Employment relations without collective bargaining and strikes: the unusual case of civil servants in Germany

• Published date: 01 March 2020
• Date: 01 March 2020
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/irj.12284
• Author: Berndt Keller

Employment relations without collective

bargaining and strikes: the unusual case of

civil servants in Germany

Berndt Keller

ABSTRACT

The article deals with the widely neglected employment relations in the public sector

of Germany with a special focus on civil servants. It is subdivided into two main

parts. A shorter part elaborates on public employees and collective bargaining, a lon-

ger one on civil servants and their diverging forms of employment relations without

the right to collective bargaining and strike. In order to better understand major

changes that have taken place since the mid2000s, we chose a long-term perspective

and examine traditional as well as present forms of interest representation. Limited

degrees of decentralisation and their lasting diverging consequences are analysed in

great detail.

1 INTRODUCTION

Traditionally, the public sector has been widely ignored in research on employment

relations in Germany. For different reasons, this obvious neglect is difficult to explain

and to justify. The practical reason is that the public sector has more than 4.8 million

employees,

1

about 10 per cent of the total workforce. The theoretical reason is that

there are persisting legal–institutional differences (-Ddualism of private law status

for public employees or Tarifbeschäftigte versus public law status for civil servants

or Beamte). Civil servants are allowed to form and to join trade unions and interest

organisations but, in contrast to all other employees, do not have the right to bargain

collectively or to go on strike. In this focal regard, legal differences in status and rights

are not, as one would assume, between private industry and the public sector but

within the latter (Keller and Henneberger, 1999 for details).

Existing research focuses on the employment conditions of public employees (Di

Carlo, 2019). Comparative studies that include Germany (European Commission,

2013; Vaughan-Whitehead, 2013) or deal exclusively with Germany (Schmidt et al.,

2011, 2018) follow the same pattern and face the same problems. In contrast to these

contributions, this article focuses on the indicated deficit under special consideration

of the extraordinary employment situation of civil servants. How do their interest or-

ganisations manage to pursue and enforce their group-specific interest without having

the usual means of collective bargaining (CB) and strikes at their disposal?

❒Berndt Keller, Department of Politics and Public Administration, University of Konstanz, Konstanz,

Germany. Correspondence should be addressed to Professor em. Dr. Berndt Keller, University of

Konstanz/Germany, Department of Politics and Public Administration.

Email: berndt.karl.keller@uni-konstanz.de

1

It comprises 3.1 million public employees and 1.7 million civil servants.

Industrial Relations Journal 51:1–2, 110–133

ISSN 0019-8692

© 2020 The Authors. Industrial Relations Journal published by Brian Towers (BRITOW) and John Wiley & Sons Ltd

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribu-

tion and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Furthermore, has this traditional constellation changed after legal amendments of the

institutional design were introduced in the late 2000s? From a more general perspec-

tive, the article contributes and brightens a major dark spot in the existing literature

on public sector employment relations (Bach et al., 1999; Bach and Bordogna,

2016; Dell’Aringa et al., 2001).

Part one elaborates on public employees and CB, part two on civil servants and

their diverging forms of employment relations. In order to better understand funda-

mental changes and their consequences, we chose a long-term perspective spanning

a period of several decades. Therefore, both parts are subdivided into (shorter) tradi-

tional and (longer) present forms of interest representation. We deal exclusively with

the sectoral level of the ‘dual system’and leave the organisational level (dienststelle)

untouched.

2

We focus on developments in Germany but introduce, whenever appro-

priate, some comparative aspects. Throughout the article, we argue primarily from an

employment relations not from a public administration systems’perspective

(Gottschall et al., 2015).

2 SOME STYLISED FACTS ON THE TRADITIONAL SYSTEM OF

COLLECTIVE BARGAINING AND INSTITUTIONAL STABILITY

In international comparative perspective (Bach and Bordogna, 2016), the traditional

system of CB was highly centralised and resulted in standardised working conditions

in terms of wages and salaries, weekly working hours and bonus payments. Its struc-

tures and procedures of ‘joint bargaining’were fairly unusual for the public adminis-

tration of a federal polity with three layers of multi-level governance (federal or Bund,

state or Bundesland and municipal or Gemeinden/Gemeindeverbände) that are le-

gally independent from each other—but were empirically interrelated in CB. Since

the 1960s, the encompassing tripartite coalition of all employers’associations of all

three levels bargained collectively with the major union Public Services, Transport

and Communication Union (Gewerkschaft Öffentliche Dienste, Transport und

Verkehr; Keller, 1983, McPherson, 1971).

3

The results of CB were transferred to all civil servants on a strict one-to-one basis

without any substantive reductions or temporal delays. This quasi-automatic transfer

happened not by CB but by decisions of the federal parliament (Bbundestag) after a

draft bill of the Minister of the Interior (Bundesminister des Innern) had initiated this

procedure. The federal railroad (now Deutsche Bahn AG) and federal postal service

(now Deutsche Post AG, Deutsche Telekom AG and Deutsche Postbank AG) were

also part of this encompassing CB structure and copied its results with some

sector-specific adaptations. This configuration of intrasectoral ‘pattern setting’and

‘pattern following’

4

changed only in the mid1990s when measures of (semi-)

privatisation of the major monopolies of public infrastructure took place, opened

2

Cf. for the special Staff Representation Acts and ‘collective voice’by staff councils Keller/Schnell 2003

and 2005. They are the functional equivalent of works’councils in private industry, both are not allowed

to go on strike.

3

Until 2001, the foundation date of the conglomerate Unified Service Sector Union (Vereinte

Dienstleistungsgewerkschaft - ver.di) (Keller, 2005), its major predecessor, Gewerkschaft Öffentliche

Dienste, Transport und Verkehr, was the most important CB partner. In the course of time smaller unions

also participated but were less influential in differing bargaining coalitions.

4

This intrasectoral hypothesis is different from the frequently made assumption of intersectoral pattern

bargaining. Actually, Germany is not an example for export sector-led pattern bargaining that cannot ac-

count for wage restraint in the public sector (Di Carlo, 2018).

111Employment relations without collective bargaining and strikes

© 2020 The Authors. Industrial Relations Journal published by Brian Towers (BRITOW) and John Wiley & Sons Ltd