Holding the Shop Together: German Industrial Relations in the Postwar Era by Stephen J. Silvia ILR Press, 2013, 264 pp., $79.95 (hardcover), $29.95 (paperback)

• Published date: 01 March 2015
• Author: Michael Gold
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/irj.12080
• Date: 01 March 2015

Book reviews

Holding the Shop Together: German Industrial Relations in the Postwar Era

Stephen J. Silvia

ILR Press, 2013, 264 pp., $79.95 (hardcover), $29.95 (paperback)

The German system of industrial relations tends to strike the British observer as both

alien and familiar at the same time. Alien, because German ways are not as ours:

sector-level bargaining, legally enforceable collective agreements, works councils and

employee board-level participation. Yet familiar because—since the collapse of the

Berlin Wall—the burgeoning ‘varieties of capitalism’ literature has generally pre-

sented Germany as the paradigm coordinated market economy that contrasts with the

UK as a liberal market economy. We have accordingly become familiar with the role

of banks, supply chains and the stock market in the development of German ‘patient

capital’, and how they all fit into the broader jigsaw of economic and social

relationships. The problem is that this familiarity can become ossified. Our under-

standing of ‘the German model’ risks degenerating into a glib stereotype that we

trundle out whenever its suits us to find a contrast to the ever-liberalising tendencies

in the UK. ‘If only we were more like the Germans’ becomes a refrain based on an

image, a perception of Germany rather than—maybe—the German ‘reality’ of a

society itself undergoing deep, individualising change in its own way. The challenge,

then, is to remain alive to the complexities of the continuing evolution of the model,

a challenge that might prove particularly demanding for non-German speakers. So

for this reason, I wholeheartedly welcome this new book by Stephen J. Silvia on

German industrial relations in the postwar era.

Silvia’s stated ‘big aims’ in writing his book were to provide an integrated account

of German industrial relations and ‘to make innovative arguments using new evidence

regarding [its] trajectory’ (p. ix). He succeeds admirably in both respects, though

maybe with one caveat to which I return later. The first two chapters, which cover the

‘resilience of the law and state in German industrial relations’ and ‘codetermination’

respectively, provide a succinct analysis of the origins of the system dating back to

1848, through the Imperial period, Weimar and Hitler, and on into the postwar

democratic settlement. Silvia demonstrates that postwar German legislation helped to

resurrect institutions, notably works councils and employee board-level participation,

which had been current in the Weimar Republic and earlier, arguing that the German

state has served as a ‘sturdy trestle’ for postwar developments, contrary to those who

underplay its role in favour of asserting the autonomy of employers and unions.

This point leads into the second part of the book, in which Silvia—changing his

metaphor from trestles to fishbowls—investigates what he sees as the central paradox

of German industrial relations: while the ‘supporting framework – the fishbowl, if you

will – of postwar German industrial relations has stood up remarkably well over more

than six decades, the fish – that is, the employers’ associations and trade unions – have

Industrial Relations Journal 46:2, 169–172

ISSN 0019-8692

© 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd