Social Movement Unionism and Social Partnership in Germany: The Case of Hamburg's Hospitals

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-232X.2008.00537.x
• Published date: 01 October 2008
• Author: IAN GREER
• Date: 01 October 2008

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XXX Original Articles

Social Movement Unionism in Germany

¾an ¼reer

Social Movement Unionism and Social

Partnership in Germany: The Case of

Hamburg’s Hospitals

IAN GREER*

This paper traces the emergence of social movement unionism in Hamburg,

Germany, as labor’s channels of influence have broken down and economic

pressures have intensified. Trade unionists have responded to the privatization

of the municipal hospitals by mobilizing members and building coalitions

around issues beyond their members’ immediate interests, including democracy

and public service quality. Although the loss of union influence has facilitated

social movement unionism in much of West Germany, economic crisis has had a

demobilizing effect in the east.

I

n

G

ermany

,

like many countries

,

unions have

traditionally

had two institutionalized ways to ratchet up labor standards: the industrial

relations system and the political system. Both kinds of influence, however,

have become less effective, as employers have created low-paying precarious

jobs and state and local governments have excluded unionists from the

policy-making process. Most policy-makers have come to view the intensi-

fication of competition, the search for competitiveness, and the elimination of

barriers to competition, including worker protections, as the keys to general

well-being. Unions have had difficulty adapting.

For industrial relations theorists, this has come as a surprise. While

comparative industrial relations scholars have long discussed Germany

within the context of globalization, they have treated it as a “coordinated

market economy.” Global market pressures, in this scheme, are mediated by

* The author’s affiliation is Leeds University Business School, The University of Leeds, Leeds LS2

9JT, United Kingdom. E-mail:

icg@lubs.leeds.ac.uk

. First and foremost, thanks to the interviewees. For

helpful comments and corrections, thanks to Virginia Doellgast, Marco Hauptmeier, Klaus-Dieter

Schwettscher, Nils Böhlke, Lowell Turner, Thorsten Schulten, three anonymous referees, Dan Mitchell

(editor), the participants of the track “Organizing Migrants and Social Movements” at the European

Group on Organizational Studies (EGOS) Colloquium of July 6–8, 2006, in Bergen, and the partici-

pants in the seminar at the Institute for Economics and Social Science at the Hans Böckler Foundation

on March 6, 2007, in Düsseldorf. The research was supported by the German Academic Exchange

Service, the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, and the Hans Böckler Foundation.

Social Movement Unionism in Germany

/ 603

an institutional framework that produced both a rising standard of living

for blue-collar workers and economic competitiveness. Trade unions played

a crucial role establishing these institutions, extending them to East Germany,

and reforming them in line with economic and political pressures. This

connection to the political and industrial relations systems became central

to trade union strategies and identities.

Recently, the institutional embeddedness of German unions has been

undermined in two ways. First, in some places, in-firm cooperation has

intensified, hardening the segments of the labor market, and leading to

concession bargaining. This tends to undermine uniform wage and work

times in industry, a central feature of employer-side coordination (Doellgast

and Greer 2007; Thelen and Kume 2006), and within large corporations it

creates conflicts between worker-side “comanagers” and their opponents

(Rehder 2006). Second, elsewhere, conflict between labor and management

has intensified, as unions have responded to employer moves to avoid

workplace-level worker representation (as in the supermarket chain Lidl; see

http://www.verdi-blog.de/lidl) or fragment collective bargaining (as in the

public sector; Bispinck 2006). Much has been written on the first trend; less

on the second.

This paper examines the case of Hamburg’s municipal hospitals, where

unions have tried both cooperation and contention in response to intensified

competition. Although trade unionists accept the need for private capital

and reduced costs, their channels of influence have largely disappeared. As

a result, they have turned away from social partnership and mobilized

workers and citizens of Hamburg around protecting public services and

jobs, shifting to a strategy that resembles what scholars have begun to call

social movement unionism

.

At issue is a change in how worker representatives have participated in

hospital restructuring since the mid-1990s. For Hamburg’s patients and

workers, the stakes have been high:

Landesbetrieb Krankenhäuser

(LBK)

was the city’s second largest employer (after Airbus) and controlled half of

the city’s hospital beds. The story begins in 1995 when the government

announced a program to rationalize the hospitals, including the formation

of LBK. It ends in 2007 with a collective agreement over the terms of a

handover of LBK to a private firm, Asklepios, and, not incidentally, the

revitalization of the union. Between these two events is a turning point, the

2001 defeat of the Social Democrats in local elections, which undermined

the union’s channels of influence over workplace restructuring.

In Germany, as ruling political parties and employers lose their interest

in social partnership, union strategies are changing. German unions, like

their colleagues elsewhere, are not just embedded in industrial relations