The interests of white‐collar workers and their representation in the German manufacturing sector: new initiatives, opportunity structures, framing and resources

• Date: 01 July 2016
• Published date: 01 July 2016
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/irj.12141
• Author: Thomas Haipeter

The interests of white-collar workers and

their representation in the German

manufacturing sector: new initiatives,

opportunity structures, framing and

resources

Thomas Haipeter

ABSTRACT

In the German manufacturing sector, white-collar workers have outpaced blue-collar

workers in numbers. Therefore, unions and works councils have launched initiatives

to attract, mobilise and organise white-collar workers. The analysis is drawing on a

conceptual framework that looks at the opportunity structures, framing processes

and resources of the initiatives.

1 INTRODUCTION: THE WHITE-COLLAR WORKER PROBLEM

This article is about new forms of interest representation that works councils and

trade unions have developed in recent years in German manufacturing industries in

order to attract, mobilise and organise white-collar workers. White-collar workers

have shown themselves to be a quite distinctive group of workers in many advanced

economies. It has been well known for decades that the work-related interests of

white-collar workers differ from those of blue-collar workers with respect to career

advancement, their relationships with superiors and their lack of working class

consciousness (Boltanski, 1987; Lockwood, 1958; Mills, 1951). These particularities

have been explained by their positions in the occupational hierarchies, by

differences between office and factory work or by ideological influences in the sense

of false consciousness (for a summary, refer to Schmidt, 2015). In Germany, in

contrast to other countries, these differences were also based on the legal entitlements

to privileged social benefits and the protection such as sick pay or higher pensions

that white-collar employees enjoyed, including a formal difference between hourly

wages—Löhne—for blue-collar workers and monthly salaries—Gehälter—for

white-collar workers that were laid down in separate collective bargaining agreements

(Kocka, 1981). Although the privileges and institutional differentiations between the

two groups of wage earners have been abolished in recent decades, the last being the

separate agreements for wages and salaries, which have been replaced by unitary

❒Thomas Haipeter, Institute Work, Skills and Training, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of

Duisburg-Essen, Lotharstraße 65, LE, 47057 Duisburg, Germany. Correspondence should be addressed

to Prof. Dr. Thomas Haipeter, Institute Work, Skills and Training, Faculty of Social Sciences,

University of Duisburg-Essen, Lotharstraße 65, LE, 47057 Duisburg, Germany email: thomas.

haipeter@uni-due.de

Industrial Relations Journal 47:4, 304–321

ISSN 0019-8692

© 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

agreements in many industries, the differences in interests have not narrowed, as more

recent studies show (Hoose et al., 2009; Kotthoff, 1997; Kudera et al., 1983). The

individualistic features of white-collar workers’interests seem to make them much

less susceptible to collective interest representation and aggregation than demands

for higher wages or shorter working times. Indeed, as research has shown, white-

collar workers are in the habit of pursuing their interests in an individual fashion by

talking to their superiors and not by contacting works councils or unions and asking

them to act on their behalf (Boes and Kämpf, 2010; Heidenreich and Töpsch, 1998;

Kotthoff, 1997).

This clearly creates a dilemma for works councils and trade unions. On one hand,

the interests of white-collar workers are hard to organise and the unions have their

strongholds traditionally among the rank and files of the blue-collar workers. On

the other hand, white-collar workers are becoming an increasingly important part

of the manufacturing workforce. Among the reasons for this long-term trend are

ongoing rationalisation in the blue-collar areas and the expansion of highly skilled

white-collar work in research and development, especially in the automotive industry

(Jürgens and Meissner, 2005). In 2011, half of the workers in the German

manufacturing sector were white-collar workers (Figure 1). In 2009 and 2010, the

share of white-collar workers was even greater than that of blue-collars, many of

whom, both temporary and permanent, were made redundant during the financial

crisis, whereas companies were keen to retain their white-collar employees.

The figures show that unions that continue to put their efforts into representing

blue-collar workers are in danger of becoming fractal organisations in the future

(Dörre, 2011), representing only a minority of workers in their organisational sphere.

Moreover, white-collar workers have considerable structural power (Wright, 2000;

Silver, 2003) that increases with hierarchical position and/or skill level and which

works councils and unions can usefully exploit by soliciting their votes in works

council elections, commissioning them as expert advisers or consultants or recruiting

them as union members willing to strike.

Figure 1: Shares of blue and white-collar workers in the manufacturing sector, 1999–2011

(Socio-Economic Panel, own calculations)

305Interest representation and white-collar initiatives

© 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd