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The chapter discusses how the state, employers, and organized labor promote and reform early retirement policies. What interests do workers, employers, and workplace representatives have in using early exit? Beyond the workplace, interest coalitions may arise among governments, employer associations, and trade unions to externalize restructuration costs, reduce labor supply, and buy social peace.

Since the study takes on power as a structural property, this chapter deals with organized power. Organized power is derived primarily and secondarily, from membership strength and resources extracted from third parties respectively. Mutual recognition in collective bargaining has heightened the power of organized business and labor and collective agreements may be used to raise resources. This chapter discusses membership density as one of the main sources of primary associational power and how corporatist regulation can be a key source of secondary associational power. Also, the chapter contains a discussion about the implications of the primary and secondary associational powers on unions and employer associations through analysing mathematical models.

This chapter examines the relevance of employers associations to postwar Germany's industrial relations system. It begins with a brief overview of the prewar establishment and postwar reconstruction of employers associations and goes on to consider how employers associations fared after the German unification. It then discusses the effects of industry structure and trade exposure on employers association density, along with the impact of density on collective bargaining. It also explores divergences in the forms of social partnership in key sectors of the German economy and the larger implications of the interplay between trade unions and employers associations for the future of German industrial relations. It suggests that density trends among employers associations have been of greatest importance in determining the influence of German industrial relations in the postwar era.

In theory, an association with a large domain requires a large organizing capacity. However, in practice, this organizing capacity depends also on how the organization's domain is related to other associations. Because of inter-associational competition, overlapping domains of organizations would result in a more fragmented system with a lower level of organizing capacity. Because organizing capacity lies in an association's ability to bring interests together, a country's most general representational space will be taken into consideration. For an association to be included in the study, its membership domain must have a national territorial coverage and an inter-industry branch coverage. This chapter analyses the representational domains and their heterogeneity, trends, and impacts of both unions and employer associations.

Although union membership is not directly linked with collective bargaining, collective bargaining in Germany can be associated with the decline of organized labor and capital or neocorporatism in general. Membership to such unions was not compulsory and became voluntary even in firms covered by a collective agreement. Through the years the percentages of union members in the German workforce shifted. The level of trade union membership was pushed down to less than one-fifth of the workforce in 2003. In addition, membership in employer and business associated unions has evidently declined as well. This is because firms which employ association members only are formally bound by sectoral negations unlike in the case of unions, membership in employer associations directly affects whether an employee is covered by collective agreements or not. This chapter discusses the implications of declining membership in such associations for the tensions between both small and large firms in Germany.

According to some industrial relations accounts like corporatist theory, the ability of unions and employer associations to employ incomes policy depends on their degree of centralization. Despite this, the application of centralization and the collection of comparable data have been given little attention. When looking into associational centralization, the relationship between associations and their members has to be considered. With the occurrence of problems such as the complex multi-level hierarchy and the discrepancy between the formal distribution of powers and the actual relations, centralization, in this chapter, is measured by looking at the following indicators: the formal powers/obligations of the largest structural peak with regard to its affiliates, the formal powers/obligations of the said affiliates to lower associational levels, the formal associational control over the lowest level, and the actual role of the largest peak in bargaining and negotiation.

This chapter examines how law and the state supported and sustained Germany's postwar industrial relations system. It first provides an overview of the German labor law before considering how the postwar German state has bolstered the social partners through the use of tripartite bodies to govern numerous aspects of German society, both economic and noneconomic. It then challenges two widely held assumptions about labor law and the role of the state in postwar industrial relations. First, the German economy was more successful in the immediate postwar era because losing World War II wiped the slate clean of prewar laws and deals between interest groups and the state that hindered growth. Second, labor and management practitioners commonly stress collective bargaining autonomy and underplay the important role of the state in providing the prerequisites for that autonomy. The chapter argues that the forces driving membership trends for German trade unions and employers associations differ and that state support of German industrial relations cannot be held responsible for change in the postwar era.

Because the book is mainly thematic, this chapter gives a historical overview to put the themes into a context. It traces the earliest chambers of commerce, from 1767, and ‘delegate’ bodies that participated in the General Chamber of Manufacturers 1785-7, and the Union of chambers 1793-1805. It demonstrates how the chambers of commerce developed in every major city, and were copied in smaller towns by chambers of trade. It describes how early societies for credit and debt collection worked with the chambers, and how chambers of agriculture competed. For the twentieth century the chapter traces competition from sector-based trade associations and national bodies such as CBI. It demonstrates the peripheralization of local voice up to the 1980s, but a revival as up to the present as providers of business services and partners with government in economic development and workforce training.

This chapter examines Germany's distinctive system of codetermination (Mitbestimmung), which gives employees some say in management decision making, and the role it played in preserving the solidity and stability of the German industrial relations system throughout the postwar years. It begins with an overview of codetermination and its two components: works councils and employee representation on supervisory boards of large enterprises. It then explains how codetermination has made trade unions especially resilient and goes on to assess employers' attitudes toward codetermination, particularly with regards to various forms of parity representation on supervisory boards. It also considers the efforts of employers associations and trade unions to amend codetermination legislation over the years. The chapter concludes by discussing the larger significance of codetermination to German industrial relations and the German economy.

Thomas Klug focuses on the city of Detroit, a major battleground in employers’ fight for open-shop conditions. Challenging the conventional story that seeks to show that the city’s employers, organized in the Employers’ Association of Detroit, enjoyed victories with little difficulties during a major strike in 1907, Klug has discovered that the organization was characterized by considerable amounts of internal tension. While organization spokespersons promoted the open-shop publicly, some members quietly negotiated with skilled workers, recognizing that collective bargaining offered the promise of industrial peace. Yet all members of the Employers’ Association of Detroit proclaimed their support for the open-shop principle.

This book explores the trajectory of Germany's industrial relations system in the years after World War II and relates it to the German economy. The story of industrial relations in postwar Germany is reflective of many broader economic, political, and social trends in the country during this period. From the 1950s through the 1970s, the postwar German industrial relations system flourished and served as an important component of an effective economy and a sound democracy. Trade unions and employers associations embraced “social partnership,” that is, they accepted each other as equal partners that work together constructively to advance the economic and social well-being of German citizens. Using historical institutionalism and statistical analysis, this book examines the two most prominent explanations for developments in German industrial relations: the “erosion” and “exhaustion” arguments. Part I discusses the framework of the German industrial relations system, while Part II looks at the principal role played by trade unions and employers associations in industrial relations.

This book concludes by discussing the findings presented in the first five chapters and integrating them into a comprehensive picture of industrial relations in Germany. It shows that labor law and the German state have been resilient throughout the postwar years and effectively provide a framework that incorporates the actors constructively into the German economy. It argues that the industrial relations framework has remained effective and relevant, able to withstand threats and tumult such as German unification and European integration. It considers how the neocorporatist components of the German state, including the Bundesagentur für Arbeit (Federal Employment Agency), have helped to preserve the political influence of trade unions and employers associations. It compares these and other results with those in other countries and ends by reflecting on the future of the German industrial relations system.

Rosemary Feurer traces the leading purveyor of anti-union services in the Midwest, A. A. Ahner, to frame employers’ antiunion strategies during the New Deal. She argues that the long learning curve that took place over decades explains why a thug agency survived and thrived instead of being eradicated during what is usually considered the heroic era of liberal intervention. Ahner became an accepted industrial relations advisor and counselor for major firms during the New Deal, with the assistance of a liberal as well as conservative forces, networks and alliances. Ahner’s career path only seems strange because historians cling to a framework of the post New Deal “Rise of the Right” with Southern origins while ignoring longer antecedents, networks, and learning

This chapter details the pattern of employment, work relations, and the shift in power between the unions and employers, after the changes brought about by containerisation. It considers the strategies of unions, the reorganisation of employers, and the actions of the New Zealand Association of Waterfront Employers in particular detail. The chapter concludes by suggesting that difficult negotiations would later lead to union downfall

Robert Woodrum examines the clashes between waterfront employers and black longshore workers in Mobile, Alabama during the era of World War I. The regional Marine Employers’ Association, committed to upholding open-shop conditions, enjoyed support from the U.S. Shipping Board and local vigilantes, including the Ku Klux Klan. During strikes, the employers benefited from the mobilization of white strikebreakers.

This chapter considers the development of the companies that employed watersiders, and the difficulties and problems inherent in their dealings with the labour organisations that represented these workers. The chapter ends by introducing harbour boards and independent stevedoring companies as the primary employers of watersiders, rather than shipping companies, and outlines the further fragmentation that occured as a result

This chapter examines the declining membership of Germany's trade unions and employers associations by conducting a quantitative analysis of unionization rate in the postwar period. Previous models of unionization in Germany focused exclusively on economic and demographic variables; this chapter includes two additional factors: “social custom” and trade. Based on the quantitative model, it considers the impact of social custom—that is, the social expectations and the milieu that influence an individual's decision to join a union—on unionization. It also discusses the correlation between trade as a percentage of the gross domestic product and the German unionization rate, as well as between German unification and unionization. It shows that the decline in German trade union density can be attributed to the deterioration of trade unionism as a social custom, rather than to a breakdown of labor law or state institutions.