Impacts of Decentralisation - Erosion or Renewal? The Decisive Link Between Workplace Representation and Company Size in German and Danish Industrial Relations**

Zusammenfassung

---

In recent decades Germany and Denmark have constituted survival areas for the classical IR system in an era that has otherwise largely been characterised by the deregulation and disorganisation of industrial relations. From the mid-1990s onwards, however, it has to varying degrees been possible to observe erosive tendencies in these hitherto sturdy fortresses of "organised decentralisation". It is the main thesis of this article that the dualistic German system makes it more difficult for the German parties to adapt the bargaining system so that their overall coordination can be preserved even though the required decentralisation is introduced.

Siehe den Gesamtinhalt dieses Dokumentes

Auszug

---

Impacts of Decentralisation - Erosion or Renewal? The Decisive Link Between Workplace Representation and Company Size in German and Danish Industrial Relations**

Introduction

In recent decades a number of European countries - including Germany and Denmark, which are the focal point of the present article1 - have constituted survival areas for the classical industrial relations (IR) system in an era that has otherwise largely been characterised by the deregulation and disorganisation of industrial relations. While the systems of collective bargaining in countries such as Great Britain and the USA have eroded, it proved possible in many European countries in the 1980s and up to the mid-1990s to adapt national IR systems to the conditions created by intensified internationalisation.

This process has been summed up by Traxler (1995) in the concept organised decentralisation. Other researchers - such as Ferner/Hyman (1992, 1998) - have used the term coordinated decentralisation. In Denmark we speak of centralised decentralisation (Due et al. 1993, 1994) and in Germany the term controlled decentralisation has been used (Schulten 2005).

Organised decentralisation is based on the premise that the collective bargaining system can adapt to new requirements so that the resulting regulation ensures viable economic solutions both for the private sector and for society as a whole and at the same time secures wage earner interests. In some of the national IR systems that initially adapted to internationalisation it seems over the last decade to have become increasingly difficult for the negotiating parties to maintain the functionality and effectiveness of the system. It would now appear that we may be running up against the limits of organised decentralisation. From the mid-1990s onwards it has also been possible to observe erosive tendencies in the hitherto sturdy fortresses of Denmark and Germany (Madsen et al. 2001; Kassel 1999).

The controlled delegation of bargaining rights within the framework of national sector agreements seems to be moving towards a form of multi-level regulation which is characterised by individual agreements, collective bargaining and legislation, which contains trends towards centralisation, decentralisation and internationalisation, and which includes many actors with different interests characterised by new norms and values. While organised or centralised decentralisation was still characterised by a hierarchic control of a strong top-down nature, multi-level regulation is not necessarily hierarchic. It may feature a "bottom-up" influence instead of "top-down" control. But there may also be a changing or non-existent connection between the various levels. It is a more horizontal ad hoc form of control - either in the form of market control or of network control. Multi-level regulation is thus characterised by the fact that there is no permanent controlling centre.

The aim of the present article is, therefore, to examine and discuss the consequences of the trends towards multi-level regulation using the German and Danish IR models as case studies. If the collective represen...

Siehe den Gesamtinhalt dieses Dokumentes

---