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We give an overview of the “German model” of industrial relations. We organize our review by focusing on the two pillars of the model: sectoral collective bargaining and firm-level codetermination. Relative to the United States, Germany outsources collective bargaining to the sectoral level, resulting in higher coverage and the avoidance of firm-level distributional conflict. Relative to other European countries, Germany makes it easy for employers to avoid coverage or use flexibility provisions to deviate downwards from collective agreements. The greater flexibility of the German system may reduce unemployment, but may also erode bargaining coverage and increase inequality. Meanwhile, firm-level codetermination through worker board representation and works councils creates cooperative dialogue between employers and workers. Board representation has few direct impacts owing to worker representatives’ minority vote share, but works councils, which hold a range of substantive powers, may be more impactful. Overall, the German model highlights tensions between efficiency-enhancing flexibility and equity-enhancing collective action.

Anfang der 2000er Jahre bildeten sich einige Berufsgewerkschaften, die das alte System der Tarifeinheit lockerten, bis das Bundesarbeitsgericht schließlich 2010 die Tarifpluralität grundsätzlich zuließ. Mit dem Tarifeinheitsgesetz von 2015 sollte die Macht kleiner Berufsgewerkschaften wieder eingegrenzt werden. Die Regeln im Tarifeinheitsgesetz sind jedoch zu unbestimmt um zu verhindern, dass es zu Konflikten der Gewerkschaften innerhalb eines Unternehmens kommt. Die Bahn bietet hier ein gutes Beispiel. At the beginning of the 2000s, some professional unions were formed that replaced the old system of collective bargaining unity. In 2010, the Federal Labour Court finally permitted the collective bargaining plurality in principle. With the Collective Bargaining Unity Act of 2015, the power of smaller professional unions was supposed to be narrowed down again. The rules in the Collective Bargaining Unity Act, however, are too vague to prevent union conflicts from occurring within a company. The Deutsche Bahn offers a good example.

This paper employs a firm-level collective bargaining dataset to investigate the effect of labor, as an important stakeholder of a firm, on debt contracting. I conjecture and provide evidence that firms with strong organized labor prefer bank loans to public bonds because, by communicating with banks privately, unionized firms can reduce the adverse selection costs while preserving the information asymmetry with organized labor. Furthermore, I show that organized labor influences the structure of syndicated loans. When firms with strong unions withhold public disclosures, but communicate privately with lead lenders, heightened information asymmetry between the lead lenders and the participant lenders induces the lead lenders to retain larger shares of the loans and form more concentrated syndicates. Overall, this study demonstrates that the proprietary costs of disclosure related to organized labor significantly influence firms' debt contracting decisions and outcomes.

Consistent with Convention 87 of the International Labour Organization (ILO), Section 79 of the Labour Act, 2003 (Act 651) empowers every employee in an organization to either form or join a trade union of their choice for the promotion and protection of their economic and social interests. In spite of this legal provision, union coverage and density in Ghana have continually declined in recent years. The decline in union density and coverage is likely to decrease the collective bargaining strength of unions. It is against this background that our study seeks to examine the effect of unions' bargaining (proxied by union presence variable) on wages in Ghana. We employ the Heckman Selection Model and quantile regression technique to analyze data extracted from the sixth round of the Ghana Living Standards Survey (GLSS 6) and 2015 Ghana Labour Force Survey (GLFS 2015) respectively. The findings indicate that unions' bargaining effect on wages is positive. Furthermore, the study finds that the union wage premium is highest at the lowest point of the wage distribution (25th quantile) but lowest at the highest point of the wage distribution (75th quantile). Whilst the study acknowledges the importance of education in earnings determination, we recommend that low-wage employees in a non-union establishment should join a trade union in order to earn a living/decent wage.

Purpose Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) and Product Carbon Footprints (PCFs) have a significant potential for contributing to consumption-based approaches to climate change. This paper provides an important building block towards a theoretical model of the factors accounting for variations in the availability of life cycle data across countries. It does so by positing a mechanism linking industry associations’ institutional role within environmental policy processes to the availability of product life data and by empirically validating it.MethodsInterviews, qualitative document analysis, web scraping, quantitative text analysis, set-theoretical causal reasoning, and process tracing.Results and discussionEnvironmental policies that stipulate industry-government deliberations and assign a coordinating or mediating role to industry peak associations can stimulate the exchange of environmental information among industrial sectors. The policy instruments of determination of ‘best available techniques’ (BAT) towards standard setting, negotiated collective agreements and carbon pricing all contribute towards the institutionalisation of organised information exchange within industry. This lowers transaction costs for the monitoring, reporting and verification of sectoral environmental data and can thus be conducive to the creation of sectoral life cycle assessment data, with positive knock-on effects on the availability of firm- and product-specific LCA labels.ConclusionsIndustry associations’ institutional role within environmental policy processes can partially explain cross-national variations in the availability of product life cycle inventories.

Collective bargaining in Germany takes place at either industry or firm level, and bargaining coverage is much higher than union density. The share of a firm's employees covered can vary between 0% and 100%, suggesting that researchers should distinguish union density, coverage at the firm level, and coverage at the individual level. Using linked employer–employee data, the authors estimate OLS and quantile regressions of wages on these dimensions of union influence. They find that a higher share of employees in a firm covered by industrywide or firm-specific contracts is associated with higher wages but find no clear-cut effect on wage dispersion. Yet, holding coverage at the firm level constant, individual coverage is associated with lower wages and less wage dispersion. Higher union density reinforces the effects of coverage. But for employees in firms without coverage, density's effect is negative and thus compresses the wage distribution in firms without coverage.

Whether collective wage bargaining impedes the implementation of variable pay systems is uncertain. The authors argue that much of this uncertainty is attributable to the fact that research neglects differences in the institutional structure of bargaining. Using representative company-level data for all member states of the European Union, the authors investigate the incidence of variable pay systems in general as well as pay types that include payment-by-results, performance-related pay, and team-related pay under various bargaining arrangements. Findings show that the institutional structure of collective bargaining matters: Variable pay systems thrive under company and multilevel collective bargaining, whereas their implementation is limited under national-level collective wage bargaining.

Das ifo Institut befragte im vierten Quartal 2023 im Auftrag von Randstad Deutschland und im Rahmen einer forschungsbasierten ifo Sonderbefragung deutsche HR-Abteilungen zum Thema Lohnentwicklung. Durchschnittlich planen die befragten Unternehmen 2024 mit einer Lohnsteigerung von 4,7%. Dabei stellen tarifvertragliche Lohnänderungen die wichtigste Stellschraube für Lohnänderungen dar. Auch andere Lohnbestandteile kommen dabei zur Anwendung: 72% der befragten Unternehmen haben die Inflationsausgleichsprämie bereits ausgezahlt. Bei weiteren 16% ist eine Auszahlung in Planung. Für die Mehrheit stand als Grund die Motivation für die Arbeitnehmenden im Vordergrund. 42% der Teilnehmenden gaben zudem an, dass sich das Finden geeigneter Fachkräfte als sehr schwierig bzw. schwierig (36%) gestaltet. Bezogen auf Arbeitskräfte im Allgemeinen sprachen 14% von einer sehr schwierigen und 30% von einer schwierigen Rekrutierungssituation. Insgesamt fällt größeren Betrieben das Finden von geeignetem Personal leichter als kleinen.

How do public employees win and lose their collective bargaining rights?And how can public sector labor unions protect those rights?These are the questions answered in From Collective Bargaining to Collective Begging.

In many sectors, pay is regulated to be equal across heterogeneous geographical labor markets. When the competitive outside wage is higher than the regulated wage, there are likely to be falls in quality. We exploit panel data from the population of English hospitals in which regulated pay for nurses is essentially flat across the country. Higher outside wages significantly worsen hospital quality as measured by hospital deaths for emergency heart attacks. A 10 percent increase in the outside wage is associated with a 7 percent increase in death rates. Furthermore, the regulation increases aggregate death rates in the public health care system.