The demise of a model? The state of collective bargaining and worker representation in Germany

Abstract

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A Sequential Decomposition of the Drop in Collective Bargaining Coverage

“…3 According to Kohaut (2004, 2014) this share dropped from 70 % in 2003 to 60 % in 2013 (also see Addison et al 2010, Antonczyk et al 2010. The strongest decline in coverage on a year-to-year basis seems to have occurred during the first half of the 2000s which is the period we investigate in this paper.…”

“…When establishments with only ten or more employees are considered, this share increases to 61.7 % (ibid.). Meanwhile, Addison et al (2011) report a drop from 62.5 % in 1998 to 51.1 % in 2004, whereas Addison et al (2010) report coverage shares of 49.9 % in 2000 and 38.1 % in 2008 for entire Germany. Once again, it seems as if different data sets obtain different coverage shares but they uniformly describe a clear drop.…”

“…Their results are based on the IAB establishment panel and differences to the results obtained from the GSES data are probably due to different response behaviour or different data selection. Based on the same data set, Addison et al (2010) report a drop of coverage at the employee level from 64.1 % in 2000 to 55.8 % in 2008 for the whole of Germany.…”

“…Thus, a decline in membership may result in a decline of coverage subsequently. Establishments under distress may opt to drop out of collective bargaining agreements (Addison et al 2010;Dustmann et al 2014). Thus, a drop in coverage may be associated with indicators of the development of the establishment over time (e. g. profits, firm growth), and a weak labour market (e. g. as measured by the local unemployment rate) may be a general indicator of distress (Gürtzgen 2016).…”

“…Note that we still analyse shares of covered individuals and not of covered firms (as done in Addison et al 2010Addison et al , 2011Schnabel et al 2006). This allows filtering out effects of changes in individual-specific characteristics, such as increases of the educational attainment.…”