Continuous erosion or re-stabilisation of multi-employer agreements?: German collective bargaining in a European perspective

Since the mid-1990s the German system of collective bargaining with its traditional dominance of sector-level agreements has been faced by a process of creeping ero-sion. While the bargaining coverage has shown a steady decline, a far-reaching de-centralisation has increasingly undermined the system of multi-employer bargaining.
Compared with other European countries, the development in Germany seems to be rather ex-ceptional, as many countries were able to continue with a rather stable collective bargaining system and a relatively high bargaining coverage. This holds true also for countries where - as in Germany - the unions were faced by a significant decline of organisational power. The latter indicates that there are other political factors which seem to compensate for the decline of unions` organisational power and keep their institutional power basis relatively stable.
In discussing German collective bargaining in a European perspective it is the aim of this paper to identify the factors which support a stable and encompassing collective bargaining system. Our arguments are developed in three steps: First, we describe the recent developments in German collective bargaining and the accompanying changes in the organisational and structural power of German trade unions. Sec-ondly, we compare the German situation with the development in other European countries and analyses the factors which are conducive for a stable bargaining sys-tem. Considering the different experiences in Europe, we thirdly discuss the possibili-ties for a restabilisation of German collective bargaining.