Employment relations without collective bargaining and strike

 

The unusual case of civil servants in Germany

According to Berndt Keller, 2020

(Industrial Relations Journals)

 In order to understand employment relations and their consequences in public sector.

Abstrak and introduction about employment relation in his journal;

“The article deals with the widely neglected employment relations in the public sector of Germany with a special focus on civil servants. It is subdivided into two main parts. A shorter part elaborates on public employees and collective bargaining, a longer one on civil servants and their diverging forms of employment relations without the right to collective bargaining and strike. In order to better understand major changes that have taken place since the mid2000s, we chose a long‐term perspective and examine traditional as well as present forms of interest representation. Limited degrees of decentralisation and their lasting diverging consequences are analysed in great detail

Traditionally, the public sector has been widely ignored in research on employment relations in Germany. For different reasons, this obvious neglect is difficult to explain and to justify. The practical reason is that the public sector has more than 4.8 million employees, about 10 per cent of the total workforce. The theoretical reason is that there are persisting legal–institutional differences (‐Ddualism of private law status for public employees or Tarifbeschäftigte versus public law status for civil servants or Beamte). Civil servants are allowed to form and to join trade unions and interest organisations but, in contrast to all other employees, do not have the right to bargain collectively or to go on strike. In this focal regard, legal differences in status and rights are not, as one would assume, between private industry and the public sector but within the latter (Keller and Henneberger, 1999 for details).

 

This analysis draw attentions about types of Employment Relations in Informal Sector;

In contrast to trade unions, both civil servants' federations cannot completely utilise their organisational power, among others in form of strikes, because of the verdict to bargain collectively and to go on strike. In a more detailed analysis this broad category can be separated in two subforms, ‘ability to pay’ and ‘ability to act’. In the case of civil servants, their comparatively high density ratio indicates that members are able and willing ‘to pay’. However, they are not allowed ‘to act’ and to take industrial action. Nevertheless, organisational power, that is sometimes labelled associational power, can be effectively used in formal and informal forms of political bargaining and lobbying.

Structural power also exists because of scarce individual skills and focal positions in the process of providing public services. However, civil servants cannot efficiently use it because of their strike ban.”

 

FULL JOURNAL CLICK HERE > https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/irj.12284