IG Metall most certainly remains the strongest trade union in Germany and Europe as a whole. Its strongholds are located in Germany’s industrial heartland: the high-value automobile industry, the end producers, the major third-party suppliers and machine-building. Here, the trade unions participate in and benefit from the strength of the German industrial model, which intensifies economic imbalances in Europe and the global economy at the same time.
Representing 30.5 percent of gross value production in the EU, Germany is the continent’s most important industrial nation by far. While industry’s proportion of gross value production has gone down in all other EU member states since the turn of the millennium, in Germany it has actually slightly increased. Together with Austria, Germany is also the only European country in which industrial employment has actually risen by roughly 6 percent since 2008. The core of the industrial sector is made up of machine-building and the automobile industry. Both industries are characterized by their high share of exports, representing 62 percent and 64 percent of total goods produced, respectively.
The industrial sector is stabilized to a significant extent by the fact that the export industries are well-attuned to meet growing demand from Asia, and China in particular. German products are both required for industrial catchup as well as eagerly bought up by the rapidly growing middle class. This has allowed industrial production in Germany to increase, despite remaining a high-wage country. 40 percent of industrial workers are employed in technology-intensive sectors, which also represent the most important motors of economic growth. It is also striking that the trend towards outsourcing production has gone down noticeably, despite comparatively high labor costs (nearly 37€/hour on average, compared to 10€ in the Czech Republic and 6.65€ in Poland). While 15 percent of companies registered outsourcing in 2006, by 2010–2011 this figure had dropped to 11 percent (compared to 25 percent from the mid-1990s into the early 2000s). In 2003, 87 percent of companies engaging in outsourcing indicated low wage costs as the primary motivating factor. By 2012, this number had receded to 71 percent. In total, the wage costs as a portion of industry’s total costs continues to decline. Including costs for temporary workers, the figure lies well below 20 percent.
The relative stability and export strength of the industrial sector means that co-determination and organized labor relations in the sectors IG Metall represents are comparatively stable. While workers in other sectors were forced to take disproportionate losses, industrial export industry managed to maintain or even raise effective wages. Comparatively strong unions and works councils played a significant role here. The fact is that the industrial sector and its core — machine-building and the automobile industry — remain the center of gravity of organized labor relations. To illustrate this, you only have to look at the fact that roughly one-fifth of all IG Metall members are located in one enterprise: Volkswagen. Germany on the whole, however, has also witnessed a dramatic decline in levels of trade unions’ organizational power. The trade union organization rate stands at 18 percent. In the year 2000, 60 percent of employees in the western states and 39 percent in the eastern states were paid according to industry-wide collective bargaining rates. By 2014, industry-wide agreements only applied to 47 percent of western and 28 percent of eastern German workers.
It is for this reason that the unions’ interest politics increasingly take place in two separate worlds. Organizations like IG Metall are capable of acting largely in what I call the “first world” of regulated collective bargaining, in which industry-specific agreements still represent the norm. Beyond that — that is to say, in the “second world” of largely deregulated work — unions are forced to fight tooth and nail from workplace to workplace. The border regime between these two worlds triggers countless smaller conflicts around company and workplace contracts which adhere to their own internal logics. Only the most dramatic of these conflicts make it into the newspapers, and thus rarely appear in strike statistics.
According to available figures, contract battles leading to strikes have tripled over the course of several years, going from 82 in 2007 to 214 in 2014. Over half of these conflicts take place in the service sector and involve relatively small numbers of strike participants, although a fraction take place in the core industrial sector. This could also be seen in the most recent pay dispute. IG Metall is capable of leading disputes and strikes in the “first world” of regulated collective bargaining, but the union’s organizational domain also encompasses a “second world” characterized by insecure employment, low wages, and meager organizational power. This is especially the case in the country’s eastern states, where hourly wages for flexible employees had dropped below 6€ in some places prior to the introduction of the federal minimum wage in 2015.
In light of declining unemployment levels and skilled labor shortages, younger workers in particular are no longer willing to accept the status quo. The disciplining power of the precariat is also on the decline. Wage sacrifices in return for job security are no longer accepted automatically, particularly in the east. IG Metall’s twenty-four-hour strikes showed how widespread dissatisfaction can be translated into conflict-oriented strategies and, in this way, win victories.
