Abstract
In May 2014 the German trade unions brought in a new leadership. The President of the German Trade Union Confederation (DGB) is Reiner Hoffmann, whose election to this post makes him the top trade union representative in the country. He got off to a shining start, having been voted in by 93 per cent of the delegates at the confederation’s 20th ‘labour parliament’. The three other members of the leadership quartet – two of them women – were elected at the same time, all with high scores. In terms of political affiliations the new team includes, alongside the Social Democrat Hoffmann, representatives of the Christian Democratic and the Green parties. Their task for the coming years is to implement the new DGB programme, the leitmotif of which is ‘Good Work – Good Life’. Transforming this plan into reality has several strings to its bow.
‘Good Employment Contracts’ to get rid of bad jobs
The need on this front is to improve the living and working conditions of several specific groups of workers. The trade unions have already tackled the areas of part-time work and subcontracted labour and will extend their net to deal also with the large category of self-employed workers, whose terms of employment and working conditions are frequently precarious, above all in the areas of health and care, media and culture. ‘Good Pensions’ is another building block intended to ensure that all are in a position to organize for themselves, as a sequel to their demanding working lives, a rewarding additional stretch of time devoted to activities of their own choice. ‘Good Training’ for all young persons living in Germany is yet another vitally important component of the programme.
Good Working Time Sovereignty
The notion of ‘working time sovereignty’ that is to be enjoyed by workers is set up in opposition to the prevailing model of flexible working time arrangements that are designed to suit the needs of business or industry. The idea is that workers should be entitled to shape their individual working lives in keeping with changing personal circumstances and different phases of the life cycle.
Good Collective Bargaining Policy
A statutory minimum wage as a baseline below which rates of pay cannot fall represents an innovation for which the trade unions have struggled in the past and for which the German government has recently introduced statutory provision. Provision exists also for sectoral minimum wages on the basis of collective agreements which the government, in accordance with the provisions of the Posting of workers Directive, has to declare generally binding. Another currently problematic matter relates to the principle of ‘one collective agreement per business’ (Tarifeinheit) which is regarded as a prerequisite for ‘Good Collective Agreements’. What this means in practice is that the trade unions with the highest membership numbers should be the only ones to conclude collective agreements. The background to the problem is the dynamic development of small occupational trade unions whose members perform jobs with strategically significant profiles. Examples are the associations of airline pilots or engine drivers which exploit their special position on the labour market to push through their special group interests without considering the social and economic repercussions on society at large. The principle of Tarifeinheit has the support of employers insofar as they have had enough of the tedious business of conducting collective bargaining first with the major industry unions and then with smaller occupational unions. The trade unions, meanwhile, remain divided on the issue because it impinges upon fundamental questions of collective bargaining freedom, freedom of association and the right to strike. This then is an area in which the new President’s arbitration skills will be brought into play in the search for a compromise settlement. It is important, at the same time, to realize that collective bargaining policy lies not in the sphere of DGB powers but within the domain of the industry unions. It is thus they who bear the primary responsibility for the conduct of ‘Good Collective Bargaining Policy’.
Worker participation rights
The trade unions are keen to strengthen the role and rights of works councils. They perceive that participation rights quite clearly demand a European perspective. ‘Good Co-determination’ must be developed, in close cooperation with the European trade union bodies, so as to become a truly future-oriented project.
Employment programme
The trade unions are highly critical of the serious investment slack in Germany for this will, in the long term, have negative repercussions on employment levels. In its pursuit of ‘Good Employment’, the DGB wants to base its efforts on a European initiative and there are indeed already some signs of major agreements between trade unions in different EU countries being concluded to this end. To promote as a central concern the creation of added value in industry and services in the internal market, and to complement this emphasis with a powerful investment programme, could produce a surge of social optimism among the people of Europe.
The new President
Who is this man with the ambitious goal to make Europe into the ‘World Market Leader in Good Work’, and to show people that there really do exist genuine alternatives to the values and policies of the neoliberal mainstream?
Reiner Hoffmann was born in 1955 into a working class family. His father was a bricklayer and his mother a cleaner. After completing a course of commercial training in the chemical industry, he took advantage of the opportunity to study for an economics degree. After working for several years at the Hans Böckler Foundation, in the mid-1990s he was appointed Director of the European Trade Union Institute in Brussels where, subsequently, he was elected to the post of Deputy General Secretary of the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC), a position he held between 2003 and 2009. His next career move took him back to his home country where he became a leading representative of the chemical workers’ union.
Reiner Hoffmann’s career to date provides a first pointer to the personality of the newly elected top union man in Germany. He is highly knowledgeable about – and a convinced advocate of – European integration. He is, in other words, a man whose sphere of reflection extends beyond the national borders. He knows that the trade unions need to show the readiness and patience to learn from one another that will enable them to develop into a genuine player on the European stage, so that the integrated Europe can become ‘our’ Europe: ‘We do not wish to become estranged from, or left behind by, Europe; but we must fight to ensure that it develops into a social and environmentally sustainable Europe.’
Reiner Hoffmann is also an experienced expert in the negotiation of pay and working conditions. The translation of ‘Good Work’ into practice requires, over and above skilful negotiation, the ability to handle conflict. The new DGB President has had ample opportunity to demonstrate that, in representing the interests of the world of labour, he can engage in and withstand the conflict inherent in his task.
An important aspect of Reiner Hoffmann’s task will be to represent the trade unions in the world of politics and public life at large. This will require all the strength that his new leadership team can muster and in this area the new President will be served by his well-honed skills as a communicator.
Reiner Hoffmann is well known for his ability to build bridges between the trade unions and other areas of society. His relationship to the fields of knowledge and culture is particularly well developed. He knows how to listen, to weigh up the arguments, to project his thoughts imaginatively into others’ life worlds. He is, in the very best sense, a child of enlightened European modernity, pursuing the goal of making the lives of working men and women the focus of an aspiration for change in today’s world with its deepening fault-lines and distressing inequalities.
In Reiner Hoffmann’s personality several elements cohere to produce an impressively solid whole: he is a networker, a bridge-builder and an excellent team-player. The crucial question, then, is whether the new President will find a way of putting his ideas into practice. A factor that will undoubtedly serve as an ally in this respect is that the German trade unions, after a long period of setbacks, have once again found their feet. They can lay claim to two major successes: On the one hand, they have succeeded in anchoring the notion of minimum wage in Germans’ minds. They have worked extremely hard to forge a change of attitude and opinion in the population, the media, and the world of politics, and the result of their efforts is the recent introduction of a minimum wage in Germany. On the other hand, the trade unions have withstood, rather well, the severe economic crisis that erupted in the wake of the crisis on the American financial market. In the years since 2008 the German system of co-determination and works councils proved to be a stability anchor and helped to forge a tripartite pact with the government and the employers. Thanks to this form of crisis management, employment was able first to be stabilized, and subsequently actually raised; unemployment, in other words, was reduced.
As a result, the trade unions, says the new President, are once again in ‘good shape’. As a collective bargaining power they have been strengthened; as an influential representative of social policy concerns they have made a comeback in the political arena. No wonder that they are recruiting new members and that in this year’s works council elections the trade union candidates succeeded in winning over 80 per cent of the votes. The ‘starting conditions’ amid which the new leadership is embarking upon its ambitious programme are thus really not so bad.