Arbeitsmarktpolitik, Gewerkschaften und Arbeitgeber

Abstract

Although the comparative labour market research often highlights the importance of the incorporation of trade unions and employers' organisations into the formulation and implementation of labour market policy, questioning the concrete factors of this incorporation played hitherto a minor role. Using a historical-institutional perspective and exemplified by the rise, fall and continuity of corporatist structured public employment services (PES) in the Netherlands, Great Britain and Germany this publication inquires the institutional conditions for the formation and stability corporatist public labour market policy. While in Great Britain and in the Netherlands "only" certain phases of corporatist structured PES (Great Britain: 1973-1988; Netherlands:1991-2000) did exist, the German PES shows corporatist structures since its formation in 1927. The central result of this publication is that the institutional context for corporatist labour market policy in the Netherlands as well as in Great Britain has more in common than the comparative research about welfare states and "varities of capitalism" seems to recognise. Embedded in and generated by the historically rooted patterns of interest-mediation within the PES and the institutional structures of the political system the PES in the Netherlands and Great Britain are very closely related to a state dominated (>staatsnah<) institutional context: the PES in the Netherlands and Great Britain are institutionalised as an 'administrative responsibility' (>Verwaltungsaufgabe<). In opposition to that the German PES was created as a 'societal responsibility' (>Gesellschaftsaufgabe<). These different formative preliminaries of the PES solidified during the PES-reforms after 1945. The German trade unions and employers' organisations identify themselves with the PES (high institutional legitimacy): the preservation of the corporatist structures of the PES is considered by the social partners as very important. However, the Dutch and the British social partners moved away from the PES: the PES has a low institutional legitimacy. The historically rooted trajectory of an 'administrative responsibility' of the British and Dutch PES in combination with the minor role of the PES in the policy-making-process and the low interdependencies between different state levels (centralized states) resulted in a 'dependence' (>Dependenz<) of the PES from changing strategies of the social partners and the state. However, in Germany the formation of the PES incorporating a more 'societal responsibility' in combination with the recognised role of the PES in the policy-making-process and the federal structure of the German state led to the 'aquisition of a high degree of autonomy' (>Autonomisierung<) of the corporatist structures. Thus, the common experience of instability of the corporatist structures in the Netherlands and Great Britain is comprehensible: because corporatism is an "alien" (>fremdes Element<) in an institutional context which is state-dominated, both the Netherlands and Great Britain have the common experience of the instability of corporatist structured PES. The historically rooted trajectories of the respective national PES are in this publication presented by critical phases of the respective national labour market policies ("critical junctures"). Beginning with a part I, in which the theoretical and methodological starting-point of this publication is introduced, part II describes the formative phases of the PES (Great Britain 1905-1911; Germany 1918-1927; Netherlands 1913-1949). Part III, IV and V are discussing the structural reforms after the Second World War (Great Britain 1958-1988; Netherlands 1963-2000; Germany 1952-1996). Using a combination of the method of agreement and the method of difference (J. S. Mill) part VI works out those common features of the Dutch and British PES, which stand in sharp contrast to the German case.