Abstract
This article looks into the question of whether trust between works councillors and managers affects their preferences for plant-level negotiations compared with industry-wide or multiemployer bargaining. The main hypothesis is that when a high degree of mutual trust exists, both parties are more likely to show a preference toward the plant level. When the level of trust is low, the bargaining parties rely more on supraplant-level bargaining and collective bargaining power. This article uses data from a survey of 1,000 German companies of at least 100 employees, including 1,000 personnel managers and 1,000 works councillors, that is, those persons responsible for negotiating working conditions at the plant level. Logistic regression analyses show that trust has no significant effect on the managers’ preference for decentralized bargaining, whereas it can be found to affect the works councillors. The authors finally discuss the question of why the effect of trust is different for the bargaining parties.
Highlights
Does trust between works councillors and managers affect their preferences for plant-level negotiations1 compared with industry-wide or multiemployer bargaining? This is the question our article sets out to address
Our main hypothesis is that the higher the degree of mutual trust between management and works councils, the stronger the preference of both parties for plant-level bargaining
We draw on data from a questionnaire survey of 1,000 managers and 1,000 works councillors involved in joint bargaining relationships regarding their position on decentralized bargaining
Summary
The character of collective agreements itself is changing; an increasing proportion of industry-wide collective agreements contain what are known as “opening clauses” (Öffnungsklauseln), which allow deviations from the agreed standards and give partial bargaining rights to works councils and management at the company level All these factors combine to produce a development that can be characterized as the “decentralization of bargaining,” with a stronger emphasis on company or plant-level bargaining (see Haipeter, 2011a, 2011b). Critics of the German multiemployer bargaining system regard the industry-wide, supraplant-level bargaining of wages, working hours, and so on by unions and employers associations as inflexible (see Berthold & Stettes, 2001; Schnabel, 2003, 2006; Zohlhöfer, 1996) According to this position, multiemployer bargaining agreements should, at most, encompass framework regulations because through decentralized bargaining, better consideration would be given to company-specific circumstances, which in turn would increase efficiency. The data refer to the German bargaining system, the research question and the results should be transferable to countries with different systems, those with works councils, and with other bargaining relationships, for example, plant-level bargaining between unions and management or industry-level collective bargaining between unions and employers associations
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