Abstract
The privatisation of Hamburg's State Enterprise Hospitals (LBK Hamburg) represents a defining moment in a general trend in the German hospital sector. Carried out in 2005, this privatisation had a far-reaching impact on industrial relations in the hospitals as well as on the working conditions of the employees. These developments cannot only be attributed to the privatisation per se, however; increases in the workloads of hospital workers can also be observed in public clinics. Nevertheless, the deterioration of established collective bargaining procedures and working condition in the privatised clinics have been dramatic, representing an important turning point for hospital employees and their trade union representatives. Drawing on case study research involving interviews with a range of stakeholders, this article describes the privatisation process and its impact on working conditions, employment and industrial relations.
Highlights
No other country has seen more privatisations of hospitals in recent years than Germany, where the share of private for-profit hospitals increased from 14.8 per cent in 1991 to 27.8 per cent in 2006
It is difficult to correlate every step of the liberalisation and privatisation processes with specific developments in the hospitals, because the economic pressures underlying these reforms affect the public clinics
The restructuring process in the hospitals that took place in the 1990s had already brought about significant changes and these change processes continued with the 2005 privatisation
Summary
No other country has seen more privatisations of hospitals in recent years than Germany, where the share of private for-profit hospitals increased from 14.8 per cent in 1991 to 27.8 per cent in 2006. In 1995, the government changed the legal status of the ten clinics that made up the LBK Hamburg by transforming the group into a legally and financially independent public-law institution This triggered a restructuring process, designed to lower the costs, broken down into a series of separate steps. It was becoming increasingly impossible to access such capital in Hamburg because of the enormous debts of the company pension scheme whose deficits had to be met from the contributions which were already overstretched from having to meet the cost of capital investment as well as the running charges In addition to this financial pressure, there was an increase in political pressure to privatise after the change of government in 2001. As soon as it came into office, this coalition immediately began to push for the sale of shares in the hospital group
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