Holding the shop together
Subtitle: German industrial relations in the postwar era
By: Stephen J. Silvia
Publisher: ILR Press, an imprint of Cornell University Press; ILR Press
Published: 2013
Place of publication: Ithaca
Language: eng
Number of pages: 280
ISBN-13: 9780801478970; 9780801452215
Subjects: Labor policy; Industrial relations; Labor unions
Description: "Since the onset of the global financial crisis in late 2008 there has been a boom in positive assessments of the German economy. Little wonder. Remarkably, Germany has managed to bring down unemployment to more than one percentage point below the precrisis level and to maintain a current account surplus equivalent to 5 percent of its gross domestic product. This is not the first time that Germany's stock has ridden high. German economic institutions received praise for the "economic miracle" of the late 1950s and early 1960s, the "model Germany" economy that weathered the oil shocks comparatively well during the 1970s, and the "export world champion" economy of the mid-1980s. At other times, however, academics and journalists have been bearish on Germany. High unemployment dogged the German economy for a quarter century, starting in the early 1980s. From the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s, Germany was generally dismissed as the economic "sick man" of Europe. These oscillating appraisals of the German economy raise two questions: Does the current positive assessment of German economic institutions reflect something real, or is it just another speculative bubble? And, what is it about German economic institutions that has drawn the attention of so many over the years? In this book I address these questions by examining a key pillar of the postwar German economy, namely, the industrial relations system."--Publisher's website.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction; title: The enduring resilience of the law and the state in German industrial relations; title: Codetermination : pillar of postwar German industrial relations; title: A quantitative analysis of membership developments in the postwar German trade union movement : milieu matters; title: Trade unions in Germany : the two postwar movements; title: Employers associations : from regaining credibility to retaining relevance; title: Conclusion : integrating the pieces and a look toward the future.