Reforming German Labor Market Institutions: A Dual Path to Flexibility

By Werner Eichhorst, Paul Marx. Social Science Research Network, 2009

265 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Germany has always been one of the prime examples of institutional complementarities between social insurance, a rather passive welfare state, strong employment protection and collective bargaining that stabilize diversified quality production. This institutional arrangement was criticized for being the main cause of inferior labor market performance and increasing fiscal pressure on the welfare state while at the same time inhibiting institutional change. However, over the last 15 years, a sequence of institutional reforms has fundamentally modified the functioning of the German labor market and increased both flexibility and job creation capacities through two intimately linked processes that redefined the line between inactivity, the flexible and the standard segment of the labor market. On the one hand, policy changes facilitated the expansion of flexible or 'atypical' jobs, whereas increasing flexibility of the standard employment relationship resulted from wage moderation and working time flexibility. While at the outset of this reform sequence German had a small, but relatively egalitarian labor market, the number of jobs, but also their diversity has increased.

Subfields: General Health Professions, Political Science and International Relations, Public Administration

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fd1f1bf573808888eb74952ccd69cf9af8bfeb4b

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In General Health Professions

1. Lucio Baccaro
2. Jan Bernhardt
3. J. Allmendinger
4. S. Bulmer
5. C. Benassi
6. Lena Hipp

In Political Science and International Relations

1. C. Benassi
2. Lucio Baccaro
3. Jan Bernhardt
4. L. Dorigatti
5. J. Allmendinger
6. S. Bulmer
7. Lena Hipp

In Public Administration

1. Lucio Baccaro
2. Jan Bernhardt
3. L. Dorigatti
4. J. Allmendinger
5. S. Bulmer
6. C. Benassi
7. Lena Hipp

Citations in the corpus

• Throwing Out the Ballast: Growth Models and the Liberalization of German Industrial Relations (2016, background): “The Hartz reforms encouraged unions and works councils in the manufacturing sector to bargain around wage flexibility and other internal flexibility measures to increase the prospects for job security of core workers (Eichhorst and Marx, 2011).”
• Germany and the Eurozone Crisis: Between Hegemony and Domestic Politics (2014, background): “Although the Hartz reforms addressed concerns about the competitiveness of German labour costs (Eichhorst and Marx 2011), the apparently inexorable rise in public debt – from under 20 per cent of GDP in 1960 to over 60 per cent in 2006 – had developed even before the financial crisis.”
• Another economic miracle? The German labor market and the Great Recession (2012, unknown): “For example, while the share of permanent full-time employees has declined from 45 percent in 1992 to 38 percent in 2007, the fraction of inactive persons has declined from 25 percent to 21 percent within the same period of time (Eichhorst and Marx, 2011).”
• Institutions and the prevalence of nonstandard employment (2015, background): “…by guest on 26 July 2018 (and sometimes even unintended) impacts on different demographic groups (Allan and Scruggs, 2004; Estevez-Abe, 2005, 2006; Rueda 2005; DiPrete et al., 2006; Polavieja 2006; Palier and Thelen 2010; Eichhorst and Marx, 2011; Fleckenstein et al. 2011; Emmenegger et al., 2012).”
• Straight to the Core — Explaining Union Responses to the Casualization of Work: The IG Metall Campaign for Agency Workers (2015, background): “While the Hartz reforms have often been interpreted as instrument of flexibilization at the margins, Section 4 shows that they changed employers’ use of agency work, putting the core workforce under pressure (see also Eichhorst and Marx 2011).”
• The paradox of liberalization – understanding dualism and the recovery of the German political economy (2014, unknown): “In total, however, fixed term employment and workers employed by temping agencies still account for less than 10 percent of the workforce (Eichhorst and Marx, 2009, p. 14).”