Negotiating Flexibility: The Politics of Call Center Restructuring in the United States and Germany

Abstract

Germany was long viewed as a model coordinated economy, known for its strong laws that granted unions a “public status” (Offe 1981). While U.S. unions bargained at the enterprise level and focused on more narrow economic issues, German unions acted as national political actors with a broad social agenda (Wever 1995, Thelen 1991,Turner 1991, Streeck 1984). Today, worker representatives are reorienting their strategies to more competitive product and capital markets in both countries, while managers enjoy increased discretion to escape collective bargaining and introduce variation in agreements at the workplace level. These trends are of particularly concern in service industries, which have lower rates of union membership and are less likely to be covered by collective agreements than “core” manufacturing sectors.