Trade Unions and the Challenge of Employee Welfare

Abstract

The positive attitude of trade unions to the expansion and importance of the welfare state has long been taken for granted because of the state’s redistribution of wealth and welfare. Most recently, Oude Nijhuis challenged this assumption in his analysis of British and Dutch trade union attitudes to governmental welfare. He argued that these are shaped by the external and internal capabilities of trade unions to forge a consensus between its members and participate in the governmental system. Chapter 9 applies his line of argumentation to the system of employee welfare and examines trade union contributions to it. British trade unions have been more in favour of employee than of governmental welfare in the voluntarist industrial relations system. In contrast, German trade unions were generally reluctant to negotiate employee welfare in the workplace until the 1980s because they sought to retain collective negotiations at the sectoral and national level. Local, workplace-specific agreements would have undermined their power claim and created divisions among their heterogeneous constituencies. At the external level, the local character of British trade unionism meant a weaker national position in the welfare system than in Germany. There, trade unions and other institutions representing employees, such as workers’ councils, have been involved in the governance of employee and governmental welfare institutions since their creation. This ability to achieve welfare improvements through different channels has compensated for their apparent lack of interest in expanding employee welfare.