Germany: Workers on the Board

by bam

Germany answers the question "who decides?" differently than any country an American student has ever seen, and the proof is a pair of numbers. About 14% of German workers belong to a union (2024). About half of them are covered by a collective agreement (2024). Those numbers are not in tension; they are the whole lesson. This course takes co-determination (Mitbestimmung) apart piece by piece: works councils elected by ALL employees under the Works Constitution Act, and the precise, unglamorous difference between a right to be informed, a right to be consulted, and a right to actually say no; workers holding half the seats on the supervisory board of a big company under the Co-determination Act of 1976, and the casting vote that means "half" overstates it; the dual system of sectoral bargaining above the firm and the peace obligation that comes with it. Then the honest part: coverage has been falling for twenty-five years, most German workplaces have no works council at all, roughly 40% of the companies big enough to owe workers a parity board have engineered their way out of it, and the best economics finds co-determination's effects to be real but modest. Cited to the German statutes themselves, Destatis, the IAB, OECD/AIAS, ETUI and the Hans-Böckler-Stiftung. A country course in the Workers' Rights track, take "The History of Unions: America and the World" first.