An evolutionary dynamic of trade union systems

Wolfgang Streeck and Jelle Visser

No 98/4, MPIfG Discussion Paper from Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies

Abstract: In recent years, parallel trends of organizational restructuring have become manifest among trade unions. Sharing similar experiences of stagnant membership and falling density rates, coupled with structural shifts in employment from industry to services and a growing pressure to attend to the needs of more heterogeneous constituencies under increasingly decentralized labor-management relations, trade unions must adapt their internal operation and external representation. In particular, unions seem to suffer from the same inverse fluctuation of revenue and client needs as social security systems, as the economics of union organizing require that most members, most of the time, do not call upon the union's services except for the collective protection it offers. In many countries, trade unions are now in a process of regrouping in which sectoral boundaries are becoming increasingly unimportant. Drawing on the case histories of union development in Germany and the Netherlands, the paper shows that current changes in the organizational landscape of trade unions are not based on political strategies of interest representation, grounded in visions of class unity or industrial governance, but are driven by an evolutionary dynamic of unions as service organizations which must respond to general principles of adaptive-economic rationality.

Date: 1998
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/43164/1/243754035.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:mpifgd:p0047

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPIfG Discussion Paper from Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().