Into murky waters. Globalisation and deregulation in Germany’s shipping employee relations
| Pages | 12-28 |
| Published date | 01 February 2002 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/01425450210416906 |
| Date | 01 February 2002 |
| Author | Thomas Klikauer,Richard Morris |
| Subject Matter | HR & organizational behaviour |
Employee
Relations
24,1
12
Employee Relations,
Vol. 24 No. 1, 2002, pp. 12-28.
#MCB UP Limited, 0142-5455
DOI 10.1108/01425450210416906
Into murky waters
Globalisation and deregulation in
Germany's shipping employee relations
Thomas Klikauer and Richard Morris
School of Management, University of Western Sydney, Penrith South,
New South Wales, Australia
Keywords Employee relations, Employment law, Germany, Shipping
Abstract While Germany's employment relations are commonly seen as a high value added
trust relationship built around the well publicised ``new production concepts'', this paper aims to
show that there is also another side to Germany's ER. Using a detailed case study of the shipping
industry, the authors show how the implementation of the International Ship Register during the
late 1980s and 1990s challenged Germany's traditional system of employment relations and
regulatory framework. The authors conclude that evidence from the shipping industry illustrates
a strong departure from Germany's long-established employment relations, where deregulation of
shipping and labour law has led to the adoption of a ``low road'' approach.
Introduction
Claims about pervasive workplace transformation and the advent of the ``high
performance'' labour force are difficult to reconcile with the empirical evidence
from the German merchant marine. Although legal and managerial reform has
accelerated, it would be difficult to subsume these developments under the
banner of a ``high road'' toward a high skill and high wage labour force.
Although German industry is the home of much discussed ``new production
concepts'' including enlarged work roles and levels of knowledgeability
reinforced by higher incomes (Kern and Schuman, 1984), in the maritime sector
a new regulatory mechanism has been introduced and developed, designed to
facilitate access to cheap labour without high levels of training.
The ``low road'' globalisation of employment relations has taken on sharper
contrasts in the shipping industry as what was historically a bastion of
national identity involving the citizen employer and the citizen seafarer under
exclusive national regulation undergoes significant metamorphoses
(Chaykowski and Giles 1998; Martin and Schumann 1997). In a globalised
industry such as shipping, the nation states of Europe, their shipping industry
employers and their seafaring employees, with few exceptions, are no longer
the unchallenged major stakeholders in shipping, as core assets are dispersed
from their jurisdictions to the ``flags of convenience'' (Jacoby, 1995). Yet the
dissolution of the national state's powers in respect of a globalised shipping
industry has not seen a transfer to European Union (EU) authority. The EU has
tightened the monitoring of ship safety in its ports and has promoted the
training of marine inspectors but notions of a European shipping fleet
employing EU citizens under the EU flag remains largely theoretical
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Into murky
waters
13
(Salvarani, 1998). In its place, regulatory strategies such as the GIS have found
favour.
In the post war period, the nationally regulated shipping industries of
Europe developed institutional and procedural practices which favoured the
tripartite handling of regulatory and human resources issues. Industry wide
associations of employers and labour, together with state agencies, typically
maintained strong controls over the labour supply, health and safety issues and
the co-ordination of the national merchant fleet with the strategic and political
planning associated with the Cold War. However, these regulatory systems
were undermined by the flight of global merchant shipping into ``flags of
convenience'' (FOCs), which by 1997 accounted for some 44 percent of total
world tonnage. The appeal of the ``open registries'' or FOCs to shipowners lay in
the offer of lower wages, lower taxes and a less rigorous regulatory
environment, made available, unlike the traditional national fleets, to
companies with no genuine link of domicile or citizenship to ``post-box'' states
such as Liberia, Antigua and more recently, Cambodia (ISF, 2000).
To counter the cumulative loss of national shipping, with all that entails for
a parallel decline of the cluster of inter-related maritime industries in the ports
such as marine insurance, ship brokering, stevedoring and shipbuilding, a
number of EU states have developed a half way house in shipping regulation,
the so-called ``international'' ship registers. Norway pioneered this movement.
Founded in 1987, the Norwegian International Ship Registry (NIS) stemmed to
some extent the haemorrhage of Norwegian owned shipping to the ``post-box''
registries while maintaining some ``quality'' connections with the traditional
fleet in the form of safety and general regulatory practices. The great difference
between the NIS and the traditional national flag fleet lay in its labour supply
options. Only the former permitted the employment of non-Norwegian
nationals at lower rates of pay (Saether, 1998).
Other EU maritime nations, of which Holland was the paradigm, rejected the
full institutionalisation of a second ``international'' registry, but in 1996 began
to ease taxes on national flag shipping and relax mandatory human resource
criteria. Foreigners on low wages could now be employed in Dutch ships
instead of Dutch citizens (Nieupoort, 1998). In short, an extensive methodology
of legislative and institutional re-structuring developed in the EU as ``a fashion
to get rid of expensive crews'' (Puttfarken, 2000).
Although organisational and human resource issues are a well-established
research topic with regard to FOC tonnage, empirical work is scant on these
issues in regard to the ``ersatz'' FOCs, the international ship registries now
common in Europe (Cooper, 1999; Chapman, 1992; Harrigan, 1984). This article
aims to contribute by presenting a case study on the new international German
ship register (GIS), a development modelled on the Norwegian initiative, rather
than the Dutch approach, but also drawing on Germany's Gastarbeiter
traditions with all they imply for labour problems. The research is based on an
extensive series of qualitative interviews carried out principally in Germany in
2000, together with an examination of the documentary record.
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