Straight to the Core — Explaining Union Responses to the Casualization of Work: The IG Metall Campaign for Agency Workers
| Author | Chiara Benassi,Lisa Dorigatti |
| Date | 01 September 2015 |
| Published date | 01 September 2015 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/bjir.12079 |
doi: 10.1111/bjir.12079
British Journal of Industrial Relations
53:3 September 2015 0007–1080 pp. 533–555
Straight to the Core — Explaining
Union Responses to the Casualization
of Work: The IG Metall Campaign for
Agency Workers
Chiara Benassi and Lisa Dorigatti
Abstract
The existing literature provides different accounts on the strategies of unions
regarding marginal workers. It has been argued that under increasing labour
market segmentation, unions have either to prioritize their core constituencies
and to seek compromises with management, or to adopt inclusive strategies
towards peripheral workers to counterbalance eroding bargaining power. This
article shows that both strategies represent equally viable options to protect the
interests of unions’ core members. The strategic choice depends on the (per-
ceived) competition between core and peripheral employees related to employ-
ers’ personnel strategies; this affects the possible alignment of interests between
unions’ core members, on the one hand, and either management or peripheral
employees, on the other. Our historical analysis of union strategies towards
agency workers in the German metal sector illustrates this mechanism, and
identifies institutional change towards liberalization as the trigger for aggres-
sive segmentation strategies by employers and for inclusive union strategies.
1.
Introduction
Atypical, precarious and low-wage work has been growing in Western politi-
cal economies over the last 30 years (Gautié and Schmitt 2010; Houseman
and O
¯
sawa 2003). This phenomenon has challenged the ability of traditional
class actors, such as trade unions, to represent workers (Gumbrell-
McCormick 2011). A broad body of literature has pointed out the factors
that make the union representation of atypical workers difficult, such as the
heterogeneity and vulnerability of these workers and their dispersion along
Chiara Benassi is at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Lisa Dorigatti is at
the University of Milan.
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd/London School of Economics. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd,
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the value chain (e.g., Doellgast 2012; Holtgrewe and Doellgast 2012;
MacKenzie 2009). Still, a controversial research issue remains the willingness
of unions to engage in the representation of atypical workers.
The dualization literature claims that unions contribute to the labour
market marginalization of atypical workers. Under increasing economic
pressure, unions are said to use atypical workers as a buffer in order to
protect their core constituencies from market fluctuations and cost-cutting
pressure (Hassel 2014; Palier and Thelen 2010). Theories of union revitaliza-
tion argue that unions increasingly seek to recruit atypical workers and
bargain on their behalf. Their inclusion has been interpreted as a reaction to
an increasingly hostile environment for labour. In order to regain bargaining
power, unions strengthen their recruiting and mobilization efforts (Frege and
Kelly 2004; Greer 2008; Turner 2009).
While these contradictory perspectives have often been set up as a debate
(Clegg et al. 2010), some authors have framed them as a dilemma that unions
face in dual labour markets (Goldthorpe 1984; Olsen 2005). Goldthorpe
argued that both inclusion and exclusion are viable strategies for unions to
maintain their labour market power: Confronted with employers’ segmenta-
tion strategies, unions can ‘strive to uphold class orientation, which must
entail as far as possible opposing dualism’, or they can ‘accept dualism and
fall back on the defense of the specific sectional interests of their enrolled
members, in the hope that these interests may be then as much protected as
undermined by dualism through the “shock absorber” function that the
secondary-workforce performs’ (Goldthorpe 1984: 339).
Still, little research exists on the conditions under which unions decide to
undertake the one or the other strategy. Ultimately, this decision relates to
the issues of how unions define their boundaries and constituencies. We argue
that the inclusion of peripheral workers into unions depends on the changing
perception of potential alignment of interests between the union and its core
members, on the one hand, and either management or peripheral employees,
on the other. Segmentation can provide mutual benefits to employers and
core workers because it allows cutting productions costs while protecting the
core workforce. Thus, unions and employers may potentially enter a coali-
tion of interests that excludes marginal workers. Alternatively, however,
segmentation may also threaten core workers through increasing competition
with the peripheral workforce. This makes the interests of core union
members more interdependent with peripheral workers, while those of core
workers and management progressively diverge. We identify institutional
change towards liberalization in the labour market as an important condition
for unions’ strategic reorientation, as it reconfigures the constraints and
opportunities for actors. Labour market liberalization lifts constraints to the
employers’ discretion (Baccaro and Howell 2011: 527), who can adopt more
aggressive segmentation strategies threatening unions’ power and collectively
agreed standards for the core workforce.
This article illustrates this argument through a historical analysis of how
the German metalworkers’ union IG Metall has approached the issue of
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd/London School of Economics.
534 British Journal of Industrial Relations
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