This chapter explores the policy-related activities of German trade unions and business associations. It looks at the different structural and organisational levels on which these actors themselves create policy analyses or commission studies and reviews. It also takes up the question as to how capable they are of generating the necessary knowledge to act as strategic actors.

Introduction

Trade unions and employers’ and trade associations are fundamental components of the German model of industrial relations. Within the scope of free collective bargaining, the social partners decisively negotiate the material working conditions, and in their function as political actors, they try to influence governmental decisions. Their influence thereby reaches considerably beyond labour market policy, into the areas of educational, social and economic policy. Trade unions and business associations are strategic actors, with their own resources, which they can deploy depending on objectives, situations and challenges. They are also reliant on knowledge, data and arguments in order to legitimise their public action and to assert their objectives. They are involved in agenda-setting, policy formulation and implementation of policies. Due to established access to parties, ministries and to the governmental system, they are indirectly able to influence the labour market, employment, educational and sociopolitical processes. In the past, leading trade unionists were occasionally also involved in policy-making processes as ministers. Up until now, they were also mostly able to maintain their capacity of codetermination and influence in the case of changing government majorities, and sometimes even to expand it (see Esser, 2003). Furthermore, corporatist arrangements in the continental European welfare state model have granted even a partially direct influence on individual policy areas. Thus, the social partners have succeeded in contributing decisively to shaping the state's labour market policy in tripartite constellations (Schroeder and Weßels, 2003, 2010, p 5; Schroeder and Keudel, 2008, p 61).

It is therefore not surprising that the trade unions are appreciated for their important contribution to the welfare state and the democratic development of Germany (Schroeder and Weßels, 2003, p 12). In some cases, they have also succeeded in averting (legislative) reforms as a veto power. So, with this in mind, the trade unions, employers’ and trade associations can be identified at least as an implicit, partially also as an explicit, part of the political system.