¹ This article was originally presented at the Chamber of Labour seminar on “The US American and the European model” in Vienna on 30 October 2003 and translated and published as a discussion and working paper at European Trade Union Institute (ETUIin Brussels 2004; it was also presented on the website of the CCGES – Toronto/Montreal. Translation from the German by Janet Altman.Google Scholar

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⁷ On the following points see P. Hall & D. Soskice, Introduction to Varieties of Capitalism, supra note 4, at 1; O. Fioretos, The Domestic Sources of Multilateral Preferences: Varieties of Capitalism in the European Community, in Varieties of Capitalism supra note 4, at 213; St. Wood, Business, Government, and Pattern of Labor Market Policy in Britain and the Federal Republic of Germany, in Varieties of Capitalism, supra note 4, at 247; S. Vitols, Varieties of Corporate Governance: Comparing Germany and the UK, in Varieties of Capitalism, supra note 4, at 337; D. Soskice, Globalisierung und institutionelle Divergenz: Die USA und Deutschland im Vergleich, in Geschichte und Gesellschaft Nr. 2, 201 (1999); but also A. Graham, The UK 1979-95: Myths and Realities of Conservative Capitalism, in C. Crouch & W. Streeck, Political Economy of Modern Capitalism 117 (1997)Google Scholar

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¹¹ It is however debatable whether or not the British economy can still be referred to as a “low-skill, low-wage” economy, as regularly happens in the rather idealised terminology of VoC analysis, given the large proportion of sectors in the UK requiring high-level skills (See European Commission (2001), Employment in Europe. Luxembourg). A theoretical approach based on a labour market segmentation or on a “dual labour market” – an approach developed in the USA against the background of its own “dual economy” – would probably be more telling. Nonetheless, the European Commission's current report on employment in Europe, to which we refer here, says nothing about the actual mix of skills in the above-mentioned sectors, referring only to an increase in employment in “high-education sectors” (European Commission 2001, pp. 32–34). Any comparison with sector-specific figures for Germany would have to take account of the fact that Germany's commercial service sector lags behind that of the UK, and of the distortion introduced by the situation on the east German labour market.Google Scholar

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¹⁷ This depiction of the German labour market as being dominated by skilled labour, with a strong focus on the capital goods sector of industry and clearly in this case also on large enterprises, is disturbing to readers – at least those who are familiar with Germany's labour market – and should not be allowed to obscure the fact that many branches of the consumer goods industry and the service sector do of course constitute a sizeable segment of the labour market, where Fordism and unskilled, low-wage labour prevail: some five million jobs fell into this category in 1990. The EU Commission's statistics for knowledge-based sectors of the European labour market in 2000 place Germany only in a middle-ranking position, calculated according to the percentage of people employed in them (See European Commission 2001, p. 31). Streeck's often-repeated thesis concerning Germany's “high-quality, high-qualification, high-wage” economy likewise suffered from a one-sided concentration on industrial skilled labour, even though there is some truth in this thesis as concerns the capital goods manufacturing industry, a key sector, and the export industry.Google Scholar

¹⁸ See also B. Boyer, French Statism at the Crossroads, in Crouch & Streeck, supra note 7, at 92.Google Scholar

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⁵⁴ It is no accident that where a similar degree of security is not provided through institutional involvement, namely in LME forms of capitalism, multinational enterprises are taking the initiative themselves and adopting codes of conduct or corporate social responsibility (CSRstandards as uniform, certified methods of embedding economic activity into society. In this way they gain a certain amount of security in unstable consumer markets (threats of consumer boycotts and can guard against potential action by trade unions.Google Scholar

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