Trade unions and labour market dualisation: a comparison of policies and attitudes towards agency and migrant workers in Germany and Belgium

What is it about?

This article addresses the questions of the extent to which, and the reasons why, western European trade unions may have privileged the protection of ‘insiders’ over that of ‘outsiders’. Temporary agency workers, among whom migrant workers are over-represented, are taken as a test case of ‘outsiders’. The findings from a comparison of Belgian and German multinational plants show that collective agreements have allowed a protection gap between permanent and agency workers to emerge in Germany, but not in Belgium. However, the weaker protection in Germany depends less on an explicit union choice for insiders than on the weakening of the institutional environment for union representation and collective bargaining

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Why is it important?

We go beyond existing institutional accounts by addressing agency and institutional factors together to tackle the underlying question of the extent to which unions’ role in co-organising dualisation depends on their political choices rather than on the environment in which they operate

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