Abstract

Born as autonomous organisations of workers whose goal was to safeguard their mutual economic, social and cultural interests, during the course of industrialisation, modern trades unions developed into organised mass labour movements, which fulfil their function of representing the interests of their members within the framework of institutionalised industrial relations. This function ranges from rejecting and condemning the capitalist state and its reformist employment measures to their subsidiary or social–liberal acceptance of the incumbent political order. In Germany, a temporarily hegemonic type of unified trades union, which is neutral in ideology and party political affiliations, and yet is involved in politics in multifarious ways, has developed to enable unions to successfully represent the aforementioned triad of workers’ interests in equal measure. The ten contributions published in this book present the specific prerequisites for and characteristics of this model for organising trades unions and determining their approach to achieving their goals. In doing so, they also make some intertemporal and international comparisons.