The Smaller, the More Pernicious? A Comparison of Tariff Conflicts in Segment and Sector-Wide Branches

In his evaluation of 173 tariff conflicts in 13 economic segments covering a total of 12 million jobs, Hagen Lesch, Institute of the German Economy in Cologne, shows that collective bargaining with specialist segment trade unions takes twice as long as with branch trade unions on average. In addition, such bargaining is one and a half times more likely to escalate. This is primarily due to the fact that conflicts over organisational delimitation tend to escalate to a greater extent among specialist segment trade unions. The new law on the bargaining unit, however, should make such status conflicts rarer.