Negotiating the New Germany

The reunification of Germany in 1990 juxtaposed two very different models of industrial relations. This volume assesses the results. By the late-1980s, West Germany had developed and refined a largely collaborative relationship between business and labour, codified in law, that governed industrial relations effectively. How would East German workers, operating within a completely different system for 40 years, respond to West Germany's institutional social partnership? Would western-style social partnership spread to all of the New Germany, or find itself seriously destabilized?