The German Train Drivers' Union (GDL), the country's oldest, used to be among its most obscure. That changed in July when its feisty leader, Manfred Schell, rejected an agreement between Deutsche Bahn, the main railway company, and the bulk of its workforce. His members, he said, deserve a big rise in their "miserable pay"—up to 31%, the union has hinted. The threat of an economy-crippling strike, which could happen as early as August 28th, is shocking enough. Still more is GDL's challenge to Germany's tradition of trade-union solidarity.
Big unions are appalled by the prospect of some workers snatching better pay and conditions from weaker fellows. Employers accustomed to labour peace fret that Germany will face "English conditions" of rival unions competing by striking.
GDL is not the first to break ranks. In 1999 airline pilots pulled out from DAG, the white-collar employees' union, to fight for their own deals. Six years later doctors abandoned an alliance with ver.di, a grouping formed by the merger of five service-sector unions, to strike for a bigger pay rise than the behemoth could win for them. GDL's defection seems to confirm the unravelling of a system based on umbrella labour contracts for whole industries or firms. Companies complain that such contracts subvert competitiveness by imposing similar conditions regardless of size or strength. But they lose fewer work days to strikes than European rivals. Germany's prowess in manufacturing, rare for a rich country, may be due in part to the security such contracts provide.
Is that about to change? A separate deal for GDL would have "huge consequences for the next round" of labour negotiations, says Hans-Joachim Schabedoth, head of policy planning for the German Trade Union Confederation (DGB), the main union umbrella group. "Wage disputes will become harder to settle.' Yet GDL's behaviour probably threatens workers more than employers. German employment is recovering after years of stagnation and some trades are starting to benefit. Even so, recovery will not restore unions' self-confidence or the relative equality among workers (in West Germany, at least) that prevailed before German unification in 1990. Instead, growing prosperity may be accompanied by a bitter quarrel over how to divide it.
Things have been going badly for the big trade unions ever since the fizzling in the mid- 1990s of the unification boom. Growth slowed, unemployment soared and workers in newly capitalist eastern Europe stole German jobs. Since 1991 the DGB has lost 44% of its members. Employers exploited unions' weakness by demanding opt-out clauses in labour contracts and sometimes dispensing with them altogether. Collective agreements now cover 65% of workers in western Germany, compared with 76% in 1998, says Reinhard Bispinck of the Hans-B6ckler Foundation, the DGB's research arm.
Workers' flexibility made the recovery possible. Companies "drove up productivity tremendously by having docile and productive unions," says Anke Hassel of the Hertie School of Governance, a private university. And now some are benefiting. Metal-bashing and electronics firms have added 85,000 jobs since employment hit bottom in April 2006. IG Metall, that industry's union, won a pay rise of over 4% for June 2007-October 2008. "Employees are no longer prepared to accept (hourly) wage increases much below the long- term average" of about 2(作图)%, says Eekart Tuchtfeld, an economist at Commerzbank. But high-productivity sectors, particularly manufacturing, will gain more than less-productive services. Global competition will continue to pressure wages overall. "The underlying situation will not change," says Mr. Tuchtfeld.
Under the constitution, unions and employers are autonomous and disputes have been resolved by the courts. But breakaway unions make it more difficult for courts to defend one union's right to negotiate on behalf of a company's entire workforce. The right to strike may now have to be regulated by law, Mr. Schabedoth believes. Another statutory fix, championed especially by ver. di, is a proposed minimum wage of 7.50 an hour.
The sense of crisis may ebb if mediators appointed by GDL and Deutsche Bahn manage to avoid a separate contract for GDL's drivers. But that will not solve the underlying problem. the discovery, as Germany recovers from its slump, that some workers are more equal than others.