ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the maintenance of national diversity over the recent past. It discusses unions in what was West Germany, The reverberations of the reunification of Germany in 1990 will not be discussed in detail as these are currently unclear. Unions are characterised by their centralism, the leading role of fulltime officials and the coordination of heterogeneous industries and workplaces into an industrial union. Legal controls on strikes/lock-outs and the centralised control of bargaining are two reasons for the low level of industrial conflict in Germany, consistently among the lowest in the industrialised world. German employers have joined the movement for greater flexibility in the hours and deployment of labour. The trend to neo-corporate tripartisanism carne to an end, the 1984 agreement being the last. In 1981 the French elected their first left-wing government since the inception of the Fifth Republic in 1958.
