ABSTRACT
Introduction For decades, employment relations in Germany have served as something of a role model for stability and orderliness. As Katzenstein put it in his seminal work, Policy and Politics in West Germany , this stability was the result of several factors:
The reformist ideology and practices of unions that are centralized and leave little scope for rank-and-fi le militants; a well-institutionalized system of works councils which involves workers at the plant level; and laws that constrain what unions and business can do.
