ABSTRACT
When in 1999 the German federal union, DGB, celebrated its fiftieth anniversary, the political scientist and trade union researcher Ulrich von Alemann (1999: 728) pointed to ‘a relatively homogeneous membership’ as one of the most significant features of the German trade union model. Does Germany therefore represent a deviant case of homogeneity in a book dealing with diversity and unions in an international context? On the contrary, women unionists, including the DGB’s female vice-president Ursula Engelen-Kefer, made the voices of women and migrants heard in a broad political initiative of female politicians, demanding a ‘new societal contract’ intended to realise a modern democracy, based on equal rights and opportunities for all citizens – women, men, and migrants – and designed towards ‘partnership, equal opportunities, justice and tolerance’ (Aktionsbuch 1998). Has the German trade union model1 thus changed from homogeneity to heterogeneity? Actually, the German union membership has never been as homogeneous as claimed in trade union research. Women always accounted for about one sixth of the entire union membership. German scholarly literature, however, heavily influenced by the idea of (class or interest group) homogeneity, ignored the division of labour and of its organisation by gender – and likewise by ideology, generation, qualification, status, and nation (Kerchner and KochBaumgarten 1998), although early women’s studies drew attention to the female outposts within the union landscape and to the special interests and identities of female employees and union members (e.g. Pinl 1977; Lippe 1983). Only in recent years has trade union research identified an increasing fragmentation of the German labour force as well as the pluralisation of employees’ interests, views and values. This fragmentation is owing to the socio-economic shift from the industrial to the post-industrial society and to German unification (Hoffmann et al. 1990). Obviously, the East-West division is a significant and peculiar feature of the German case. Nevertheless, empirical research on diversity and gender within German unions is still scarce. In particular systematic and detailed investigations of gender relations within individual unions are nearly non-existent. Even recent studies, which note the transformation of centralist union organisations into rudimentary network-unions
and which thereby acknowledge diversity within the union membership, have so far only mentioned gender issues in passing (Alemann and Schmidt 1998; Klatt 1997; Martens 2000). Therefore my investigations are based on the evaluation of published and unpublished documents, placed at my disposal by women’s departments of the German trade unions.
