ABSTRACT
One of the critiques advanced in this book has been that the new political economy approach does not consider the issue of variation between countries in a systematic way. Throughout the present book, the Varieties of Capitalism typology has been used as a heuristic device for exploring variation in the structure of immigration controls and the labour market position of immigrants. The penultimate chapter reverses this line of enquiry by exploring what the impact of immigration has been on the salience of coordinated industrial relations within the German construction industry. It argues that immigration’s effects depend largely on the extent to which the law constructs migrants as low-wage, exploitable workers, as well as the capacity of the government and social partners to control illegal employment – an endeavour that has been made more difficult in the wake of liberalising reforms. In addition, other factors were equally or more threatening to the salience of coordinated industrial relations in the German construction industry, including the volatility of business cycle, the Europeanisation of law and, most of all, the reunification of East and West Germany. The chapter ends by considering what the case studies reveals about the nature of change within coordinated market economies and, more generally, the inevitability of liberalisation – a theme that is expanded upon in the next – and final – chapter of the book.
