Abstract
This article analyses working conditions and attitudes of white-collar workers in the manufacturing sector as well as the efforts of trade unions to organise this group of employees in three European countries – Finland, France and Germany. Organising white-collar workers has become a major issue for manufacturing trade unions because of their growing proportion in the sector’s workforce. The study is based on an analysis of European secondary data sets, a survey on white-collar attitudes and, finally, on workshops with trade unionists in the countries investigated. Although white-collar workers traditionally are said to be reluctant to join trade unions, ambivalence towards their working conditions and rather positive assessments of trade unions offer some starting points for organising. Trade unions have developed different activities to organise white-collar workers, which are closely related to the different institutional and organisational conditions in which they operate. These activities still lack strategic decisions to prioritise white-collar organising.
Introduction
Organising white-collar workers has become a major issue for manufacturing trade unions in European political economies. The main reason is simple: the rise in the share of white-collar workers in the manufacturing workforce (Haipeter, 2016). This trend has also led to a shift in the sources of employee structural power. Skilled operatives no longer form the core of the manufacturing workforce, but are being supplemented or even replaced by white-collar staff, such as engineers, IT-specialists or other formally qualified and highly-skilled employees with a high level of structural power – the latter based on skills that are in short supply and indispensable for sustaining the scope for innovation in the value creation process.
Given that blue-collar workers are the traditional backbone of trade union organisational power in manufacturing industry, this situation now poses an existential threat to trade unions in this sector. The greater the decline in the share of blue-collar workers, the more acute the risk that trade unions will lose organisational power and with this their ability to represent the workforce in collective bargaining (Kämpf, 2018). This could have ominous consequences for the future of organised industrial relations overall, as in many countries it is manufacturing trade unions that continue to be the mainstay of trade union organisational power.
However, current knowledge about white-collar workers and the responses of trade unions is rather limited, despite the sociological tradition of analysing white-collar issues in terms of classes or industrial relations. Given this, our analysis tries to tackle three research questions: Firstly, what are the characteristics and patterns of employment, work and working conditions of white-collar workers in the manufacturing sector and how do these workers perceive them? Secondly, what are their attitudes towards trade unions? And thirdly, what do the activities of trade unions to mobilise and organise white-collar employees look like? Based on a comparative approach, the article presents new evidence both on the attitudes and interests of white-collar workers and on how trade unions represent and organise this group of employees. The analysis is based on the findings of a research project that was financed by the EU and conducted together with IndustriAll Europe, the European umbrella association of the trade unions which have their organisational domains in the manufacturing sector.
The article is divided into the following sections. It begins with a short introduction on the state of research on white-collar work and trade unions and then gives a comment on methods. The next three sections cover the three research questions posed above: employment and working conditions of white-collar workers, their attitudes towards trade unions and, finally, the organising strategies pursued by trade unions towards white-collar workers. In the final two sections, the results are analysed with respect to institutional and organisational factors of trade union organising strategies and to trade union practices of organising white-collar workers.
White-collar worker and trade unions
White-collar workers and the role of the middle classes traditionally are a core issue in class analysis. Given their diverse skill levels and their positions in organisational hierarchies, Wright (1997) argued that exercising skills and authority can establish ‘contradictory class locations’. Employees in these positions are therefore in a position to capture some of the surplus value (the ‘social surplus’) generated by the production system either because they have scarce marketable skills (‘skill rent’) or because companies want to retain them and pay them a ‘loyalty rent’.
Industrial sociology usually traced the question whether white-collar workers have working-class orientations or not back to the trends of working conditions. Two opposing interpretations of this development have prevailed since the 1970s in German industrial sociology: on the one hand, the deskilling thesis, grounded in the growing abstraction and standardisation of work due to, among other things, the introduction of IT (Brandt, 1978); and on the other hand, the thesis that work has been upgraded and reskilled, with IT relieving workers of the drudgery of routine and giving them structural power resources that white-collar employees can mobilise in individual negotiations with superiors (Littek and Heisig, 1987).
This debate has continued to the present, arguing in the one case that high-skilled white-collar employees are directed towards making a contribution to organisational success (Kotthoff, 1997; Kotthoff and Wagner, 2008). This contrasts with the pattern of employee orientation observed notably in outsourcing and offshoring in the IT industry, leading to a feeling of insecurity and fears of job losses on the part of skilled workers in software and IT services, administration, and research and development (Boes and Kämpf, 2010; Kämpf, 2008). The latter analysis is supported by findings on knowledge work, where research suggests that it is no longer appropriate to equate ‘white-collar jobs’ with good working conditions (Kalleberg, 2016). In some places there is even talk of ‘white-collar sweatshops’ (Fraser, 2001). This picture of ambivalent working conditions is empirically confirmed by the European Working Conditions Survey, which states that managers and professionals are most satisfied with their working conditions – and at the same time are under the most pressure (Eurofound, 2017). Whereas blue-collar workers report more physical job demands, white-collar workers tend to show higher psychological demands (Schreuder et al., 2008).
Finally, the dynamic changes currently observable in the work of white-collar employees have led to a new focus. Looking at digitalisation, an ambivalent picture has emerged: on the one hand, white-collar workers increasingly have to use information and communication software, to work across national borders and to work faster (Hoonakker, 2014); on the other hand, there is a trend towards the elimination of routine activities and greater work autonomy to be observed (Seibold and Stieler, 2016). These developments might lead to a polarisation of white-collar employees into those conducting routine activities characterised by increasing standardisation (Kämpf, 2018) and more highly-skilled employees able to enjoy a higher degree of job enrichment driven by digitalisation (Waschull et al., 2022).
These trends are connected with new forms of work organisation. Whereas ‘lean office’ is based on standardisation and continuous improvement (Boes et al., 2018), agile work is aimed at the self-organisation of work in teams in which individual members perform specific roles and work in short cycles (Bendel and Latniak, 2020). As yet, it is unclear whether and to what extent self-organisation and autonomy in agile forms of work are necessarily accompanied by stress and work overload (Boes et al., 2018).
At the same time, decisions to join a trade union do not depend solely on economic status, working conditions or even the subjective stance of white-collar workers. Much also depends on trade unions themselves and their activities – the services they offer, the frames of reference they develop to explain or resolve problems at work, and how they mobilise and organise workers (Haipeter, 2016). To explore these, we now turn to the research findings on white-collar unionism and trade union organising.
In the debate about white-collar unionism (for an overview, see Price, 1983), Blackburn and Prandy (1965) and Bain (1970) argued several decades ago that trade union growth could be explained by factors like, firstly, the attitude and behaviour of the employer in the sense of employer recognition of trade unionism; secondly, the growth of bureaucracy, which favours collective instead of individual action; and, finally, the degree of control that individual employees have over their work. A second aspect stressed in this debate was the form of white-collar trade unionism. Blackburn and Prandy (1965) created the term ‘unionateness’ to characterise the degree of similarity and difference between white- and blue-collar unions and demarcate trade unions from professional associations. However, Kleingartner (1968), for example, expected hybrid organisations, combining the characteristics of professional associations and trade unions, would become more important.
These explanations were limited by the fact that the debate was anchored in a structural approach to trade unionism. What trade unions actually do to attract white-collar employees played a subordinate role at best. This rather passive view on trade unions has been challenged since the 1990s by the debate on union revitalisation and organising.
The core idea in this debate is that the activity of organising can help to increase organisational density and to revitalise trade unions. In this way organising is characterised as a set of strategic trade union practices that together form the model of strategic organising (for an overview, see Heery, 2015). This model is based, amongst other activities, on (a) involving activists at the workplace; (b) mapping workers with respect to their propensity to join a trade union; (c) identifying issues or grievances; (d) framing the case within a broader discourse of social justice; (e) organising collective actions to mobilise workers; and (f) looking for coalitions with social movements. Additionally, organising requires a profound strategic and structural reorientation of trade unions. This involves issues like training professional organisers, implementing plans and budgets for organising, developing key areas and targets of activities, and making organising an ongoing organisational task by establishing organising departments.
However, the concept of organising is not quite as clear-cut as it might seem. From the outset, there has been a debate about the role of leadership and union democracy (Voss, 2010). Another ambiguity concerns the range and depth of the changes required to initiate organising. In its pure form, organising is a profoundly new way of recruiting members for trade unions. At the same time, organising has also been discussed in terms of single instruments that can be deployed alongside traditional forms of trade union organisation (Brinkmann et al., 2008).
Finally, in the conflictual approach of organising, partnership patterns with employers can be regarded as an obstacle to reaching organising targets (Badigannavar and Kelly, 2011). Against this view, other authors have stressed that consensus and collective agreements can produce advantages for labour that are not possible in a purely conflictual approach (Ackers, 2015) and that trade unions have to deliver improvements in order to retain members won by organising campaigns (Cregan, 2005). As a consequence, Heery (2015) has proposed combining organising and partnership. From this point of view, organising would be a suitable strategy directed at low-wage workers and employers who are hostile to trade unions, whereas partnership would be a strategy for high-wage employers with recognised trade unions.
However, looking at white-collar workers in manufacturing, the problem for trade unions is rather to organise workers who might already work in partnership arrangements and be relatively highly paid. In such circumstances, a purely conflictual approach would seem to hold out little prospect of success, given the more cooperative orientations of white-collar workers. In contrast, a purely partnership approach also seems insufficient, given that this has not as yet yielded positive organising effects on its own.
At the same time, the debate about the organising model seems to neglect the finding that traditional workplace representation plays a crucial role in trade union organising (Waddington, 2015), as many trade union members are recruited at workplaces with trade union representatives. Given this, the use of the term organising should not be confined to the model of strategic organising described above. There might be other approaches neglected in the debate that focus on already existing structures of workplace representation, and that at the same time might be less encompassing or less resource intensive. Therefore, looking at these approaches and their implementation can enrich the discussion about trade union organising and open the view for the repertoires of organising developed by trade unions.
Methods and country selection
By looking at Finland, France and Germany, the article takes a comparative perspective on white-collar work and organising attempts of trade unions. These three countries were chosen because they stand for different forms of capitalism, industrial relations systems and trade union structures.
Firstly, the three selected countries each represent types identified by the ‘Varieties of Capitalism’ approach (Hall and Soskice, 2001) within the European Union: Finland represents the Nordic model, with strong trade unions and a comprehensive welfare state; France represents the Mediterranean model with an important role of the state; and, finally, Germany comes from the tradition of a coordinated market economy, albeit one in which coordinating institutions, such the role of banks in corporate financing, have noticeably declined in importance (Bosch et al., 2009).
At the same time, the selected countries also exhibit distinctive models of industrial relations and trade union arrangements, based on two central criteria (see also Bamber et al., 2021; European Trade Union Institute [ETUI], 2025). The first of these refers to the difference between unitary and dual systems of industrial relations. Finland is an example of a unitary or single-channel system in which trade unions both negotiate collective bargaining agreements on industry level and form the interest representation at the workplace level. France stands for a mixed system at workplace level with both works councils, endowed with authority to represent employee interests on certain topics, and trade unions on establishment and industry level with the sole right to conclude collective agreements with companies. Germany is an example of a ‘dual system’ in which industry collective bargaining by trade unions is combined with a workplace representation by works councils formally independent of trade unions.
The second criterion is the organisational logic of trade unions. Three main organisational logics can be distinguished: firstly, industry trade unions whose organisational domains include all employees in an industry or sector; secondly, trade unions that organise groups of employees by occupation or qualification, regardless of sectoral boundaries; and, thirdly, general trade unions that organise across many sectors but have sector-specific organisational structures and compete for members with other unions. In Germany, industry unionism is the dominant principle. In Finland, trade unions are clustered along the employee groups of blue-collar workers, white-collar workers and, finally, academic and managerial staff. In France we find competing general unions with differing political orientations, however with the exemption of the trade union CFE-CGC which organises higher qualified white-collar employees.
With regard to these two criteria, the models of employee representation and trade unionism in the countries included in the analysis can be classified as shown in Table 1.
Logics of trade union organisation and interest representation.
The comparative analysis is based on three data sources. The first source is statistical analysis for the three European countries using secondary data from the European Labour Force Survey (EU-LFS) and the European Working Conditions Survey (EWCS).
The second source is primary data from an online-access survey of white-collar employees in manufacturing conducted in the three countries: Finland, France and Germany. The online-access survey took place in spring 2024 with 1,062 respondents in France, 833 in Finland and 1,045 in Germany. Only white-collar employees in the manufacturing sector were included. Due to the fact that no reliable information was available about the distribution of the target group, it was not possible to draw a representative sample by using quota-based methods. However, our survey for the first time collects comparative data on interests and trade union orientations of white-collar workers.
The third data source we rely on are half-day online workshops held with trade union organisers – from the white-collar and organising departments – of IndustriAll Europe member unions from the three selected countries. In these workshops – which had the character of group interviews with experts – we discussed and analysed the working conditions and orientations of white-collar workers towards trade unions, the strategies and practices that have been developed to organise and represent white-collar workers by the trade unions, and the challenges and shortcomings these practices might entail.
Each workshop lasted from between three and a half to four hours with one or two short breaks. Workshops were attended by between three and seven trade union experts from different trade unions. In Germany two separate workshops were held with unions, whereas in the two other cases the unions attended one workshop respectively (Table 2).
Expert workshops – attending trade unions.
In Finland, STTK is the most important trade union organising white-collar workers in the manufacturing sector (and PRO is its affiliate responsible for educated professionals and experts); TEK is the affiliate of the occupational trade union AKAVA, which is traditionally responsible for academic engineers and architects and nowadays also for the expanding group of IT experts. The organisational domain of the CFE-CGC in France are professional employees with higher education. Whereas this trade union is an equivalent to the occupational Finnish trade unions, the CGT is a general trade union focusing on all employees in all sectors and competing for members with the CFE-CGC. Both trade unions from Germany are industry trade unions, with IG Metall organising workers mainly in the metalworking sector and IG BCE in the chemical and pharmaceutical industry.
Developments and working conditions of white-collar employees
This section takes a look at the development of white-collar employment in the manufacturing sector in terms of employment structure and the way white-collar workers perceive their working conditions in the three countries under scrutiny. Looking at employment structure first, it can be stated that the proportion of white-collar workers in the manufacturing workforce is on the rise in Finland and Germany, and that it is at a high level in all three countries. According to data from the EU-LFS, the proportion of white-collar workers in manufacturing increased in the period from 2011 to 2022 from 45% to 49.8% in Finland and from 47% to 52.1% in Germany; in France the share decreased from 53.9 to 47.4%. However, in all three countries almost half or more of the workforce in the manufacturing sector is composed of white-collar workers. The former blue-collar dominated sector is shifting towards a white-collar based workforce.
At the same time, according to the EU-LFS figures, the proportion of women among white-collar workers in manufacturing ranges from 34% in Finland to around 37% in France, with Germany in between (36%), compared to female shares among blue-collar workers of about 20% or less in all three countries. Overall, this means that organising white-collar employees also means organising women to a much greater extent than previously.
These structural changes in the manufacturing workforce are accompanied by a shift in skill structures and the activities and positions of employees in corporate hierarchies. In the main, according to the EWCS, a large majority of white-collar employees – 68% in Finland, 76% in France and 52% in Germany – have attained a tertiary level of education, whereas the highest level of education for most blue-collar workers is secondary education, with 84% of the workers in Finland, 82% in France and 88% in Germany. The lower level of tertiary education among white-collar employees in Germany can be attributed to the importance of the system of vocational training which also covers important white-collar activities.
How do white-collar employees perceive their working conditions? Our results confirm the ambivalent findings cited in the literature review. Positive aspects are combined with more critical statements. This can be shown by our survey in which we asked for responses on several statements about working conditions. The categories ‘strongly agree’ and ‘somewhat agree’ (for some questions ‘to a very high extent’ or ‘to a high extent’) are combined here as values denoting agreement.
Looking at positive statements first, the statements ‘I think my work is meaningful’ and ‘My work allows me to develop my knowledge and skills’ show the highest level of agreement among the respondents, with agreement figures between 60% and 80% depending on the countries (Figure 1). Agreement to other statements like ‘I am well paid for my work’, ‘I can influence decisions that are important to my work’, ‘I am satisfied with the continuous training opportunities offered by my company’ or ‘I am satisfied with my career prospects in my current job’ was lower, with in most cases fewer than 50% the respondents agreeing to these statements.
Positive statements about work and working conditions, in percentages (own survey).
Among the statements with a more negative connotation the highest agreement (40% or more) across the three countries is on the statements ‘I would like more opportunities to reconcile work, free time and family’ and ‘Over the last 12 months, I’ve had to do more work than before within the same timeframe’. The level of agreement is somewhat lower on the statement ‘How often do you feel overwhelmed by work or under pressure’ (response categories ‘often’ and ‘very often’). Still around one third or more of the employees indicate their agreement that the intensity and pressure of their work is increasing. Agreement with the question ‘Do you often have to make concessions regarding the quality of your work to meet deadlines?’ can be viewed as an additional indicator of the time pressures under which employees work. Finally, agreement to the statement ‘I am generally expected to be available by email or telephone outside my normal working hours’ can both reinforce the feeling that work is becoming busier and that there should be more opportunities to reconcile work and free time (Figure 2).
Negative statements about work and working conditions, in percentages (own survey).
There are some differences in responses by age and gender, although these are not especially marked. Women and younger workers tend to put more emphasis on issues such as opportunities to reconcile work and leisure and feeling that they have to work more than previously. Trade union members in general are more critical of working conditions than non-members, emphasising the negative aspects more strongly and the positive less firmly. However, these are partly differences of degree, and there is still a remarkable proportion of non-members who made negative statements – a potential starting point for trade union organising initiatives perhaps.
Taken together, the findings of our survey underline the ambivalences of working conditions of white-collar workers in the manufacturing sector. Whereas the majority of workers in the three countries consider their work to be meaningful, knowledge and skill intensive or well paid, fewer than half of them are satisfied with training opportunities or career perspectives, and around half of them – or at least a significant minority – criticise an increasing intensity of work or lacking opportunities to reconcile work and private life.
Attitudes of white-collar workers towards trade unions
The ambiguous stance of white-collar workers towards their working conditions raises the question of what their attitudes towards trade unions might be. We will start our analysis with trade union density figures and then have a look at the perceived relevance of trade unions, issues of priority and motives for membership.
Trade union membership figures for respondents in manufacturing vary greatly between the countries surveyed. By far the highest level of membership was reported in Finland, at just under 62%. Germany followed a long way behind, with just 30% of respondents saying that they were trade union members. Finally, in France, only under 16% of those surveyed were members of a trade union.
The differences between the countries correspond roughly with the overall trade union density figures of the respective economies: Finland 55%, Germany 16% and France 9% (OECD/AIAS, 2023). The relatively higher level of trade union density shown in our survey in absolute terms for all the three countries can be explained by the fact that in these countries the manufacturing sector is much more highly organised than private services and that, therefore, trade unions have a better access to white-collar workers than their counterparts in the service economy. The outstanding figure for Finland is connected with the trade union role in the organisation of unemployment funds, a fact we will take up later.
Given this, what do white-collar workers in the three sample countries think about trade unions and their relevance? To ascertain this, the survey asked respondents both about the importance they ascribe to trade unions as representatives of employee interests in general and about their relevance to themselves personally. Whereas respondents in Germany (74%) and, to a lesser degree in Finland (65%), estimate the general relevance of trade unions as higher than the personal one, on the latter point opinions are relatively evenly distributed across the three countries. In France (53% for personal and general relevance) and Germany (52%), the personal relevance of trade unions is much more prevalent than the sample’s union density rate; in Finland (48%) it is much below. One implication from this for trade unions is that in Germany and France, organising efforts could build on a pool of potential members – that is, those who feel that trade unions are important for them but are not members; another could be that unions should attend to transforming general into personal relevance of trade unions.
What issues should trade unions tackle from the standpoint of white-collar workers? Our survey listed a number of topics, and respondents were asked whether they agree or not with them. All items have a high priority (‘very important’ and ‘important’) for the majority of white-collar workers: among them, negotiating collective agreements, providing support in disputes with the employer, creating new jobs or campaigning for job security, improving health and safety at the workplace, giving help to balance private and professional life and achieving pay rises (Figure 3). The expectations of trade union members in general are higher than those of non-members. However, non-members are only slightly behind and therefore also show high expectations, given that they have not decided to become members yet.
Issues that should be given greater priority by trade unions, in percentages (own survey).
Given the gap – at least in France and Germany – between membership figures and the assessments of trade union importance and the issues they should deal with, why do white-collar workers in manufacturing join a trade union in the first place? According to the findings of our survey, the most widespread motive for joining a union was the general importance of trade unions (Figure 4). The further motives can be bundled together in the sense that, apart from socialisation in the family, they refer mainly to personal experiences of trade union activities in conflicts and problem solving at the workplace.
Reasons for trade union membership, in percentages (own survey).
One important conclusion from this is that membership decisions become more likely if the general relevance attributed to trade unions coincides with personal experiences of them at the workplace. Given this, direct contact between trade unions and white-collar workers seems to be a critical issue. Having personal contact may transfer the general relevance of the trade union into an issue of personal relevance. According to our findings, however, the level of contact between trade unions and white-collar workers appears to be rather low in all of the countries under scrutiny, albeit with significant differences between the countries. While well over 50% of respondents in Finland and France report a direct contact with trade unions, the figure for Germany is just under 41%. This difference could be related to the fact that the first point of contact for problems or issues at the workplace in Germany is not trade unions but works councils, and respondents might not necessarily identify them with trade unions. Anyway, increasing these figures and making trade unions a personal experience by having more contact with them at the workplace seems to be a rather promising route for trade unions to better organise white-collar workers.
Trade union practices of interest representation and organising of white-collar employees
In this section the concrete organising activities of the trade unions in the three countries investigated will be analysed. Irrespective of their organisational structure, the six trade unions included in our study have made organising white-collar employees an important goal and developed a repertoire of different organising approaches. However, implementing this has been pursued to varying degrees and with differing organisational underpinnings.
Table 3 shows the range of strategies and initiatives developed by the trade unions in the three countries under scrutiny, many of which are shared across-the-board. In this respect it is possible to identify patterns of practices to attract and organise white-collar workers. At the same time, these patterns are used in different ways and to a different extent by the trade unions in the respective countries, depending on the forms of trade unionism and institutional conditions.
Organising: patterns of practices of trade unions.
Finland
White-collar trade unions in Finland seem to be in a comfortable position, given their – in a comparative perspective – high trade union density figures. However, these figures have declined significantly along with the overall development of trade union density, which fell from about 70% to only 55% in the last 20 years (OECD/AIAS, 2023). One of the main reasons for this development is the change that has occurred in the organisation of unemployment funds during this time. Whereas this organisation – a form of Ghent system – was originally confined to the trade unions, non-trade union funds have since been introduced which compete with the trade unions by offering the same level of unemployment protection without demanding trade union membership fees (Kjellberg, 2023).
As trade unions have come under this new competitive pressure, the white-collar trade unions developed new strategies to stop the downward trend of membership figures. One of the main strategies in this respect was the activation of shop stewards at the workplace level. In the case of the trade union STTK PRO this strategy was based on two initiatives. The first, which was introduced more than a decade ago, focused on the recruitment of shop stewards in workplaces both with and without shop stewards. The goal was to better represent the trade union members at the workplace and, above all, to be better able to convince employees to join the trade union. For this purpose the trade union hired new trade union secretaries working on the regional level who had the explicit task to go to the workplaces and convince members to become shop stewards, among them also two of the experts participating in our workshop.
And [at that time], we were hired to get more shop stewards. I could say something about the amount of the shop stewards we have now, about 2000 like nationwide. And I think that the number was very much lower before. (Workshop Finland)
The second and ongoing initiative to activate shop stewards is to elect PRO-club leaders as additional shop stewards at the workplace. These club leaders have the function to support and relieve the traditional shop stewards and, especially, to focus on the recruitment of new members. In order to make this work attractive, the club leaders get similar benefits to the normal shop stewards.
Additionally, the trade union has developed a training programme for these activities, and it has created a separate department operating at the headquarters and regional level which deals just with this kind of workplace activation. According to the experts, the union succeeded in installing about 3,000 club leaders across its organisational domain.
So, these club leaders’ role is to help recruiting new members. And we have given this club leader similar benefits as a job steward gets. And we also have some organised schooling and training for these from our separate department which deals with this. We have actually created a separate department, which only deals with the workplace-level. (Workshop Finland)
The organisers from the regional or national level work actively together with the shop stewards and the club leaders. Together they organise events and meetings which are called ‘coffee-break meetings’ by the experts and which are aimed at recruiting new members. Every year in September and October, the organisers go to the workplaces, bringing with them coffee and cakes, and inform the employees about collective bargaining agreements, wages and economic developments. This information is combined with the offer of a reduced membership fee of 25 Euros for the rest of the year to join the trade union.
Maybe 30 of our regional specialists go to different workplaces and they bring coffee and cakes for the workers and talk about the collective agreement issues. And we have a campaign, that, if you join during these three weeks, the rest of the year’s membership fee is only 25 Euro. (Workshop Finland)
For the trade union AKAVA TEK, workplace activation of shop stewards is a more difficult issue. The group of potential members at the workplace is much smaller than that of STTK PRO, so the effort would exceed the benefits from the point of view of the experts. In this situation the trade union does two things: firstly, it encourages its members, but also shop stewards from other trade unions, to recruit members for the trade union by offering them 50 Euro for each new member; and secondly, it joins forces with the other member unions of UTN, the umbrella association of AKAVA, to develop workplace campaigns.
Additionally, the trade union, like STTK PRO, organises webinars, sends information letters out to its members via e-mail and has set up webpages and social media accounts to address and inform employees. Apart from this, both trade unions have developed additional programmes for students, younger employees and foreigners. STTK PRO tries to be present at universities (mainly of applied sciences) to inform students about trade unions and collective bargaining agreements. Additionally, the trade union has implemented a new programme which is targeting younger employees and offers them a membership for a reduced fee. The campaign has proven to be rather successful in terms of new recruits.
We cast [the net for] younger employees, 36 or younger than that. They can join the union with a lower membership fee. You can get into PRO with 99 Euro, and after those couple of years, you start paying the normal 1.25 percent. This has been a very successful campaign for us. We have now like over 5,000 new members from the beginning of the year. (Workshop Finland)
AKAVA TEK, on the other hand, is present at the universities too and offers free membership for students.
Germany
Organising white-collar workers is regarded as a pressing problem in the two German trade unions. In the IG BCE, two full-time trade union secretaries have been installed who are responsible for representing the interests of white-collar workers at board level of the trade union, and at the time of the study, a further four positions were also being set up at the regional level to support and further expand activities in regions with high shares of white-collar workers. At IG Metall, on the other hand, the topic of white-collar workers is anchored as a task at board level in the ‘Employees, IT and Students’ department. Responsibilities for white-collar activities with different focal points in these fields also exist in the seven regional offices – the ‘Bezirke’ – as the organisational level below the executive board and above the local trade union offices.
Both unions – as industrial trade unions – have large membership figures, but their traditional organisational base is among blue-collar workers. Representing white-collar workers, on the other hand, requires a new culture of representation different from the way the trade unions have been accustomed to represent blue-collar workers.
Why do we organise blue-collar workers better than white-collar workers? Because we simply have cultural roots there. We have active shop stewards and our secretaries are predominantly recruited from these areas. (IG Metall Workshop)
A second condition for both IG BCE and IG Metall is that trade union activities for white-collar workers at the workplace have to be coordinated with and via the works councils. This is all the more important as unionised works councils have traditionally taken on the task of recruiting members for the trade unions. This is why the activation of works councils is a key objective for both trade unions. The aim is to bring the organisation and representation of white-collar workers – and the more, the higher qualified they are – into the focus of the works councils. Activation in this sense has two focal points. On the one hand, works councils have to identify issues and to develop access to this group of employees. And on the other hand, they should increase the proportion of highly qualified white-collar workers within their works council committees in order to be able to address white-collar workers in the company more successfully.
What can play a major role is whether you have someone, or ideally several people, in the works council who are white-collar workers themselves, who come from this group, who know the problems first-hand, who are socialised accordingly and so on and so forth. (IG BCE Workshop)
In both trade unions, the activation of works councils is seen as a comprehensive task which is heavily dependent on the priorities of the trade union support for the works councils organised on the local level.
The IG BCE’s ‘KAAT’ initiative is closely linked to the activation of works councils. The practical basis of the initiative is a new website and a newsletter, which, according to the experts, has a broad readership and produces a lot of feedback. The main aim of the initiative is to tackle the challenge of addressing employees in companies more systematically – and thus also to promote the activation of works councils. This is being done on the basis of training programmes offered by the union.
Over the course of three years, we have built up these training programmes by people who then take the topic to their companies first. There was a direct positive effect, because they then go out with events, they then publish our newsletters on their intranets. (IG BCE Workshop)
The initiative also focuses on providing information through thematic events on topics such as working times or pay structures, which are offered to white-collar workers in the companies and are usually very popular among employees.
At IG Metall, the focus of further activities is on the development of campaigns by the white-collar department at headquarters level, which in turn will filter down to the company level. A good example of this is the ‘Home Office Must Be Fair’ campaign, which was finalised some time ago. With this campaign, IG Metall took up a key issue relating to the working conditions of white-collar workers. Its centrepiece was an online survey on the topic that could be carried out in the companies.
Information about the survey was sent to the local trade union offices. Contact with the local trade union offices is therefore a key success factor for thematic campaigns. The survey generated a total of 30,000 data sets from respondents, which were then analysed by the white-collar department – another service – and fed back to the companies so that the works councils could work with the results.
A third focus of IG Metall is strategic organising. Organising takes place in the form of short-term projects carried out by trained organisers who go into companies, try to identify conflict issues and win over trade union activists and ultimately support these activists until – if successful – they have established new structures in the form of works councils, collective agreements or shop stewards. Although IG Metall has a board department for strategic organising, the specific projects are primarily developed and coordinated at the organisational level of the regions. Organising projects can relate to different focal points and employee groups; white-collar workers are an important topic among others and are at the centre of development work in individual districts such as Lower Saxony or Bavaria. The experts emphasise that strategic organising efforts go hand in hand with more successful membership recruitment where its focus is on white-collar workers.
In general, you can say that wherever organising takes place, more employees are organised . . . And where the focus is on white-collar workers, it is even clearer. (IG Metall Workshop)
According to the experts, the major challenge of such organising activities lies in their temporary nature, because for sustainable success it is crucial to create sustainable trade union structures and to achieve positive results – such as collective agreements – that show employees that union membership offers added value.
Both trade unions, finally, tend to be present at universities for career fairs or similar activities in order to inform students that they exist and what they do. The extent of this activity depends very much on the resources of the secretaries at the central level of the trade unions. However, the main bottleneck in the activities of both trade unions is resources at the level of the local trade union offices. Here the available funds have to be divided between many different activities and topics, such as supporting works councils or negotiating decentralised collective bargaining agreements for companies or establishments. The key question is therefore the priority given to white-collar organising and workplace activation within the organisation and compared to other activities. According to our findings, white-collar policy in both trade unions is still not consistently and comprehensively embedded as a central issue – and as an issue that will essentially determine the future viability of industrial trade unions.
France
In France, the repertoire of different practices is more restricted and used less systematically by the trade unions than in the other two countries. Both French trade unions rely strongly on workplace dialogue with white-collar workers. For the CGT, talking to people and organising meetings at the workplace is the core business in order to identify relevant topics and activities in a bottom-up manner.
We go through the various departments, we talk to the people and from this a picture of the problem emerges, and then we try to come up with solutions, but also together with them, not us in our trade union office. (Workshop France)
In line with this approach, visibility, professional expertise and closeness to the workers at the workplace are the key priorities of the strategy developed by the CFE-CGC. Professional expertise is an important element of the workplace approach, as the experts argue that the trade union can only convince employees if the trade unionists know about working conditions and topics relevant to white-collar workers and are able to give them qualified advice. Based on these three criteria the trade union has implemented a department on the level of the umbrella association whose purpose is to help those member organisations which lag behind in realising this approach.
In our union, we have written down that we cover these three areas: visibility, proximity and a professional approach. And we have then clearly noted where we have made progress and where we have taken steps backwards, categorised from zero to ten. (Workshop France)
However, the goal of organising white-collar workers is regarded as much less urgent by the French unions than by the unions in the two other countries. The reason is the role of the workplace elections in the French system of labour relations, the results of which are the core criteria for the representativeness of trade unions and for the financial support they get from the state. This is the reason why voting is more important than organising from the point of view of the French trade unions.
You can have thousands of supporters, but if these people don’t vote, then we have a problem, then we haven’t won anything. So, the goal is not to have a lot of supporters, but do these people vote, that’s the really important question. (Workshop France)
The workplace activities of the trade unions also include special programmes and information events for young employees. As the experts from both trade unions stress, ensuring the trade union delegates are qualified is a crucial precondition for imparting professional expertise in workplace dialogues with workers. This is why both trade unions have intensified their training activities for delegates.
Moreover, having well qualified, knowledgeable delegates is all the more important as the number of delegates working full-time at the workplace level has been reduced in the legal reforms of 2017, when the different workplace representations were combined. The bulk of trade union delegates work part-time for their trade unions, mandated by the companies and paid by them.
This law did not really help us, there are now far fewer union representatives who are employed full-time, which is a problem for trade union organisation. (Workshop France)
Analysis and discussion
The increase in the proportion of white-collar workers in manufacturing revealed in the analysis is the starting point for understanding trade union strategies to recruit white-collar workers. As our comparative analysis has shown, in Finland, France and Germany about or more than half of the workforce in this sector is composed of white-collar workers. White-collar workers are on the way to replace skilled blue-collar workers as a critical organisational power resource of trade unions in this sector. At the same time, they are different from blue-collar ones – they are more highly skilled, include more females, and have a decided view with regard to their working conditions in terms of the development and usage of skills or the meaningfulness of their work.
Our analysis has confirmed and refined the findings from the literature on the ambiguities of working conditions and the way they are perceived by white-collar workers, as there is much less satisfaction with career prospects or training opportunities, and a significant share of white-collar workers from all three countries report an increase in work intensity and problems reconciling work and private life. These similarities can be interpreted as an expression of the common trends of work organisation in companies mentioned in the literature like agility, offering more autonomy and demanding more flexibility and work intensity at the same time.
Similarities between the three countries under scrutiny are noticeable also in terms of attitudes towards trade unions. In all three countries surveyed, well over half of respondents agreed that trade unions were of high general relevance and, with slightly lower proportions, of high relevance to them personally. Additionally, expectations of trade union action are high in the traditional areas of interest representation like collective bargaining, safeguarding of jobs or support in case of individual grievances at the workplace. In all three countries, the general importance attributed to trade unions is the most important motivation to become a trade union member, combined with trade union support at the workplace, which connects the perception of general relevance with the personal relevance of trade unions.
However, despite these similarities in the way working conditions and trade unions are perceived by the white-collar workers in Finland, France and Germany, the organisational density of white-collar workers in the manufacturing sector is rather different, with the Finnish unions far ahead, followed by Germany and then France. This fact can be attributed to the institutional differences between the three countries: the organisation of unemployment funds by the trade unions in Finland as a major motive to organise, the traditional focus of German industry trade unions on blue-collar workers and the neglect of organising because of the importance of workplace elections in France.
These institutional differences also explain to a large extent the differences in the organising approaches of the trade unions observed in the three countries – apart from a stronger presence at universities in order to make them popular among students, which the trade unions in all three countries try to realise. Trade unions have all developed new initiatives to organise white-collar workers, however they do this under different institutional conditions and organisational structures. This in turn leads to the trade unions setting different priorities.
In Finland the priority is on workplace programmes to strengthen the activities of shop stewards to recruit new members among white-collar workers, either by giving support from the regional level or by strengthening the resources of shop stewards. The occupation-based trade unions in Finland can spend huge resources on this, given still high membership figures and the fact that they do not have to organise other groups of employees. Moreover, the widespread distribution of shop stewards among companies and workplaces is an important precondition to be able to reach most of the white-collar workers in this way.
In the case of the German trade unions in the manufacturing industry, the usage of resources for white-collar organising is much more disputed as here the blue-collar workers – still forming the majority of trade union members – have to be represented as well by the industry trade unions. At the same time, these workers are traditionally the focus of the trade union activities, which means that the unions have to develop new concepts and skills to address white-collar workers; the cultural heritage makes this change more difficult. Finally, trade unions have to cope with the works councils as the main institution of employee representation at the workplace. They cannot implement new strategies and practices directly, but have to attract, convince and support the works councils in doing so. Even trade union organising by organising departments has to be coordinated with works councils or is directed towards the setting up of works councils where they do not exist at the workplace. This is why many of the trade union activities are directed to create tools and support for works councils, and the activation of works councils is a central goal for the trade unions.
In France, finally, the trade unions have to cope with far fewer resources. More ambitious initiatives to organise white-collar employees by strengthening the resources of shop stewards or the implementation of organising departments would exceed the possibilities of the trade unions in terms of financial and personnel resources. At the same time, the French trade unions attach less urgency to this issue because they give priority to the workplace elections: being successful here is regarded as much more important for resources and opportunities than recruiting a larger number of members because public subsidies are distributed according to the results of the elections.
Conclusions
Comparing the experiences and practices of the trade unions in the three countries, three conclusions stand out. Firstly, organising white-collar workers has become a core issue for all the trade unions in the three countries. They have developed repertoires of initiatives to attract and organise white-collar employees. These approaches show clear similarities between the countries. The most striking among them is the approach to activate workplace representatives for organising. The activation of workplace representation is not only about organising white-collar workers, but also about ensuring that they can be retained, and activated, to work for the union. Additionally, the trade unions in all three countries have implemented organisational reforms to strengthen white-collar activities and to support workplace activation within their organisations.
Secondly, the trade unions in the three countries have different starting points for doing this in terms of structures and resources. Whereas in Finland the trade union STTK PRO was able to hire organisers and to implement a new type of shop steward responsible for contacting employees, in France the trade unions have to cope with a shrinking number of shop stewards. This points to the fact that the trade unions operate in different institutional environments with diverse arrangements for employee representation and trade union organisation. Occupational trade unions for white-collar employees like in Finland have the advantage that they can devote all their resources to representing white-collar staff and that they do not have to overcome cultural differences between the representation of blue- and white-collar workers like the German industrial trade unions. This does not mean, however, that occupational trade unions have necessarily been more successful in organising white-collar workers. By contrast, the French CFE-CGC, as an occupational trade union, has been much less successful in terms of building membership – apart from the fact that for French unions workplace elections are more important than membership figures and that the Finnish membership figures are driven by the access to unemployment benefits via the trade unions.
Thirdly, strategic organising by organising departments as the way of approach most discussed in sociological research is only practised at the German IG Metall and, therefore, is more the exception than the rule in the repertoire of organising initiatives developed by our sample of trade unions. Here, strategic organising has proven to be successful in certain cases, especially in companies with weak or absent works councils and a low trade union density – conditions that exclude the approach of workplace dialogue right from the start. As it tends to focus on specific problems only, strategic organising does not seem to be a general approach for white-collar organising.
This is why trade unions have developed different repertoires for different purposes, with the activation of workplace representatives at the core. However, as our evidence has shown, if this approach is taken seriously and applied consistently, it requires a strategic prioritisation of activities within the trade union organisations. This is a strategic choice most of the trade unions under scrutiny have not made yet.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The author received financial support for the research of this article by the European Union.
