Symposium: Overseas Perspectives on the Future of German Employment Relations

In 1995, Industrielle Beziehungen published a special issue on the ‘Future of the German Model’. It was based on a symposium sponsored by the Anglo-German Foundation, and involved a dialogue between academic researchers from Germany, Britain, the US and France and officials from trade unions and employer organisations from Germany and the UK. At that time, the ‘German Model ’ was still held up as an example of what some American scholars refer to as the ‘high road ’ of employment relations and la-bour management practices. The German experience had been especially influential on the thinking of the Dunlop Commission set up by the Clinton administration to propose reforms to US employment relations. Some Japanese scholars and policy analysts were also interested in the German model of occupational skills as a possible way of sustaining workers ’ economic status while at the same time enabling companies to limit the commitment to long-term employment.1 Since those heady days, interest in the recipes to be learned from the German model by foreigners has waned. The economic strains of re-unification and the mod-est economic growth of the German economy, especially when compared to the dy