Solidarity with Whom? Trade Unions and the Modernization of Pension Policies in Conservative Welfare States’, Paper presented at ESPAnet young researchers workshop 2005

This article examines the role of organized labor in the “modernization ” of Swiss and German pension policy. Recent reforms in this field comprise both retrenchment of existing levels of benefits and extension of coverage to post-industrial social needs (e.g. pension credits for education or the coverage of atypical employment biographies). It has been argued in the literature that such combinations of cuts and extended coverage create potentials for legitimate “modernizing compromises”, which gain the approval of most political actors. The article shows, however, that these reform packages are particularly ambivalent for trade unions, on the one hand because they imply a second conflict-dimension beside the distributional class conflict, namely a value conflict over modernization vs. conservatism, and on the other hand because they require solidarity with post-industrial risk groups who do not belong to the traditional trade union clientele. Hence, intra-labor heterogeneity increases as well as the distance between the labor movement and the left parties (Social Democrats and Green parties), which tends to marginalize organized labor as an actor of pension policy development in these countries. The empirical data includes actors ’ positions on three major pension reforms in each country between 1982 and 2003. The hypotheses on a new conflict-dimension and on increasing heterogeneity of the left are tested by means of factor analysis and qualitative data derived from documentary analysis and interviews