Sackgasse Mitgliedschaft ohne Tarif – zur Erosion des Tarifvertragssystems

OT membership allows companies to join an employers’ association without being bound by its collective agreements. What was originally introduced as a stopgap measure to retain members is increasingly becoming the norm. This development is not without consequences for collective bargaining coverage in the metal and electrical industry, where today less than half of employees are covered by a sector-wide collective agreement. Employers’ associations are thus increasingly manoeuvring themselves into a structural dilemma. For without their core function in collective bargaining policy, they lose their social raison d’être. The following article analyses the spread of OT memberships, their consequences for the collective bargaining system, and discusses possible ways out of this impasse.