You mention the difficulty of “moving on”. This is where the issue gets skewed in Germany. A U.S. employee who is highly skilled and in the IT sector is also probably willing to relocate and make certain changes when changing jobs. How many people do I know who’ve simply up and moved from Austin to San Francisco or from Orlando to Chicago, etc…….many! Although this is generalization at it’s finest, most highly-skilled and educated Germans I know simply aren’t as flexible as their US counterparts (although I don’t criticize this….it has certain benefits which differentiate the highly skilled educated worker from his counterpart in the US—that’s another issue). This in turn makes it significantly more difficult to find a new job if you are looking for one. Ask your friends who’ve been out of work for three years whether they’ve considered relocating. I’d be curious to find out how many were willing to pick up and move from Hamburg to Munich or from Berlin to Karlsruhe, or even from Germany to the UK or from Germany to Eastern Europe, and on and on. I believe in debating this issue (I’m effected by it directly) but we can’t compare apples and oranges, and that is somewhat the case when comparing highly educated skilled workforces and their job opportunities in Germany vs. the U.S. Hence, arguing that it is more difficult in Germany than in the U.S. to “move one” really doesn’t carry much weight when considering a works council in my opinion.

Cheers,
Paul

To Zoli’s comment. On a more general point the term free market is pretty overused. The recent radical overhaul of the US compliance model via SOX is an indicator that “letting management do their job” has its limits. In the same way that well run companies dont need the SOX oversight, SAP doesnt really need a betriebsrat .

SAP was voted employer of the year in Germany, so things are in pretty good shape.

At SAP we have had a more informal model, and 90% of the employees felt this was fine. However, the German constitution enshrines the right to a formal Works council.

the union (in this case the metalworkers union????go figure) has been pushing to have this formal structure. It is very unlikely though that they will have any significant influence on the works council or SAP.

I’ve written a bit more on this “German” thing my blog.

One side you might be taking is employees voted against unions because they feared SAP might take away free lunches (in the true sense of the meaning) once the work council decided to press the company for anything they might be entitled to by law.

The other side is while SAP employees are well cared for, that might change any day. In that case, having a work council means employees are in a far better position. A kind of extra insurance for bad times.

Unions don’t have anything to do with that directly – of course they’d like to get in to recruit members (you have to pay them 1% of your gross salary), but you can have (and I think SAP should!) a work council without any union involvement. In the building phase, the employees pushing the work council like to rely on the unions knowledge of the law, this is why they’re mentioned at all.

The german law is very clear on the issue – it doesn’t say you may have elections to form a work council, they say you have to have elections every four years. This is a strange law in many ways – because of it, companys are careful to hire new employees. As a result of that, it’s desirable to have a work council to get a bit more job security. Catch 22.

This is different in the US – due to the lack of such laws, it’s a lot easier to get a new job once a company gives you the pink slip.

Again – lots of aspects to that debate, right now I’m not sure I have an opinion if this will be good or bad for SAP. But as it’s inevitable (so it seems), let’s make sure employees embracing the “SAP culture” will form the work council.