Project: Professional associations and trade unions in the Federal Republic of Germany

The project is funded by the Hans Böckler Foundation and ran from September 2009 to December 2010.

The aim of the project is to quantitatively record and investigate associations that represent the interests of working people.

To date, there is no comprehensive list of all organizations that represent the interests of working people in Germany. There are individual compilations that list organizations that represent the interests of working people in the context of the world of work. These include: the Oeckl, the lobby list of the German Bundestag, the Hoppenstedt and the online portal Verbändeforum. All of these collections also include interest organizations of working people in the broadest sense; however, none of these lists claim to be exhaustive. A realistic picture of the landscape can neither be determined on the basis of one of the lists, nor on the basis of a mere combination of all the collections listed into an overall compilation.
In addition to the lack of a cartographic record and representation of the overall landscape, there is currently a lack of in-depth knowledge about the state and nature of the organizational landscape. A subdivision of the landscape into individual groups is not clearly possible on the basis of the definitions and conceptual attributions offered, so that it would not be possible to assign the individual employee associations that can be identified in the above-mentioned lists to superordinate organizational types. However, in order to be able to formulate statements about trends, dynamics and processes of change in the overall landscape, a prior categorization of associations into groups - in the sense of an assignment to individual organization types - seems absolutely necessary.

The quantitative study aims to survey the employee association landscape. The aim is to determine how many associations in Germany represent employee interests and how the number of associations, the objectives of association work and the resources of the individual associations (number of members, means/ways of public relations work) have changed over time. The aim is to fully record the publicly visible employee associations in order to create a map of the overall landscape that provides an overview of all collective employee organizations in Germany.
Based on this map of associations, a typology of the associations shown here will then be drawn up. The associations will be assigned to superordinate organization types based on their respective characteristics, key features, objectives and tasks, so that a typology of all associations that currently represent the interests of working people in Germany can be developed and presented.

Supplementary project to the original project