Abstract
Today, industrial relations in the United States and Germany operate along strikingly divergent patterns, but in the early postwar years they had much in common. Indeed, the United States emulated Germany. That might seem an exceedingly strange proposition, because Germany was just emerging from utter destruction and the United States and Britain were occupying powers in the late 1940s. Moreover, the American economy then seemed a productive wonder, a model for others to follow. Within that economic colossus was a powerful trade union movement whose membership had risen fivefold in just fifteen years. Nevertheless, the de facto corporatism that characterized industrial relations in some key US industries during the 1940s and 1950s contained many similarities to the regime which German unionists, employers, and politicians were seeking to construct, or reconstruct, in the early postwar era. But within two decades, German and American unionists took quite different paths. In the 1950s and 1960s when Walter Reuther’s United Automobile Workers sought to persuade German unionists of the virtues inherent in American-style collective bargaining, the Germans soundly rejected the gambit because it would have subverted the sectoral bargaining model they advanced and the social market economy they sought to preserve.
