Service Delivery Networks and Employment Relations at German Airports : Jeopardizing Industrial Peace on the Ground?

In this paper, we ask how organizational restructuring towards a network form of service delivery at airports challenges the established form of employment relations in Germany, i.e. labour-management collaboration. Building on a theoretical discussion of the marketization hypothesis, we develop a structuration perspective on the relationship between network restructuring and labour-management collaboration which highlights the political economy of inter-firm networks. Empirically, we focus on two major airport authorities in Germany. Our findings show how these authorities at the core of service delivery networks face a strategic trade-off between short-term labour cost reductions and more adversarial employment relations. Apart from coinciding with a deterioration in working conditions for service workers, the handling of this trade-off depends on managers' and worker representatives' commitment to collaboration across the network. While unions and works councils initially continued with social partnership-type practices, the more adversarial management practices for enacting the network restructuring cause a fragmentation on the workers' side and increase the conflict potential. We conclude that agency of management and worker representatives in the enactment of inter-firm networks mostly oscillates between more partnership-like and more conflictive practices, which turn the network restructuring into a political process with divergent outcomes for labour-management collaboration