Navigating Demands for Social Protection and Social Investment: Explaining Trade Union Positioning on Active Labour Market Policies in Germany.

To explain variation in the trajectories of social investment expansion, it is important to develop a better understanding of the political factors that promote and hamper such investments (Garritzmann et al., 2022). The main explanation for resistance to social investment expansion is based on the distributional struggle between societal groups that prioritise either social investment or social consumption, given the broader context of permanent austerity (Busemeyer & Neimanns, 2017; Häusermann et al., 2020; Neimanns et al., 2018). While trade unions are expected to be particularly sensitive to this trade-off (especially when insider-outsider dualization is prominent, cf. Rueda, 2006), unions are often found to be supports of active labour market policies (e.g. Bender, 2023). This raises the question to what extent the expected conflicts between social protection and investment objectives materialise and how this trade-off shapes the politics of social investment politics. To answer this question, this article provides an in-depth exploration of how trade unions navigate these potentially competing demands for social investment and social protection. Empirically, it focuses on the positioning of four major trade unions in Germany – a country characterised by strong dualization and ‘truncated’ expansion of social investment. Findings are based on qualitative analysis of trade union documents between 2004 and 2018 (including press releases, position papers, etc.), as well as interviews with key representatives. Apart from contributing to our understanding of the politics of social investment, this paper also contributes to industrial relations literature on internal conflicts within trade unions.