Der Betriebsrat — The Works Council

What the Betriebsrat is, and what it is not

The works council is one of the genuinely distinctive features of German working life and it is easy to misunderstand in two directions at once, so it is worth being precise. It is not a union. Die Gewerkschaft is an outside organization you join and pay dues to, and it negotiates the Tarifvertrag that sets pay across a whole industry — the subject of lesson 58. Der Betriebsrat is internal: it is elected by the people who work in one establishment, from among themselves, and it represents them to their own employer. The two cooperate and their memberships overlap, but they are separate institutions with separate powers, and the council has no role in setting pay. Confusing them will make a conversation about either of them go strange. Nor is it something management grants. Any establishment with at least five permanent employees old enough to vote may form one, elections are held every four years, and the employer is obliged to bear the cost and may not obstruct the process. Whether one exists in practice varies enormously: large industrial employers and the public sector almost always have one, small firms and much of the tech and startup sector often do not, and the absence is sometimes a deliberate management preference. Asking whether there is a Betriebsrat is a normal question to ask in an interview and tells you something real about the place. What it actually does, in descending order of how often it matters to you: it co-determines working hours, shift patterns, overtime, holiday scheduling and how performance is monitored, which is why anything involving surveillance software is a council matter; it must be heard before any dismissal, and the best-known provision of the Act makes a dismissal void if the council was not heard at all, which is a procedural protection quite separate from whether the dismissal was otherwise justified; it can negotiate a Betriebsvereinbarung, a works agreement, which binds the employer across the whole establishment; and it holds a Betriebsversammlung, a staff assembly, once per calendar quarter, during working time and with pay. From around two hundred employees upward at least one member is released from their normal job entirely to do the work. A practical word for someone in Alex's position. Council membership is unpaid — members are released from work rather than compensated, and are legally protected against dismissal and against disadvantage for serving. That protection exists because the job involves telling your own employer no. If you have a problem with your manager that you cannot settle, the council is the body designed for exactly that, and going to it is not an escalation against your employer so much as a use of the machinery your employer is obliged to maintain. The Betriebsrätin's closing line is the honest advice, though: the council is much more effective when consulted early about a pattern than when handed a grievance after the fact.