Foreign Workers and Workforce Management in West Germany

The present situation of foreign workers in West Germany can only be adequately understood if one takes explicit discrimination in job allocation into account. Foreigners are kept longer than Germans in stressful entry-level jobs and are blocked in their advancement to better positions. As part of the secondary labour market of big industrial firms, they do not only serve as a reservoir of flexibility in transfers; they are also more likely to lose their jobs in a period of redundancies. The thesis is put forward that contrary to many expectations about the rational behaviour of single capital units management discriminates against foreign workers in order to gain the compliance of the majority workforce and to achieve social peace in the plants. Selective personnel policies only work as smoothly as they do because there is also a selective representation of labour interests, which put Germans first and foreigners second. Although successful in sheltering the German core workforce against the threat of job losses to some extent, this selective representation of interests may in the long run imply the danger of an ethnic polarization within the labour movement.