IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/zbw/espost/235249.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The Rise of Faith-Based Welfare Providers in Germany and Its Consequences

Author

Listed:
  • Hien, Josef
  • Kneip, Sascha

Abstract

Since the 1970s welfare organisations operated by the churches in Germany have evolved into the country’s largest employers. While church affiliation and attendance dropped sharply, the churches grew as employers. Caritas and Diakonie, the two largest faith-based welfare providers, enjoy a special status as ecclesiastical employers. They can dismiss employees that do not live in congruence with their worldview such as homosexuals, those who have re-married or those who exit the church. Moreover their employees are exempted from the right to strike. The following is the first study that offers a comprehensive analysis of the phenomenal rise of faith-based welfare providers in Germany and the consequences of their special status for employees. The encompassing analysis of labour-law conflicts in German courts between ecclesiastical employers and their employees shows that the contentiousness of those controversies has increased over time. We explain this with the changed composition in the workforce of Caritas and Diakonie which has, in contrast to former times, today much less connection to the values of the church. Moreover, our analysis of legal cases shows that Caritas and Diakonie so far have been able to successfully defend their special status in front of German courts.

Suggested Citation

  • Hien, Josef & Kneip, Sascha, 2020. "The Rise of Faith-Based Welfare Providers in Germany and Its Consequences," EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, vol. 29(2), pages 244-261.
  • Handle: RePEc:zbw:espost:235249
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/235249/1/Full-text-article-Hien-et-al-The-rise-of.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Patrick Emmenegger & Philip Manow, 2014. "Religion and the Gender Vote Gap," Politics & Society, , vol. 42(2), pages 166-193, June.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Donato Di Carlo & Christian Lyhne Ibsen & Oscar Molina, 2024. "The new political economy of public sector wage-setting in Europe: Introduction to the special issue," European Journal of Industrial Relations, , vol. 30(1), pages 5-30, March.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Brice William David & Chu Edward & Jones Wayne, 2016. "Culture-Laden Imports: International Market Entry and Cultural Taboos," International Journal of Management and Economics, Warsaw School of Economics, Collegium of World Economy, vol. 50(1), pages 49-62, June.
    2. Beckmann, Paul & Fulda, Barbara & Kohl, Sebastian, 2020. "Housing and voting in Germany: Multi-level evidence for the association between house prices and housing tenure and party outcomes, 1980-2017," MPIfG Discussion Paper 20/6, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies.
    3. Carol Galais & André Blais, 2019. "Is There a Gender Gap in the Sense of Duty to Vote?," Societies, MDPI, vol. 9(4), pages 1-15, November.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:zbw:espost:235249. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/zbwkide.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.