The paper constructs a time-series model of trade union growth and decline in the Federal Republic of Germany (1955–1984) by testing and combining ten economic and socio-political hypotheses prevalent in the German and international trade union literature. It employs wages, prices, unemployment, strikes, and the proportion of foreigners in the workforce as explanatory variables. The model proves to be satisfactory when judged in terms of usual statistical criteria such as overall goodness of fit and signs, magnitudes, and significance of the estimated regression coefficients as well as in terms of its structural stability, data sensitivity, and predictive ability.
The author should like to thank Professors C. Folkers, W. Franz, and M. Gärtner, members of the labour economics workshop at the University of Kent at Canterbury, and an anonymous referee for helpful comments on a previous draft of this paper. The usual disclaimer applies.