Power Resources and Immigration Policy Regimes in Germany and Sweden after World War II

This paper proposes a combination of power-resource and institutional approaches to understand why certain countries have relied extensively on foreign labour to expand their output in the postwar period, while others have relied on strategies to improve productivity or bring in more women onto the workforce. Labour power and the structure of the welfare state are presented as central variables to explain why Germany (and other Bismarckian systems) have made extensive use of guestworkers in the postwar period, while guest-worker programmes have been comparatively short-lived and small in Scandinavia. In Sweden, strong unions and and the encompassing system of welfare protection and collective bargaining made it difficult for Swedish employers to take advantage of different reservation wages between natives and migrant workers. In Germany, by contrast the more fragmented nature of welfare and collective bargaining left regulation gaps which made it possible to exploit these differentials. Besides, in Germany the import of migrant men was considered preferable to the entry of native women which could challenge the gender roles enshrined in the Bismarckian system. It is argued that the attempt of German unions to keep migrants out of the welfare system had the paradoxical effect of making them more attractive for employers, paving the way for the creation of a large secondary lanour market.