Abstract:
The protestant and catholic churches in Germany and their welfare organizations Diakonie and Caritas employ over one million persons. The working conditions and salaries of this staff however, are not regulated through collective agreements between trade unions and church employers but are resolved in specific church¬related boards, so called "Arbeitsrechtliche Kommissionen".
The purpose of this paper is, to empirically clarify the base factor of this special type of labour relations system, i.e. the status and the development of the churches' labour force itself. The development of the labour force in the church sector is analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively on a time series from 1920 to today. Research of this kind is being presented for the first time. The background questions of the analysis are: Does the special church labour relations system remain stable? Will change take place? And if so, into which directions?