The struggle for a ‘unified labour law’. A brief history of the non-codification of labour law in Germany

German labour law is split across a large number of Acts which deal with specific aspects of the employment relationship or collective labour relations. Despite of number of initiatives to codify its labour law, Germany has not succeeded in adopting a labour code that organizes all statutory rules of labour law in a systematic way, as many other countries have. This article gives a brief overview of the various attempts to codify German labour law since the end of the 19th century, especially during the German Empire (1871–1918), the Weimar Republic (1918–1933), National Socialism (1933–1945), the German Democratic Republic (1949–1990) and the Federal Republic of Germany (since 1949), and tries to identify the main reasons why all these initiatives for a ‘unified labour law’ failed.