The Protestant and Roman Catholic Churches greeted the ruling as an endorsement of their system of resolving wage disputes through mediation, while the union said it confirmed church workers had the right to industrial action.
German media
reflected the split on Wednesday.
"Church can ban strikes," read the
headline in the conservative daily Die Welt. "Church workers can strike," wrote the liberal Sueddeutsche Zeitung.
The two churches, with a combined total of about 1.3 million staff in schools, hospitals and social services, are effectively the largest employer in Germany after the public sector.
The German
constitution guarantees them freedom to manage their internal affairs,
which they have used to bar strikes in their ranks and favor mediation
of wage disputes, a method they say is more compatible with Christian
teaching.
"There cannot be
strikes against carrying out the mission of our Lord," Peter Neher, head
of the Catholic charity organization Caritas, told German radio.
STILL NOT FINALLY DECIDED
The service sector
union Ver.di, Germany's second largest, accuses the churches of
undercutting employees' wages by outsourcing many services in recent
years to save money.
It brought cases
against Protestant social services for forbidding strikes in 2009 and
two lower courts involved came to opposite conclusions.
That brought the
issue on appeal to the Federal Labour Court in Erfurt but did not
resolve it.
"Limiting the churches' right to self-determination by a strike is not illegal in all cases," the court decision said.
At the same time,
it said that strikes "severely limit social ministries and damage the
credibility of the church."
It advised the churches to allow the unions
more rights in the mediation process or risk strikes.
The churches'
networks of social services have become so large and complex that Pope
Benedict warned Catholic service workers last year against treating
their jobs as if they were in any other bureaucracy rather than part of
the Church's mission.
His call to avoid
what he called "worldliness", issued at the end of a visit to his
homeland, left German Catholic leaders asking whether he meant they
should pull out of social services.
They concluded he was not arguing
for such a radical step.