Abstract
mHE literature dealing with industry-wide or multi-employer bargaining associates this bargaining with various characteristics of industries. Factors that have been emphasized as conditioning the form of collective bargaining which has evolved include relative labor costs, nature of the product market, extent of competition, number of firms, nature of production process, structure of the union, etc. Many writers stress the significance of relatively high labor costs as a factor influencing the adoption of that type of collective bargaining.' Relatively high labor costs (as measured by the relationship of wages and salaries to total sales or value added by manufacture) are cited as a factor impelling employers to agree to multi-employer bargaining in order to equalize their competitive cost situation. The recent availability of the I947 Census of Manufactures makes it possible to check the accuracy of this widely held assumption, as well as other economic characteristics of industries which practice multi-employer bargaining. These Census data can be applied to the industries which the U. S. Bureau of Labor Statistics has classified as bargaining through associations or by groups of employees.2 The present article proposes to relate relative wage costs in terms of value added by manufacture and value of product shipped to various types of multi-employer bargaining and to company-wide bargaining. Table i shows the experience in I947 for industries with multiemployer bargaining; and Table 2 shows the relationships for industries using company-wide bargaining. Do the industries with multi-employer bargaining have higher relative wage costs than those with company-wide bargaining or than the average for all manufacturing industries where such over-all data are available? The BLS tabulation of industries with multiemployer bargaining includes both manufacturing and nonmanufacturing industries. Census data, however, have not been made available for nonmanufacturing industries since I939. Hence, for those industries, I939 data had to be used. These industries were:
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