Union‐Type Effects on Bargaining Outcomes in Indian Manufacturing

Abstract

Earlier approaches to the study of unions in developing societies speculated about the eventual trajectories of the union movements in these countries (Dunlop, 1958; Kerr et al . 1960; Sturmthall, 1966). Specifically, researchers asked whether the labour relations system of the developing countries would converge to the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ model of collective bargaining and independent trade unionism as their national economies developed, or would they, as a result of specific institutional factors and unique historical circumstances, remain essentially a model of political unionism, with increasing state intervention in the determination of industrial relations outcomes (Galenson, 1959; Millen, 1963; Kilby, 1967). These macro-institutional approaches have been criticised by Bates (1970) for not being supported by the available historical evidence’, and by Kassalow (1978A), who pointed out that what researchers ,missed in the fifties and sixties was the rising strength of enterprise and/or plant-based unionism that emerged in many developing countries in the early seventies. These independent unions often arose as a result of the ineffectiveness of bureaucratic trade unionism. While industrial sociologists studied individual worker responses to different types of unionism (see for example, Form, 1973) and institutional labour economists estimated union wage effects (see for example, House and Rempel, 1976), no study, as far as the author is aware, directly tested for union-type effects on bargaining outcomes in LDC labour markets. A recent exception is Ian Roxborough’s (1984) pioneering study of union-types in the Mexican automobile industry. Dichotomising unions in the industry into ‘official’ unions (those tied to dominant political parties) and ‘independent’ unions (largely formed in the 1970s as breakaway movements from the official union federations), Roxborough explicitly hypothesises, for various reasons, that the independent unions will secure higher wage increases and fringe benefits than the official unions.*