Bargaining Unit Research Articles

New NLRB rules on collective bargaining units in the health care industry

(1989). New NLRB rules on collective bargaining units in the health care industry. Journal of Legal Medicine: Vol. 10, No. 4, pp. 738-754.

Bargaining Effect and Membership Effect in Public Sector Unions

The vast majority of the literature on public sector unionism focuses on union wage effects and the extent of unionization. In this paper we investigate some additional aspects of public sector unionism that have been discussed recently with respect to the private sector. The first is an analysis of the wage effects attributable to the legal status of the worker/union. Specifically, we investigate the difference between an individual's membership in a union and an individual's employment in a collective bargaining unit. Second, we examine the return to human capital and seniority in unionized versus non-unionized public sector employment. The two issues under scrutiny here are not unrelated for each measures in its own way the ability of the union to deliver benefits to, and elicit the support of, its membership. In other words, both are issues of union security. For the most part, the literature on union wage effects makes no distinction between union membership and collective bargaining coverage. As an exception, Christensen and Maki use a cross-section of three-digit industries to investigate both an industry coverage variable and an industry membership variable [3]. They conclude that membership in the union is the key status in the collective bargaining process. In two other papers, Jones [15] and Blakemore, Hunt and Kiker, [1] use panel data that allow the worker's union status to be identified according to union membership and collective bargaining coverage. Both find that nonunion workers employed in a collective bargaining unit receive a wage premium over workers who are not covered, and that union members receive an extra bonus.

Commentary on "Multiemployer Bargaining Rules": Searching for the Right Questions

ONE way of investigating a topic is to look at it in the light of insights gained elsewhere. This is what Professor Douglas Leslie recommends in his very interesting article. He takes a number of ideas that have been developed within the law and economics movement and juxtaposes them with the legal rules governing multiemployer bargaining, specifically with rules applying to withdrawal from multiemployer bargaining units. The outcome of the enterprise is the suggestion of a series of questions having to do with various issues, including the competing explanations of the parties' incentives to adopt multiemployer bargaining (such as cartelization versus premium theory versus relative wage theory); the possible sources of transactions costs in collective bargaining (such as batch theory and framing device theory); and the criteria of choice between precise and multifactored rules. Although conceding that the questions he has raised are devilishly difficult, Leslie concludes by expressing confidence that these are the Although I am in no position to be anything other than agnostic to such an economic analysis, I am inclined to hope that these are not the appropriate questions, or at least not the only questions. Leslie's questions can be answered, if at all, only by extensive study of unions and employers engaged in their customary pursuits. Thus, as they stand, the questions are not very useful to lawyers, governmental agencies, and judges in the ongoing process of fitting doctrine to litigated disputes. Moreover, I do not believe that we have a kennel full of social scientists baying to be set on the trail of these questions. I therefore do not think there is much prospect of usable answers to these questions emerging anytime soon. A second way to proceed with some subject of interest is to begin by making explicit what we think we know and then to ask where our account seems inadequate or in need of support. In this Commentary, I will briefly attempt this type of investigation and suggest an approach to multiemployer bargaining that contrasts with that by Leslie. I do not mean to imply that what I say will be uncontroversial or universally accepted. I believe, however, that it will come within a familiar range of discourse and thus be readily digestible in the continuing professional dialogue on multiemployer

Women and Clerical Work: Revisiting Class and Gender

Iremember an incident during the Federal Clerks' strike of 1980 which epitomizes the subordination of women clerks at the workplace and within their unions. A demonstration had been organized to coincide with the end of the first week of the strike. As the Federal government is the largest single employer of women, and the clerical and regulatory group is the largest bargaining unit in the country-fifty thousand strong-not unexpectedly, the demonstration turned out to be the largest ever held by Ottawa workers. It was one of those glorious moments, during a period of pain and worry, when one felt that the struggle was truly worth it no matter what might happen down the road.

Collective Bargaining and Public Sector Supervisors: A Trend toward Exclusion?

Requiring public employers to bargain collectively is one of the most far reaching developments in public personnel management in this century. Public employees in 40 states, the District of Columbia, the federal government, and the Virgin Islands have the right to bargain collectively under the protection of various federal, state, and local statutes. Additional legislation is found in selected cities, counties, special districts, and other jurisdictions. The development and institutionalization of collective bargaining in government have generated new responsibilities and challenges for public administrators. In political subdivisions where the work force is unionized, virtually every aspect of personnel systems and associated administrative procedures is affected by this process. The result frequently depends on legislative provisions which establish the regulatory framework for bargaining. After nearly 30 years of public sector labor relations, the question of collective bargaining rights for public sector supervisors (PSS) remains unresolved. Some argue that PSS do not exercise responsibilities associated with managerial or supervisory status, are powerless as supervisors, and, as such, should be afforded the same bargaining rights as nonsupervisory employees. Others argue for complete exclusion, asserting that if public management is to be strengthened, a clearly defined cadre of supervisors who are managers is needed. They claim that unionized PSS are unable to meet their conflicting roles as rank-and-file employees and as members of management, thus leading to divided loyalties and a potential conflict of interest. An accommodation position suggests that PSS should neither be excluded from collective bargaining nor included in bargaining units with rank-and-file employees but should instead be placed in autonomous supervisory bargaining units.

Correlates of Union Support in NLRB Elections

Bargaining unit, union, industry, and geographic correlates of union support in NLRB certification and decertification elections for the period 1977 to 1979 are analyzed using similar regression specifications. Several relationships are found to be significant; however, an examination of the magnitude of the estimated coefficients suggests only unit size and union organizing effort affect outcomes in more than a small percentage of all certification elections.

Faculty Unionization and Salary Differentials in Ontario Universities

This paper explores the impact of unionization on salary differentials among Ontario universities by comparing the trends in average salaries between those institutions which have certified bargaining units and those which do not. The principal time period considered is from 1975, when the first Ontario university became certified, to 1983, three years after the most recent faculty association to become certified did so. The age-adjusted average salary increase for the unionized institutions was found to be only about two per cent greater than for the nonunionized group. As well, other data presented led to the conclusion that unionization has not had a significant impact upon relative salary structures in Ontario universities. This conclusion is qualified by noting that certification may not be an effective indicator of unionization, that the presence of unions in some universities may have influenced the salary behaviour of the nonunionized institutions, and that the potential influence of faculty unions was constrained by wage controls and funding limits during the period under investigation.

Union Membership and Attitudes Toward Participation in Determining Conditions of Work in the Federal Government

Data from five federal installations are examined in order to determine the relationship between union membership and (1) perceived influence over the determination of working conditions, and (2) satisfaction with participation in determining work conditions in this sector. Union members, compared with nonmember bargaining unit employees, show lowerperceivedparticipation in determining their annual performance standards and less satisfaction with their influence in creating these standards. Lower satisfaction with influence persists even when perceived amount of influence is controlled, supporting the argument that union members in the federal government seek more influence in determining their conditions of work than nonmembers. These results are not indicative of job dissatisfaction or of distrust between labor and management. Rather, they appear to reflect a positive desire among union members for more influence in the agency.

Indexation and Incomes Policy: A Study of Wage Adjustment in Unionized Manufacturing

Data from nearly 200 collective bargaining units are used to study the frequency of wage change from 1957 to 1978. It is shown that incomes policies during the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations encouraged changes in the length of time between wage adjustments. Inflation, often thought to be responsible for fluctuations in the coverage of indexing provisions, is found to play virtually no role. The conclusion is that government intervention in the wageprice process aroused fears that the government will intervene again in the future. In the presence of this uncertainty, the wage adjustment provisions of collective bargaining contracts were changed.

An ordered choice model of promotion rules

This paper continues an important but short line of research investigating non-pecuniary outcomes of collective bargaining. These outcomes define the rules governing the employment relationship. The determinants of one of the most important of these rules — the one that governs the intrafirm allocation of labor — are analyzed. Specifically, micro-level data are used to estimate the determinants of promotion rules in major collective bargaining agreements in U.S. manufacturing. A multinomial choice model is estimated once these rules have been ordered along the joint dimension of increasing weight attached to seniority across a broadening seniority unit. The evidence suggests that contracts involving small, capital-intensive firms, whose technologies value specific training, in single-employer bargaining units, that contain an increasing proportion of men, are most likely to exhibit promotion rules that heavily weight company-wide seniority.

Learning by Striking: Estimates of the Teetotaler Effect

We hypothesize that past strike experience will have a negative or "teetotaler" effect on a collective bargaining unit's propensity to strike in future negotiations, other things being equal. We test this using a unique micro-level sample comprising four consecutive negotiations by 147 bargaining units in U.S. manufacturing industries, controlling for observable and unobservable differences among bargaining pairs in the propensity to strike. Our results are consistent with the view that the experience of striking is, indeed, sobering: lagged strike experience variables have a significantly negative effect on the propensity to strike in the current negotiation.

Determinants of the decertification process: Evidence from employer-initiated elections

There have been relatively few studies on why workers choose to decertify a union as their bargaining unit and virtually no empirical studies on the outcomes of employer-initiated representation elections. Using data from the NLRB monthly election reports (1977–1981), we attempt to analyze the factors that seem to influence the outcomes of employer-initiated representation elections with an incumbent union. Variables in our analysis include size of the election unit, region, industrial classification, type of incumbent union, and the state of the local economy. While the data show a concentration of elections on the West Coast, there is no significant difference in the ability of unions there to “win” decertification elections.

The Equilibrium Distribution of Wage Settlements and Economic Stability

Several authors recently have attempted to extend the Fischer contract model by allowing agents to endogenize the contract pattern (see e.g., Gray [1978] and Blanchard [1979]). Aside from the early literature on the pattern bargaining (Ross [1948], Rees and Hamilton [1963], and McGuire and Rapping [1968]), however, the only literature that endogenizes the pattern of negotiation is Fethke and Policano [1982], [1984]. Adopting a game theoretic framework in which each sector selects the contract length and the timing of its negotiation date so as to minimize the expected resource cost of contracting, they investigate the determinants and aggregate implications of alternative negotiation patterns in a twosector model with relative and aggregate disturbances. In this paper, contract length is assumed to be fixed and indexing provisions are ignored. Our attention is concentrated on the determinants of the timing of bargaining and the macroeconomic consequences of the resulting year-to-year distributions of wage settlements. These questions will be analyzed in a game theoretic framework where bargaining units choose the timing of bargaining and the authority chooses the money supply rules. Suppose that the distribution of wage settlements is uniform and that the monetary authority chooses optimum monetary policy such as that given by Fischer [1977]. Then the behaviors of the price level, output, and the real wage are symmetric between odd and even periods, and hence bargaining units are indifferent to the timing of bargaining. At the same time the authority minimizes the loss function given the distribution of wage settlements. Consequently, no player has an incentive to change his current strategy and the economy is in Nash equilibrium. In effect Fischer [1977] examines the properties of this equilibrium without providing a game theoretic treatment of the problem. We require answers to three questions: 1) is uniform distribution the only equilibrium of this labor contract economy; 2) if not, what is the optimal pattern of negotiation from the

Imperfect Information and Strikes: An Analysis of Canadian Experience, 1967–82

To test their hypothesis that the propensity to strike is affected less by the actual balance of bargaining power than by the parties' uncertainty about their relative power, the authors perform a probit analysis of data on 1,871 collective agreements negotiated in the Canadian manufacturing sector between 1967 and 1982. They find, consistent with their hypothesis, that some characteristics of individual bargaining units, the relevant industries, and the economy as a whole that affect both the quantity and reliability of information needed to assess relative bargaining power do have significant value in predicting strike incidence across industries and over time.

Collective Bargaining and Union Membership Effects on the Wages of Male Youths

The objective of this paper is to demonstrate that the nonunion wage differential consists of two effects. The first represents the differential between the wage of a nonunion worker in a collective bargaining unit and the wage paid to a comparable worker not covered by a bargaining agreement. This effect arises from the monopoly power of organized labor. The second is the wage differential between union and nonunion workers in collective bargaining units. This latter effect is attributed to economic benefits that unionism brings to its members. Empirical evidence is presented in support of both effects.

Appropriate bargaining units for state employees: Potential impacts for labor relations and public administration

This article reviews the literature and empirically examines the long-held assumption that occupational bargaining units for state employees are more appropriate and more in the public interest than are departmental units. The payroll records of Michigan state employees were analyzed on six demographic and organizational variables to test five hypotheses concerning the greater appropriateness of departmental units. Four of the five hypotheses supported the greater appropriateness of departmental units. In addition, because the mean highest job level in departmental units was significantly greater than in occupational units, career mobility and affirmative action programs for employees within occupations were more severely limited.

The Effects of Union Membership of Felt Influence Over Working Conditions in the Federal Government.

Data from five federal installations are examined in order to determine some of the effects of union membership in the public sector. Union members, compared with non-member bargaining unit employe...

Labor Bargaining Units

Labor Bargaining Units

Joint Union-Management Committees

The operation and effectiveness of joint union-management committees in six federal government facilities were examined over a four-year period. Hypotheses derived from previous cross-sectional studies and reviews of the literature relating organizational and bargaining unit variables, labor relations variables, and committee variables to committee effectiveness were tested longitudinally. While much of the prior work in the area was supported by the results, committee effectiveness were tested longitudinally. While much of the prior work in the area was supported by the results, committee effectiveness appeared to be most closely related to the labor relations variables, particularly the labor relations climate.

Establishing Bargaining Units in Agricultural Marketing

Establishing Bargaining Units in Agricultural Marketing