Collective Bargaining Benefits Research Articles

COST-BENEFIT ANALYSIS OF UNION MEMBERSHIP WITHOUT COLLECTIVE BARGAINING BENEFITS

Traditional unions rely on collective bargaining benefits to attract workers to the union. A key ingredient of collective bargaining benefits is union wage premium which will force employers to retrench some workers. A macro-focused union differs from traditional union or micro-focused union in two ways. First, a macro-focused union will work together with the government and management to raise productivity and therefore shift the demand for labor curve upward. Second, the macro-focused union will want to maximize employment and therefore aim at competitive wage level for not only its members but non-union members too. Consequently, this may create a huge free ridership problem as workers may refuse to pay the member fee but still enjoy the club benefits. This paper focuses on a situation where a macro-focused labor union offers non-collective bargaining benefits through offering discount to a subset of consumption goods. However, individual workers’ preference is not publicly observed. The union leader may pay a certain survey fee to find out. Therefore, in the equilibrium, the union leader needs to weigh the benefits of larger union size against the costs of survey fee. Similarly, on the workers’ side, the tradeoff is the union member fee together with some psychology cost of being a union member against a discount on his favorable consumption goods. We develop a mathematical framework that incorporates all these elements above. We show both theoretically and quantitatively what determines the equilibrium union size and union leader’s survey decisions. Moreover, we also examine at the aggregate level, how the union workers’ and union leader’s welfare levels may respond to certain changes in economic fundamentals, such as preference shift and changes in survey fee, etc.

In Praise of Collective Bargaining: The Enduring Significance of Hugh Clegg’s Trade Unionism under Collective Bargaining

Hugh Clegg’s Trade Unionism under Collective Bargaining was published nearly forty years ago. It is far from being just a work of antiquarian interest, however. Its core argument, that the main influence on trade-union behaviour is the structure of collective bargaining, which depends on the role of employers and their organizations, remains as challenging as it ever was. Its approach, comparative and historical, is a watershed in the theoretical development of industrial relations, paving the way for an emphasis on theory ‘in’ rather than theory ‘of’. It also implicitly raises two questions of enduring significance. The first is the wider contribution of collective bargaining and what its decline means not just for trade-union members but also society as a whole. The other is the conditions necessary for the survival of collective bargaining. The policy implication is that, if society wants to have the benefits of collective bargaining, there will be a need for legislation to boost collective bargaining’...

Collective Bargaining by Business: Economic and Legal Implications

It is sometimes mutually beneficial for businesses to join together through a cooperative or other organisational structure in order to pool their ability to buy or sell goods and services. Collective bargaining is a particular form of cooperation between businesses that is limited to either buying or selling particular products. Collective agreements between competitors are often illegal under competition laws. However, in some jurisdictions, such as Australia and the European Union, collective bargaining can be exempt from those laws. The test for exemption in these jurisdictions involves analysing the costs and benefits of exemption. This article analyses both the costs and benefits of collective bargaining by businesses. The aims of this article are threefold: (1) to develop a simple economic framework to analyse the costs and benefits of negotiations between a collective bargaining group on one side of a market and either a supplier or a customer on the other side of the market; (2) to compare the results from this framework with the approach adopted by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) in recent collective bargaining decisions; and (3) to highlight areas of potential concern where the ACCC could focus its attention.

Supportive Legislation, Unsupportive Employers and Collective Bargaining in New Zealand

In New Zealand in the 1990s, labour market decentralization and new employment legislation precipitated a sharp decline in unionism and collective bargaining coverage; trends that continued well into the 2000s even after the introduction of the more supportive Employment Relations Act 2000 (ERA). The ERA prescribed new bargaining rules, which included a good faith obligation, increased union rights and promoted collective bargaining as the key to building productive employment relationships (Anderson, 2004; May and Walsh, 2002). In this respect the ERA provided scope for increased collective bargaining and union renewal (Harbridge and Thickett, 2003; May, 2003a and 2003b; May and Walsh, 2002). Despite these predictions and the ERA's overall intent, the decline in collective bargaining coverage begun in the 1990s has continued unabated in the private sector. It has naturally been questioned why the ERA has not reversed, or at least halted, this downward trend. So far research has focused on the impact of the legislation itself and much less on employer behaviour and perceptions, or on their contribution to these trends. This article addresses the paucity of employer focused research in New Zealand. The research explores views of employers on the benefi ts of collective bargaining, how decisions to engage or not engage in collective bargaining are made and the factors instrumental to them. It is demonstrated that the preferred method of setting pay and conditions continues to be individual bargaining. This is especially so for organizations with less than 50 employees, by far the largest majority of fi rms in New Zealand. Frequently, these smaller organizations see no perceived benefits from collective bargaining. Overall, these fi ndings suggest that despite a decade of supportive legislation there are few signs that the 20 year decline in collective bargaining coverage in New Zealand will be reversed.

Assessing the Costs and Benefits of Collective Bargaining – the Potential Use of Costing

This paper presents the union point of view on collective bargaining costing.

Excludability and the Effects of Free Riders: Right-To-Work Laws and Local Public Sector Unionization

Benefits of collective bargaining in the local public sector are always nonrival for covered employees. In states with public sector right-to-work laws, they are also nonexcludable. Among 10,308 county and city departments that were nonunion in 1977, the probability of engaging in collective bargaining as of 1982 was signifi cantly and substantially lower in states with right-to-work laws. Furthermore, the larger the department the greater the reductton in the probability of forming a bargaining union. These results are the first nonexperimental evidence of the effects of free riders on the provision of a public good They support the hypothesis that, without excludability, free riders reduce the levels of public good provision.