Collective Bargaining Rights Research Articles

Collective Bargaining and Police Misconduct: Evidence from Florida

Growing controversy surrounds the impact of labor unions on law enforcement behavior. Critics argue that unions impede organizational reform and insulate officers from discipline for misconduct. Yet collective bargaining tends to increase wages, which could improve officer behavior. We provide quasi-experimental empirical evidence on the effects of collective bargaining rights on violent incidents of misconduct. Our empirical strategy exploits a 2003 Florida Supreme Court decision (Williams), which conferred collective bargaining rights on sheriffs’ deputies, resulting in a substantial increase in unionization among these officers. Using a Florida state administrative database of “moral character” violations reported by local agencies between 1996 and 2015, we implement a difference-in-difference approach in which police departments (which were unaffected by Williams) serve as a control group for sheriffs’ offices (SOs). Our estimates imply that collective bargaining rights led to a substantial increase in violent incidents of misconduct among SOs, relative to police departments. The effect of collective bargaining rights is concentrated among SOs that subsequently adopted collective bargaining agreements, and the timing of the adoption of these agreements is associated with increases in violent misconduct. There is also some evidence consistent with a “bargaining in the shadow” effect among SOs that did not unionize.

The future is public transport

6 | International Union Rights | 26/4 FOCUS | CLIMATE CHANGE & TRADE UNIONS The future is public transport How has the ITF’s approach to climate change and public transport developed? At the 2010 ITF Congress, a resolution was adopted on developing a trade union response to climate change in transport1. This set out a number of political principles around the issue and committed ITF to what we call a ‘Reduce – Shift – Improve’ framework: reducing the movement of goods and people, shifting the modes of transport, and improving the energy efficiency of the sector. The resolution contained really important commitments, for instance to take a science-based approach to emission reduction and to contribute to the scale of transformation in transport necessary in order to effectively reduce emissions and address the climate emergency. The ITF’s public transport policy fits within that political resolution. We’ve developed an alternative model of public transport, recognising that we cannot address environmental issues separately from the wider social and employment issues. The core demands of the policy concern public ownership, public financing, decent work, gender equality, more worker control of technology, and transport and energy democracy. We feel it is necessary for unions to go beyond traditional, bread-and-butter workplace issues, and address all of the different aspects of a new model of public transport. Just Transition is not only about reskilling, retraining, numbers of jobs - that’s all important, but it needs to be linked a long-term vision of transformative change in transport. The policy proposals provide a platform for linking current issues in public transport to that long-term vision of change, as well as a platform for building alliances with other organisations that might be able to support this kind of policy and these demands. There is sometimes an assumption – from unions but also outside the union movement – that public transport is an ‘easy’ sector, because it’s a sector that stands to benefit from progressive climate change policies. On one level that might be true, because it’s not controversial that there needs to be a massive expansion of public transport in order to reduce emissions in cities. But how that expansion takes place, what kind of employment it generates, what democratic participation and control it allows workers or citizens or passengers - all of that is heavily contested. The policy paper states that ‘trade unions must contest power not only in workplaces but also in the public sphere where decision-making takes place’. What challenges do public transport sector workers face in exercising collective bargaining rights to pursue this agenda? One of the biggest issues is that, globally, large parts of the public transport workforce are in the informal economy. In many developing countries, in many cities, up to 85 percent of the passenger transport workforce are informal, and are denied fundamental workplace rights: they are not defined as employees, they don’t have a clearly defined employment relationship, labour law doesn’t cover them, there are no clear collective bargaining rights, there are no contracts. One of our main concerns therefore is how to organise informal workers, how to win some of those workplace rights, and in the long-term how to formalise employment in public transport so that those rights are guaranteed through labour law and other institutions that formal workers would have access to. For example, ‘Bus Rapid Transit’ (BRT) systems are being introduced in Africa, Asia and Latin America. These are formalised public transport systems but are developed without consideration for the impacts they can have on the informal workers who rely on providing those services for their livelihoods. The ITF is beginning to look with unions at the labour impacts of these systems and to put together a platform of rights and demands that can be negotiated with local authorities, governments or employers – wherever the power lies. In Kenya and Senegal we’re beginning to see the impacts of this work. We are making visible a large section of the workforce that has been otherwise completely excluded from any formal labour protection or collective bargaining rights. A lot of the funding for these BRT programmes also comes from international financial institutions, and we’ve engaged...

The future is public transport

6 | International Union Rights | 26/4 FOCUS | CLIMATE CHANGE & TRADE UNIONS The future is public transport How has the ITF’s approach to climate change and public transport developed? At the 2010 ITF Congress, a resolution was adopted on developing a trade union response to climate change in transport1. This set out a number of political principles around the issue and committed ITF to what we call a ‘Reduce – Shift – Improve’ framework: reducing the movement of goods and people, shifting the modes of transport, and improving the energy efficiency of the sector. The resolution contained really important commitments, for instance to take a science-based approach to emission reduction and to contribute to the scale of transformation in transport necessary in order to effectively reduce emissions and address the climate emergency. The ITF’s public transport policy fits within that political resolution. We’ve developed an alternative model of public transport, recognising that we cannot address environmental issues separately from the wider social and employment issues. The core demands of the policy concern public ownership, public financing, decent work, gender equality, more worker control of technology, and transport and energy democracy. We feel it is necessary for unions to go beyond traditional, bread-and-butter workplace issues, and address all of the different aspects of a new model of public transport. Just Transition is not only about reskilling, retraining, numbers of jobs - that’s all important, but it needs to be linked a long-term vision of transformative change in transport. The policy proposals provide a platform for linking current issues in public transport to that long-term vision of change, as well as a platform for building alliances with other organisations that might be able to support this kind of policy and these demands. There is sometimes an assumption – from unions but also outside the union movement – that public transport is an ‘easy’ sector, because it’s a sector that stands to benefit from progressive climate change policies. On one level that might be true, because it’s not controversial that there needs to be a massive expansion of public transport in order to reduce emissions in cities. But how that expansion takes place, what kind of employment it generates, what democratic participation and control it allows workers or citizens or passengers - all of that is heavily contested. The policy paper states that ‘trade unions must contest power not only in workplaces but also in the public sphere where decision-making takes place’. What challenges do public transport sector workers face in exercising collective bargaining rights to pursue this agenda? One of the biggest issues is that, globally, large parts of the public transport workforce are in the informal economy. In many developing countries, in many cities, up to 85 percent of the passenger transport workforce are informal, and are denied fundamental workplace rights: they are not defined as employees, they don’t have a clearly defined employment relationship, labour law doesn’t cover them, there are no clear collective bargaining rights, there are no contracts. One of our main concerns therefore is how to organise informal workers, how to win some of those workplace rights, and in the long-term how to formalise employment in public transport so that those rights are guaranteed through labour law and other institutions that formal workers would have access to. For example, ‘Bus Rapid Transit’ (BRT) systems are being introduced in Africa, Asia and Latin America. These are formalised public transport systems but are developed without consideration for the impacts they can have on the informal workers who rely on providing those services for their livelihoods. The ITF is beginning to look with unions at the labour impacts of these systems and to put together a platform of rights and demands that can be negotiated with local authorities, governments or employers – wherever the power lies. In Kenya and Senegal we’re beginning to see the impacts of this work. We are making visible a large section of the workforce that has been otherwise completely excluded from any formal labour protection or collective bargaining rights. A lot of the funding for these BRT programmes also comes from international financial institutions, and we’ve engaged...

German teachers take legal action for full collective rights

In December 2018, eleven German teachers began their appeal to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, supported by the German teachers’ union GEW (Gewerkschaft Erziehung und Wissenschaft). The reason is the strike ban for civil servants in Germany, which was confirmed by the German Constitutional Court on 12 June 2018 . Roughly one third of all civil servants in Germany are teachers. More than 80 percent of teachers in public schools are employed as civil servants; the remainder are employed on fixed term or permanent working contracts. The teachers appealing the Constitutional Court ruling are working as civil servants in several of the German federal states. They have participated in strike actions organised by GEW, which were aimed at achieving higher wages or a reduction in teaching hours. As a consequence of their participation, they faced disciplinary measures for unauthorised absence, ranging from reprimands (with possible negative impact with regard to promotions) to monetary penalties. The German strike ban for civil servants is not explicitly mentioned in the German constitution, the ‘Grundgesetz’. Instead, the constitution refers to a formulation known as ‘Hergebrachte Grundsätze des Berufsbeamtentums’, which refers to the traditional principles of the civil servant status that date back to the nineteenth century and the Weimar Republic (1918–1933). The interpretation of these principles is basically case law. The principles encompass a duty of allegiance on the part of the civil servant, meaning obedience to the law and loyalty to the employer. The employer in return is said to have a fiduciary duty to remunerate his civil servants in a decent way according to the dignity of the respective position. Succinctly put, this conception means that civil servants are allowed to neither strike nor do they have the necessity to strike. GEW as a union has repudiated this total strike ban for decades, in line with the other unions organised in the national umbrella organisation, Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund (DGB). In this, the unions do not stand alone. The International Labour Organisation and other international organisations constantly criticise the German legal framework withholding civil servant’s collective rights and have repeatedly requested the German Government to revise this violation of basic human and workers’ rights. Now and then, GEW members have nevertheless taken part in strike actions, tacitly or proudly accepting the collateral disciplinary measures, since the jurisprudence of German courts seemed to be totally static. This changed after the rulings of the European Court of Human Rights in the cases of Demir1 and Baycara2 and Yapi-Yol Sen3. The Court asserted that restrictions on the rights of collective bargaining and to strike should be exercised as narrowly as possible. Remaining restrictions must be justified by the function the respective person is fulfilling, being limited to sovereign responsibilities of public administration. The legal employment status is not a sufficient justification to deny basic human rights. GEW saw this as recognition of its own legal arguments. Therefore from 2009 onwards, the union has supported numerous lawsuits of members who were disciplined after taking part in GEW strike actions. Several levels of jurisdiction found diverging answers to the question of how to reconcile the conflicting outcomes of traditional German civil servant law on the one hand, and international labour law and human rights on the other. As these cases reached the German Constitutional Court in 2018, the total strike ban for civil servants was affirmed all along the line, referring to the above mentioned principles of German civil servant law being an indivisible set of rights and obligations. The judges refuted any contradiction between the rulings of the European Court of Human Rights and German jurisprudence. Since European human rights law had been at the centre of its cause of action in these cases, GEW motivated the eleven teachers to bring their cases to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. They will be advocated by the union-based lawyers, Gewerkschaftliches Zentrum für Revision und Europäisches Recht der DGB Rechtsschutz GmbH. Notes 1 2 BvR 1738/12, 2 BvR 1395/13, 2 BvR 1068/14, 2 BvR 646/15 2 Demir and Baykara v Turkey [2008] ECHR 1345 3 Enerji Yapi-Yol Sen v Turkey [2009] ECHR 2251 20...

Disembedded Politics: Neoliberal Reform and Labour Market Institutions in Central and Eastern Europe

AbstractDefying predictions of radical liberalization, labour market institutions in post-socialist Central and Eastern Europe are characterized by relatively protective employment legislation, sometimes combined with collective bargaining rights. However, not all protective employment regimes survived political attack by neoliberal reformers. Existing theories in comparative political economy suggest that employment regimes reflect the relative political power of producer groups. Others have suggested that in Central and Eastern Europe the content of labour market reform was determined by the coercive influence of transnational actors. Through a comparative analysis of labour market reform in Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Romania and Slovakia, this article finds that trade unions played a key role in early institutional settlements over labour markets. However, in Romania and Slovakia, these institutional settlements were subsequently undermined by attacks by ideologically motivated domestic elites in episodes of disembedded politics. The article develops the concept of disembedded politics and demonstrates its importance in post-socialist institutional change.

The architecture of modern anti-unionism in Canada: Class struggle and the erosion of workers’ collective freedoms

Over the past four decades, governments have backed away from the promotion of collective bargaining in Canada resulting in a tendency towards anti-unionism. Examining this new reality, this article investigates two interrelated trends in Canadian anti-unionism over the last two decades in an effort to conceptualize the role of the state in regulating labour relations. First, we investigate legislative attempts to undermine or eliminate the ability of workers to collectively bargain and strike. Second, the article unpacks the political economy of anti-unionism in the private sector by focusing on the role of lobby groups that have shaped labour legislation. These two interrelated threads allow us to expose the relationship between employers and governments, which has threatened the strength of organized labour in the private and public sector and shaped a uniquely Canadian anti-unionism. Finally, we conclude by examining both the strengths and limitations of the unique fight-back strategies used by the labour movement, which has sought to elevate aspects of Canadian labour law to be protected by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. This, we argue, offers restrictive possibilities for advancing collective bargaining rights in the existing labour relations framework.

The Québec System of Worker Participation: Toward a Refoundation on a New Constitutional Basis?

Workers’ participation rights, centred around collective bargaining, present numerous weaknesses in Quebec. The authors highlight in this respect the collision between collective bargaining rights and property rights, as well as freedom of commerce. However, for the authors, the new labour constitution in Canada heralds a positive change for workers’ basic participation rights.

State Collective Bargaining Laws and Public-Sector Pay

Using the Public Use Microdata Sample from the 2005 to 2015 American Community Survey, the authors provide new evidence on how state collective bargaining laws affect public-sector wages. To isolate the causal effect of bargaining laws on public-sector pay, they examine wage differentials between otherwise similar public- and private-sector employees located in the same local labor market. They estimate difference-in-differences (DD) models that exploit two sources of plausibly exogenous variation: 1) policy discontinuities along state borders and 2) variation within states in collective bargaining laws in states where the majority of public workers are without collective bargaining rights. Findings show that mandatory collective bargaining laws increase public-sector wages by approximately 5 to 8 percentage points. Results therefore suggest that mandatory collective bargaining laws provide a formal mechanism through which public-sector workers are able to bargain for increased compensation.

Public‐Sector Unions and the Size of Government

AbstractPublic‐sector unions are generally thought to increase the size of government through collective bargaining. This article challenges this idea for the case of teacher unions in the United States and argues that while collective bargaining institutions sometimes lead to increased education spending, this is not the norm. Using a new longitudinal data set spanning all states before and after they granted collective bargaining rights to teachers, the article shows that although states that mandate districts to bargain with teachers have higher education expenditures than states that do not, the differences precede collective bargaining. Difference‐in‐differences analyses find no evidence that introducing collective bargaining rights led to average increases in the level of resources devoted to education. Although existing theories cannot explain these null findings, the article shows one reason behind them is that most laws granting collective bargaining rights to teachers were not unambiguously prolabor, but included both pro‐ and anti‐union provisions.

The bad end of the bargain?: Revisiting the relationship between collective bargaining agreements and student achievement

This paper revisits the relationship between teacher collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) and student achievement. Using a district-level dataset of California teacher CBAs that includes measures of overall and subarea contract strength linked to district-level panel data, we build on prior work by controlling for unobserved fixed and time-varying confounders. This study demonstrates that naïve pooled OLS estimates of student achievement on overall CBA strength are larger and more negative than lagged achievement and within-district estimates, signifying a negative bias in the naïve levels models. When controlling for time invariant and time-varying unobservables, the relationship between CBA strength and student achievement is persistently negative and small, or null, but never significantly positive. This relationship extends to specific CBA subareas and to subgroups of students. These findings have important implications for new reforms designed to weaken teacher collective bargaining rights.

Does the Political Power of Nonfinancial Stakeholders Affect Firm Values? Evidence from Labor Unions

Whereas corporate political connections are known to enhance equity values, we demonstrate that union political activity can have the opposite effect. We examine the consequences of a recent Australian state law that restricts union political activity but does not change collective bargaining rights. In the wake of this law, the equity values of affected unionized firms significantly increase, and consistent with this market reaction, these firms are able to bargain for more favorable labor contracts than their unionized peers in other states. The evidence strongly suggests that unions use political activism to extract rents from shareholders and benefit their members.

Public Pensions and Collective Bargaining Rights: Evidence from State and Local Governments

AbstractAn aging workforce and increasing retirement benefits are ongoing problems for states and municipalities. Unions are often blamed for governments offering too generous pension benefits. This contributes to budgetary pressures in some state and municipal governments. This article analyzes the impact of collective bargaining on pension benefit generosity under different economic conditions. The study finds that the impact of collective bargaining on pension benefits is not consistent over time or across pension plans. Collective bargaining has a positive effect on pension benefits under worsening economic conditions. Additionally, unions indirectly influence pension benefit generosity through campaign donations and unionization intensity. The findings suggest mixed impacts of collective bargaining on different groups of public employees regarding pension contributions. The article concludes with implications for the role of unions in public financial performance and strategic human resource management during fiscal austerity.

The Effect of Collective Bargaining Rights on Law Enforcement: Evidence from Florida

Growing controversy surrounds the impact of labor unions on law enforcement behavior. Critics argue that unions impede organizational reform and insulate officers from discipline for misconduct. Yet collective tends to increase wages, which could improve officer behavior. We provide quasi-experimental empirical evidence on the effects of collective rights on violent incidents of misconduct. Our empirical strategy exploits a 2003 Florida Supreme Court decision (Williams), which conferred collective rights on sheriffs' deputies, resulting in a substantial increase in unionization among these officers. Using a Florida state administrative database of moral character violations reported by local agencies between 1996 and 2015, we implement a difference-in-difference approach in which police departments (which were unaffected by Williams) serve as a control group for sheriffs' offices (SOs). Our estimates imply that collective rights led to a substantial increase in violent incidents of misconduct among SOs, relative to police departments. The effect of collective rights is concentrated among SOs that subsequently adopted collective agreements, and the timing of the adoption of these agreements is associated with increases in violent misconduct. There is also some evidence consistent with a bargaining in the shadow effect among SOs that did not unionize.

Aportes para la comprensión de la arquitectura jurídica de la relación de consumo en el derecho brasilero

The Brazilian Consumer Protection and Defense Act has granted special protection to several categories. In doing so it has in fact recognized the stricto sensu, the bystander, and the collectively protected categories, further associating prospective protection to all those who may be reached by any number of commerce practices. It has also not waived rights of collective bargaining for consumer demands as fundamental rights. This article seeks to explore whether the current theoretical background that aims to categorize collectives as consumers is enough to deal with the issues within the field. Our hypothesis is that the current background is not sufficient given the need to overcome, through a complex hermeneutic approach, the answers proposed by the dogmatic perspective within consumer studies. Our approach seeks to critically analyze the juridical literature written on the topic in Brazil, mapping decisions written during the almost 30 years of effectivity of the Brazilian Consumer Protection and Defense Act, reviewing each of the current theories on the issue of consumer protection, and finally proposing an overarching theory of consumer protection.

The guarantee of freedom of association and collective bargaining rights to domestic workers: two opposite models, Brazil and Canada

The study’s main objective is to question the exclusion of domestic workers from freedom of association and collective bargaining rights and to propose possible policy solutions to allow the rights to these workers. The paper focuses in the Canadian and in the Brazilian cases. Even though the Brazilian and Canadian models illustrate two very different approaches towards collective organization, both countries present regulatory challenges to the effective recognition of domestic workers’ freedom of association and collective bargaining rights. The policy solutions to these challenges in the case of domestic work can serve other groups of vulnerable workers, such as migrants, low wage service workers, informal workers. The methodology is developed through bibliographical and documentary analysis.

Law on Collective Bargaining Rights

Law on Collective Bargaining Rights

State Phobia, Then and Now: Three Waves of Conflict over Wisconsin's Public Sector, 1930–2013

While state legislative rollbacks of public-sector workers’ collective bargaining rights in Wisconsin and other US states in 2011 appeared to signal an unprecedented wave of hostility toward the public sector, such episodes have a long history. Drawing on recent work on “governance repertoires,” this article compares antistate initiatives in Wisconsin in 2011 to two previous periods of conflict over the size and shape of government: the 1930s and the 1970s. We find that while small government advocates in all three periods used similar language and emphasized comparable themes, the outcomes of their advocacy were different due to the distinct historical moments in which they unfolded and the way local initiatives were linked to political projects at the national level. We explore the relationship of local versions of small government activism to their national-level counterparts in each period to show how national-level movements and the ideological, social, and material resources they provided shaped governance repertoires in Wisconsin. We argue that the three moments of conflict over the size of government are deeply intertwined with the prehistory, emergence, and rise to dominance of neoliberal political rationality and can provide insight into how that new “governance repertoire” was experienced and built at the local level.

The City of Seattle's Ordinance Providing Collective Bargaining Rights to Independent Contractor For-Hire Drivers: An Analysis of the Major Legal Hurdles

The City of Seattle's Ordinance Providing Collective Bargaining Rights to Independent Contractor For-Hire Drivers: An Analysis of the Major Legal Hurdles

Conservative Counterrevolution: Challenging Liberalism in 1950s Milwaukee

Wisconsin's recent political showdowns have captured national attention because they reveal a broad erosion of labor power across the country and the endurance of racial discrimination in policing and housing. Tula A. Connell's Conservative Counterrevolution unfolds more than half a century before the massive rallies that shook the statehouse in 2011 in opposition to Republican governor Scott Walker's attack on collective bargaining rights. Milwaukeeans' 1950s opposition to affordable housing and antidiscrimination measures may seem far removed from last year's revolt against police violence in Milwaukee's black communities, yet Connell's account of the neglected urban roots of conservatism show how this heavily unionized, socialist-led city came to figure into the national story of right-wing resurgence. Connell's finely researched study focuses on the tumultuous three-term mayoralty of the polymath and socialist Frank Zeidler (1948–1960). Connell locates conservative interests arrayed against Zeidler not solely within suburban enclaves or national organizations but also within urban governance itself. Small property owners, business leaders, free enterprise propagandists, and opportunistic alderman, Connell argues, sustained dissent beneath a gloss of liberal self-assurance. Attuned to Milwaukee's idiosyncrasies, Connell also locates conservatism's roots in the city's constricted liberal tradition. This included socialists who “‘produced no socialism’” and parsimonious residents who rejected public debt (p. 26). While moderate conservatives came to share with liberal opponents a belief that government should offer some services, key disputes over civil rights, public employee unions, and affordable housing pushed them further apart. During a 1950–1951 referendum, for example, conservatives “saw free enterprise and public service as mutually exclusive” and decried subsidized housing as a step toward justifying government provision of “cars, steaks and decent dress” (pp. 73, 76).

Consequences of Wisconsin's Act 10: Teacher Compensation and Employment

Wisconsin’s Act 10 in 2011 gutted collective bargaining rights for public school teachers and mandated benefits cuts for most districts. We use various cross-state methods on school-district data from school years 2002-03 to 2015-16 to examine the act’s immediate and medium-run net impacts on compensation and employment. We find that Act 10 coincided with ongoing significant benefit relative declines beyond the immediate benefit cuts. Controlling for funding level and composition reveals that Wisconsin school districts, unlike their control counterparts, have seen the number of teachers per student rise in the years since Act 10.