The future of public sector collective bargaining in Canada

Conclusion Looking to the future of Canadian public sector labor relations, the glass is half full. Despite regular intervals when government fiscal and economic policy “trump” public sector bargaining rights through legislation, public sector unions and collective bargaining will survive. Public sector compensation and job security will likely continue to be at least comparable to the unionized private sector, and public sector union density should remain stable, at or near its currently high levels.     

The impact of organized labor on public employment: A comparative analysis

This paper examines the political economy of public employment, specifically the impact of labor unions on public employment across 20 OECD nations during the 1965–1983 period. A theoretical paradigm based on exchange theory is used to explain the rationale for organized labor’s role in public employment. A model is then presented and tested to explain variation in public employment levels across the 20 nations. The results of the analyses support the central hypothesis that labor union power is positively correlated with public employment. Following the data analysis, the conclusions and implications of the findings are discussed as they pertain to the political economy in advanced industrial democracies.     

Recent trends in public support for unions in Canada

This paper investigates trends in public support for unionism during the 1980s. Comparing data from two western Canadian cities in 1981 and 1987, we examine the impact of the recession of the early 1980s on public perceptions of the role of unions, whether the differences between cities documented during 1981 had increased or decreased by 1987, and if “hard times” had resulted in more nonunion employees expressing a willingness to join a union. There is little evidence of growing support for negative “big labor” opinions about unions in the two cities. Despite a well-publicized labor dispute involving the use of strikebreakers in one city, there was no increase in support for legislation restricting the practice. Residents in the same city, however, were significantly more likely to agree with “business unionism” sentiments, an opinion trend accompanied by a growing willingness to join a union. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual meetings of the Western Association of Sociology & Anthropology, February 1988, Edmonton. We thank the Population Research Laboratory at the University of Alberta and Dr. Raymond Currie, Department of Sociology, University of Manitoba, for making available results of the 1981 and 1987 Edmonton and Winnipeg Area Studies. We also acknowledge the research assistance provided by Alan Law and Mary Thompson, and the word processing done by Linda Abbott.     

The use of happiness research for public policy

Research on happiness tends to follow a “benevolent dictator” approach where politicians pursue people’s happiness. This paper takes an antithetic approach based on the insights of public choice theory. First, we inquire how the results of happiness research may be used to improve the choice of institutions. Second, we show that the policy approach matters for the choice of research questions and the kind of knowledge happiness research aims to provide. Third, we emphasize that there is no shortcut to an optimal policy maximizing some happiness indicator or social welfare function since governments have an incentive to manipulate this indicator.     

Union militancy among public employees: A public choice hypothesis

Public employee union membership has grown from under 6 percent to over 20 percent of all union members since 1963. This growth has been ascribed to lagging wages, inelastic demands for public products, political clout, changed laws, and reduced professionalism and public spiritedness. These explanations agree that public employees now confront their employers in a newly militant and adversarial mode. We disagree. We model this growth in membership as a continuation of old public employment relations and forecast the soon diminution of militancy.     

Syndicalisme et nanotechnologies. De l’espace des relations professionnelles à l’espace public des risques

The positions taken on nanotechnologies by trade union organisations, whether European or French, reveal a shift in union action. Traditionally, the trade union approach to occupational risk has been embedded in the field of professional relations, where “technical progress” is accompanied by demands formulated in terms of risk prevention. With nanotechnologies, the union response is framed in precautionary terms, with an emphasis on protection of the environment and human health before innovations are introduced. From this perspective, the study will show how the trade union movement has tackled the issue of nanotechnologies, moving from an initially work-related approach to one that places the accent on public concerns that go beyond traditional union preoccupations.     

The public intellectual trope in the United States

This article takes the “public intellectual” trope as a theoretical case study, and traces how it has been used in the elite public sphere of the contemporary United States since its coining in 1987. The analysis challenges the notion that the “public intellectual” is primarily about broad democratic publics. It documents instead how the trope is used to frame meaning and practice within specific intellectual publics, namely science, higher education, and journalism. By focusing on the play of tropes around the “public intellectual” and examining the authoritative cultural members who use the trope, the trope analysis identifies principles and strategies under contest in the journalistic, academic, and political fields of the contemporary United States.     

Union activity and the decline in American trade union membership

This paper extends recent research on the determinants of the decline in union membership in the United States. Using biennial state-level data for a set of years between 1958 and 1982, my model tests “union organizing,” “structural,” “management opposition,” and “public policy” hypotheses concerning union membership and suggests improved specifications of each of these hypotheses. The paper also examines the relative importance of each factor in explaining the decline in unionization. The results support each of the hypotheses and confirm previous findings that changes in the structure of the labor force are most important in explaining union membership decline.     

Axiomatizations of public good indices with a priori unions

We provide axiomatizations for six variants of the Public Good Index (PGI) for games with a priori unions. Two such coalitional PGIs have been introduced and alternatively axiomatized in Alonso-Meijide et al. (Working paper 18, 2008b). They assign power in two steps. In the first step, power is distributed between unions according to the PGI of the quotient game. In a second step, the Solidarity PGI splits power equally among union members while the Owen Extended PGI takes into account so-called essential parts. The other four coalitional PGIs have been introduced in Holler and Nohn (Homo Oeconomicus 26, 2009). The first variant elaborates the original idea of Holler (Political Studies 30:262–271, 1982) that the coalitional value is a public good and only minimal winning coalitions of the quotient game are relevant. The remaining three variants also use the two-step distribution where, however, on the member stage they take into account the possibilities of players to threaten their partners through leaving their union.     

Union commitment and membership support for political action: An exploratory analysis

Union political activity has always been controversial, even among union members. Research has shown that a sizable minority of union members question the propriety of union political involvement and disagree with union leaders on public policy issues. It has also shown, however, that union members’ commitment to the union may be positively associated with members’ political support. This study extends this research by statistically estimating the relationship between union commitment and members’ support for their national union’s political involvement. Based on the questionnaire responses of several hundred local union members, the findings support a positive relationship between union commitment and political support. The authors wish to thank John Delaney and Cynthia Fisher and an anonymous referee for their comments on an earlier draft of the paper. They also wish to thank the numerous union participants in the study.     

Outsourcing and union power

The outsourcing of union work and jobs either diffuses or diminishes union membership, depending on perspective and situation. The correlation of trends in union membership to trends in union power, while less than perfect, has until recently been relatively strong over the past sixteen years. The fact that as diverse a sample of unions as AFSCME, SEIU, and UAW have chosen to make outsourcing a prominent labor/public relations issue suggests that the correlation continues to be perceived by the union movement to be significant, notwithstanding the efforts of the “new” leadership of the AFL-CIO to break that link with respect to union political power by “taxing” member unions and their members to contribute both money and militancy to the 1996 election cycle. Although outsourcing may lead only to the diffusion of union membership either within or between unions, as opposed to the diminution of union membership, this fact has not received a great deal of attention. The net effect on total union membership of outsourcing from one union employer to another union employer is unclear, although the effect on the membership of the union at the outsourcing employer is not. The redistribution of membership within a union as a result of outsourcing is likely to have little immediate impact on union power. However, as even the best case scenario presented above suggests, it may have significant long-run deleterious effects on union bargaining power by taking labor out of a sheltered market and putting it into potentially competitive market. This is particularly likely to be the case when outsourcing (1) places the outsourced work into a different industry or wage contour and (2) creates the possibility of moving from sole-source to multiplesource supplier arrangements. The redistribution of membership between unions as a result of outsourcing is unlikely to have a major impact on union power broadly defined. It can have, however, serious deleterious effects in terms of the power of an individual union, as suggested in my “competitive case” scenario. The fact that one union’s losses due to outsourcing may be another union’s gain is of little consolation to the losing union. That act, in and of itself, may make the threat of outsourcing a potential union “Achilles heel” at the bargaining table by placing it into competition with some other, perhaps unknown, union as well as possibly nonunion competition. The most obvious threat to union power comes from outsourcing that diminishes union membership overall by transferring jobs from union to nonunion employers. The willingness and ability of employers to move work/jobs entirely out of the orbit of union control constitutes, in terms of power and particularly union bargaining power, a revisitation of the phenomenon of the “runaway shop.” It may also be viewed as a proactive form of hiring permanent replacements for (potentially) striking workers. The union options in dealing with such a challenge are to endeavor to preclude outsourcing through legislation or collective bargaining or to chase the work by organizing the unorganized, hopefully with the help of the unionized outsourcing employer. Neither option may be easy, but as the 1996 auto industry negotiations suggest, the former may be less difficult than the latter. The possibility that outsourcing from union to nonunion employer may provide unions with the power to organize from the top (outsourcer) down (outsourcee) cannot be entirely ignored as the issue of supplier “neutrality” reportedly was raised in the 1996 auto negotiations. The adverse effects of outsourcing on union political and financial power, by virtue of its impact on the level or distribution of union membership, can and may well be offset by an increase in union activism—as measured by dues levels, merger activity, organizing commitment, and political action. The adverse effects of outsourcing on union bargaining power are more problematical from the union standpoint. The effect of outsourcing, whatever its rationale or scenario, appears to be to put union labor back into competition. Thus, outsourcing constitutes yet another challenge to the labor movement in its ongoing and seemingly increasingly unsuccessful battle to take and keep U.S. union labor out of competition by proving itself able and willing to organize to the extent of the market and standardizing wages in that market.     

Compensation,employment, and the political activity of public employee unions

It has been hypothesized that because public employee unions are politically influential, they have a bargaining advanatage over their private-sector counterparts. Previous studies, however, have not directly measured the political activities of public employee unions and have instead usually used some type of unionization proxy. This paper uses unpublished data from the International City Managers Association to develop a more direct measure of union political activity. Using this measure, it is found that an increase in union political activity leads to higher compensation and employment for public employee union members.     

Union Worker Wage Effect in the Public Sector

This study examines union wage premiums in the public sector for the 1998–2004 period. Unlike previous studies, our approach estimates union wage premiums considering differences in the rewards to education, experience, and other personal characteristics for union and non-union workers. The approach provides a larger estimated wage gap than the traditional approach, and allows for simulations of union–nonunion wage gaps for different types of workers. Moreover, we use an Oaxaca decomposition to explain the larger union–nonunion wage gap in the private sector in comparison to that in the public sector. We find that between 50% and 60% of the difference in union wage premiums between the private and public sectors is due to differences in the way unionized workers are rewarded in the private and public sectors, while the remaining portion is due to differences in personal characteristics of private and public sector workers.

Public sector union democracy: A comparative analysis

A congressional subcommittee held “union democracy” hearings in 1998 and 1999 to debate the impact and effectiveness of the union-democracy protections provided by the Land rum-Griffin Act which provides union members in the private sector and U.S. Postal Service certain democratic rights and protections. What was not resolved at that hearing was whether state sector or public employee union members should also enjoy the same democracy protections. We survey the existing 28 state sector collective bargaining laws and find that the majority of state legislation falls considerably short of the protections provided by the Labor Management Reporting and Disclosure Act. Moreover the consequences of limited state-enacted union-democracy protections are discussed and assessed to determine whether LMRDA jurisdiction should also cover public sector union members.     

Why sociology does not need to be saved: Analytic reflections on public sociologies

After reviewing the debate about public sociologies in the American Sociological Association over the past few years, we offer a response to calls for “saving sociology” from the Burawoy approach as well as an analytic critique of the former ASA president's “For Public Sociology” address. While being sympathetic to the basic idea of public sociologies, we argue that the “reflexive” and “critical” categories of sociology, as Burawoy has conceptualized them, are too ambiguous and value-laden to allow for empirical investigation of the different major orientations of sociological research and the ways the discipline can address non-academic audiences. Debates about the future of sociology should be undertaken with empirical evidence, and we need a theoretical approach that can allow us to compare both disciplines and nations as well as taking into account the institutional context of the universities in which we operate. Research into the conditions under which professional, critical, policy, and public sociologies could work together for the larger disciplinary and societal good is called for instead of overheated rhetoric both for and against public sociologies.     

Agency costs,property rights,and the evolution of labor unions

Collective bargaining requires that an agent represent workers. This paper examines the implications for the trade union movement of the resulting agency costs. Without transferable rights in the union, union members lack the means and incentive to bring forth the innovative agent controls common to the modern corporation. Considerations of the bargaining strengths of employers and employees, each represented by an agent, provide an explanation of the simultaneous decline of private sector union membership (corporate share holders have been more successful at lowering agency costs) and growth of public sector union representation (where the union official, a “double agent,” serves the interest of both employee and bureaucratic employer). The authors acknowledge the helpful remarks Donald L. Martin whose earlier research on property rights in unions inspired this effort. Don Bellante’s work was supported by a grant from the Research Committee of the College of Business Administration, University of South Florida.     

Pairwise Strategy-Proofness and Self-Enforcing Manipulation

“Strategy-proofness” is one of the axioms that are most frequently used in the recent literature on social choice theory. It requires that by misrepresenting his preferences, no agent can manipulate the outcome of the social choice rule in his favor. The stronger requirement of “group strategy-proofness” is also often employed to obtain clear characterization results of social choice rules. Group strategy-proofness requires that no group of agents can manipulate the outcome in their favors. In this paper, we advocate “effective pairwise strategy-proofness.” It is the requirement that the social choice rule should be immune to unilateral manipulation and “self-enforcing” pairwise manipulation in the sense that no agent of a pair has the incentive to betray his partner. We apply the axiom of effective pairwise strategy-proofness to three types of economies: public good economy, pure exchange economy, and allotment economy. Although effective pairwise strategy-proofness is seemingly a much weaker axiom than group strategy-proofness, effective pairwise strategy-proofness characterizes social choice rules that are analyzed by using different axioms in the literature.     

The replacement principle for the provision of multiple public goods on tree networks

This article considers the provision of two public goods on tree networks where each agent has a single-peaked preference. We show that if there are at least four agents, then no social choice rule exists that satisfies efficiency and replacement-domination. In fact, these properties are incompatible, even if agents’ preferences are restricted to a smaller domain of symmetric single-peaked preferences. However, for rules on an interval, we prove that Miyagawa’s (Soc Choice Welf 18:527–541, 2001) characterization that only the left-peaks rule and the right-peaks rule satisfy both of these properties also holds on the domain of symmetric single-peaked preferences. Moreover, if agents’ peak locations are restricted to either the nodes or the endpoints of trees, rules exist on a subclass of trees. We provide a characterization of a family of such rules for this tree subclass.     

To reward and punish: A classification of union political strategies

The complexity of union involvement in American politics has frequently been underestimated in the existing academic literature. For this reason, it is helpful to develop a comprehensive classification of the bargaining strategies adopted by unions as they interact with elected officeholders. This classification allows a more systematic analysis of the preconditions and associated advantages and disadvantages of various union strategies in both party nominating processes and general elections. It also shows that the decision to enter electoral politics is best seen as the beginning of a complex, ongoing, and multidimensional process rather than as the end-point of a “single-play” game. Lastly, the classification demonstrates that a wider range of political choice is available to organized labor than is commonly recognized, notwithstanding the real and continuing constraints on labor power.     

Social gerontology as public sociology in action

Burawoy (2005) argues that sociology needs to re-establish a public sociology oriented toward society’s problems and the practice of its unique knowledge if it is to again be taken seriously by the public, policymakers, and others. Yet, it is unclear how best to achieve these goals. We argue that the relatively young field of social gerontology provides a useful model of successful public sociology in action. As a multidisciplinary field engaged in basic and applied research and practice, social gerontology’s major aim is to improve the lives of older people and to ameliorate problems associated with age and aging. Thus social gerontology has routinely reached beyond the academy to engage with its publics. We review the field’s historical and theoretical development and present four examples of public sociology in action. Several factors have contributed to social gerontology's success in achieving the goals of public sociology: (1) Working in multidisciplinary teams which promote collaboration and respect for diverse perspectives. (2) Its ability to advocate “professionally” for its publics without favoring one group at the expense of another. (3) The unique affinity of its theories and practices with its disciplinary values. (4) The constructive effects of its ongoing questioning of values and ethics. Working in a multidisciplinary field with multiple publics, social gerontologists have been able to blend professional, critical, policy, and public sociologies to a considerable degree while contributing toward improvements in well-being.