Collective Bargaining and the Gender Pay Gap in the Printing Industry

This paper considers the effect of collective bargaining on the gender pay gap in the printing industry. This sector was subject to multi‐employer bargaining for around 90 years, until 2010. The article analyses gendered collective bargaining processes through the mechanism of symbolic power, that is, the power of interpretation and definition, and utilizes Walton and McKersie's seminal work on bargaining behaviour to understand the processes that have prevented the closing of the pay gap. It finds that symbolic power operates within the sub‐processes of attitudinal structuring and intra‐organizational bargaining to de‐legitimize women's role in equal pay bargaining, alongside distributive bargaining tactics that preclude equal pay bargaining, thereby creating the impression that women are irrelevant to bargaining processes and ensuring relative invisibility for issues of importance to equality bargaining.     

Fixing minimum wage levels in developing countries: Common failures and remedies

Some developing countries have set their minimum wages too high or too low to constitute a meaningful constraint on employers. The article compares minimum wages worldwide, proposes several ways of measuring them in developing countries and discusses whether they are effective thresholds in those countries. The second part of the article considers the institutional factors leading countries to set minimum wages at extreme levels. The author concludes that the minimum wage is used as a policy instrument to several ends – wage negotiation, deflation and social dialogue – which results in the absence of a wage floor, weak collective bargaining, or non‐compliance.     

Is collective bargaining a collective good?

This study argues that legislation imposes on collective bargaining an artificial collective goods characteristic as a legal property, which should be distinguished from collective goods in the economic sense. The law creates an artificial freerider problem. Congressional intent was to require compulsory unionism to the extent that all workers would be required to share in the expenses incurred by the union in the negotiation and administration of collective bargaining agreements. Recent court decisions have attempted to define the obligation of employees, employers, and labor unions in terms of this legislative intent.     

An economic analysis of public sector collective bargaining and strike activity

This paper develops a theory of public sector collective bargaining and uses it to investigate the economic determinants of public sector strike activity. The model considers union leaders, union members, bureaucrats, politicians, and voters, with the intention of explicitly recognizing both the constraints placed on the bargaining parties by their constituents and the differences between public and private sector collective bargaining. The empirical results indicate that only in cases where both negotiating parties are motivated by self-interest can we expect frequent strikes and strikes of long duration. The results also suggest that public sector strikes are countercyclical and principally influenced by the business cycle and its impact on state and local revenues.     

Freedom of association and collective bargaining in the platform economy: A human rights-based approach and an ever-increasing mobilization of workers

This paper examines the exercise of the rights to freedom of association and collective bargaining by platform workers. It focuses on several significant developments involving the collective organization of platform workers worldwide, and considers the rights to freedom of association and collective bargaining as human rights. It contends that the shifting context of work has led to changes in modern workplaces, which, in turn, have generated a novel interest in the adoption of a human rights-based approach towards labour protection. This approach considers that all workers are entitled to rights, such as the right to collective bargaining, which derive from international human rights instruments.     

Concession bargaining and unions: Impacts and implications

The characteristics of concession bargaining relating to management behavior, information disclosure, intraunion activity, and union member attitudes are formulated and briefly described, followed by an exploration of the impact of the experience on and the implications for unions. The analysis suggests that union solidarity, union leader credibility, and union effectiveness have been negatively affected. Concession bargaining appears to lead to more difficulty in administering unions, a further decline in union image, an emphasis on adversarial relations with management, and the potential use of new tactics in collective bargaining. The authors express appreciation to Dr. Donald McPherson, Dr. Antone Aboud, and Commissioner Joseph Biondo, FMCS, for helpful comments.     

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 legal status of collective bargaining by public school teachers

This paper examines the characteristics of area populations that predict the content of bargaining legislation for public school teachers. The authors provide evidence suggesting that 1) pro-bargaining legislation is correlated with the representation of union members and related workers who benefit from collective bargaining, and 2) the legislation appears to be demanded by career workers as a means of transferring resources away from teachers with relatively short career horizons. An N-chotomous probit model is used to estimate the form of legislation that ranges from bargaining prohibition to prescribed bargaining. Data for the study were obtained from 95 SMSAs in 35 states. We are indebted to Paul H. Rubin and Elchanon Cohn for their substantial contributions to this project. We also received helpful suggestions from Chris Paul and R. Carter Hill.     

Collective consumption models with restricted bargaining weights: an empirical assessment based on experimental data

We use experimental data to analyze consumption decisions by groups of individuals who have to reach a consensus on spending a joint budget. Our experiment involves dyads (i.e. two-member groups) who have to compose consumption bundles consisting of three commodities (wine, orange juice and M&Ms). We focus on the collective consumption model to describe group behavior. This model represents group decisions as Pareto optimal outcomes of a within-group bargaining process, with rational group members who are each characterized by individual bargaining weights. We also consider specifications of the collective model that restrict the variation of these bargaining weights. A distinguishing feature of our study is that we use revealed preference testing tools to assess the goodness-of-fit and discriminatory power of alternative specifications of the collective model. Our experimental results suggest that the most appropriate model specification allows for a limited variation of the bargaining weights.     

Labor’s inequality of bargaining power: myth or reality?

This article responds to Morgan O. Reynolds’ paper which questions the inequality of labor’s bargaining power by addressing four issues: (1) the economic case for collective bargaining, (2) the concept of an inequality of bargaining power, (3) the extent of employer market power, and (4) the role of public policy. The author thanks Jack Blicksilver for helpful comments.     

Institutional Pluralism,Organizations, and Actors: A Review

The institutional logics perspective holds the promise of delivering where neo‐institutionalist theory has disappointed – the ability to address key societal problems such as inequality, social discrimination, and economic insecurity – a promise that, as of yet, has been unrealized. In this review, I provide an overview of the body of work within the institutional logics perspective that addresses the co‐existence of multiple institutional logics influencing identities, values, cognitive frameworks, and practices – institutional pluralism. I demonstrate how pluralism diverges from conventional neo‐institutionalist theory in its view of institutional fields as heterogeneous spaces. I then review the implications for organizations and social actors responding to multiple logics in the institutional environment. In the discussion section, I argue that the study of pluralism, in acknowledging human agency, politics, and collective mobilization, opens the door for creative resolutions to societal problems hitherto overlooked in neo‐institutional theory. Despite the promise, I address key research areas that remain unresolved or under‐addressed in the institutional pluralism perspective.     

Dynamic fairness in repeated bargaining with risk

We study dynamic notions of fairness via an experiment of a two-round bilateral bargaining environment, where the payoff to one player is subject to ex-post risk, while the other player receives a fixed payment, effectively making the player exposed to risk a residual claimant. The ex-post risk not only provides substantive issues for bargaining parties to resolve in the experiment – i.e. what is a fair compensation for the exposure to risk – it also results in the endogenous formation of reference points for the second round due to ex post inequality after the realization of uncertainty in the first round. We find support for a “payback” hypothesis. That is, agreements in the second round significantly differ from the first round in a manner consistent with reducing the inequality that arose due to the initial pie realization.     

Police bargaining,arbitration, and fringe benefits

Data from a national sample of 500 to 600 U.S. cities with over 25,000 in population indicated that the practice of police collective bargaining has a positive, strong association with fringe benefits (measured by city contributions for police retirement and insurance benefits per police officer). The availability of arbitration, however, seems to have little or no influence on the dollar amount of police fringes, and neither the current nor the prior use of arbitration (i.e., actually receiving an arbitration award) has any consistent association with police fringes. The results indicate that collective bargaining and regional location influence the level of police fringes more than do other variables. We are grateful to Steve Kawakami, Mark Phillips, Joe Schimansky, and Dick Williams for some excellent research assistance. We are also grateful to the National Institute of Justice of the U.S. Department of Justice for financially supporting this research. Such support does not mean that the Institute or Department necessarily agrees with our methods or conclusions.     

Labor’s inequality of bargaining power: Changes over time and implications for public policy

A major justification for enacting the Wagner Act and encouraging collective bargaining was that in the wage-determination process individual workers suffer from an inequality of bargaining power vis-á-vis employers. This critical review of this justification examines the analytical meaning of the concept of an inequality of bargaining power, the factors responsible for this inequality, the change that has taken place in labor’s disadvantage since the 1930s, and the implications for national labor policy. It is concluded that some employers continue to have significant market power over wages but that the extent and degree of labor’s disadvantage in bargaining has diminished substantially since World War II. The implication is that the Wagner Act’s protection of the right to organize remains in the social interest but that the bargaining power of labor unions should be further circumscribed to preserve a balance of power in wage determination. The author thanks Paul Swiercz for helpful comments.     

Airline Negotiations and the New Concessionary Bargaining

I ask whether the highly confrontational collective bargaining in the airlines is unique to that industry or a sign of a deepening crisis in union–management relations nationally. First, airline labor relations are reviewed in the context of extremely contentious negotiations, intense industry competition, complex and fragmented bargaining structures, frequent bankruptcies, and unpredictable external shocks. Next, concessionary bargaining in the airlines is discussed, and a new and extreme form of concessionary bargaining is identified. The emergence of the new concessionary bargaining in the airlines and its spread to the automobile sector is then interpreted as the early signs of a fundamental transformation of collective bargaining. The implications of the new concessionary bargaining are then described at the workplace, company, union, and societal levels.

Tax reform and endogenous gender bargaining power

The conventional studies with unitary representation of the household have been seeking for the condition in which tax systems achieve improvements of both fertility and female labor supply. Such analyses may not be enough to capture the important aspects of family behaviors since their common-preference assumption is frequently inconsistent with observed economies. By making use of a family bargaining framework, we argue that the heterogeneity in parental preferences among household members influences the result of existing studies on tax systems. Our results show that when women prefer larger family size than men, the tax reform towards individual taxation raises the fertility rate even more. In this case, female labor supply can be still increased in spite of enhanced fertility due to bargaining allocation.     

Weakest collective rationality and the Nash bargaining solution

We propose a new axiom, weakest collective rationality (WCR) which is weaker than both weak Pareto optimality (WPO) in Nash’s (Econometrica 18:155–162, 1950) original characterization and strong individual rationality (SIR) in Roth’s (Math Oper Res 2:64–65, 1977) characterization of the Nash bargaining solution. We then characterize the Nash solution by symmetry (SYM), scale invariance (SI), independence of irrelevant alternatives (IIA) and our weakest collective rationality (WCR) axiom.     

Battles through and about statistics in French pay equity bargaining: The politics of quantification at workplace level

This article proposes to study the discreet ‘battles of numbers’ at workplace level, particularly exacerbated on pay equity, in relation to its potential additional costs for employers. Figures are at once a framework, an object and a resource for power struggles between social partners. This approach is inspired by ‘statactivism’, a research perspective that studies the ways and contexts in which statistics can become tools for social mobilization. In a European context where bargaining is increasingly decentralized to company level, we argue that researchers should pay attention to statistical resources and quantification skills of negotiators, both on the management and unions side. They should also include in their analytical framework the influence of experts and specialists who advise social partners on how to strategically produce and use gender‐sensitive statistics. In this article, two case studies allow us to open the ‘black box’ of equality bargaining, revealing challenges and controversies of gender pay reporting.     

Social Movements and Tactical Choice

For much of the past 40 years, the study of social movement tactics has viewed organizers' choices as driven by a desire to maximize efficacy and efficiency within a context of scarce resources and structural constraints. As sociologists increasingly turned toward culture, a new orientation emerged to view tactical choice as a process of gathering, interpreting, and evaluating information within dynamic, uncertain, and often‐contradictory contexts. The importance of the cultural turn has been amply demonstrated in studies of such things as identities, emotions, and collective action frames, but the full implications of its insights continue to be discovered. Four insights in particular warrant greater attention: many core concepts in the study of social movements have an interpretive, subjective, and contingent nature; tactics are a means of communication; social structures are imbued with culture, and culture is thoroughly structured; and social movements sometimes behave irrationally, and what appears to be irrational behavior often is in fact rational. I briefly discuss three areas of scholarship – collective identities, diffusion, and institutional fields – that demonstrate innovative ways that sociologists continue to combine and incorporate these insights and point the way toward a more sophisticated understanding of social movements and tactical choice.     

Towards a new experimental socio-economics: Complex behaviour in bargaining

Game theory has provided a rigorous conceptual support to analyse strategic decisions and bargaining behaviour. But it shares with competitive equilibrium three basic assumptions. The players are fully rational; they comprehend the faced situation; and they know all the relevant institutional parameters. Thus disregarding the social dimension of bargaining. In this paper we advocate for a consilient focus of economics, psychology and sociology. We argue that it is necessary and possible to experiment within a Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) with bounded rational agents endorsed with explicit social behaviour. The observed behaviour is obtained from a laboratory experiment with human agents and can be captured in a cognitive multi-agent modelling with artificial agents. The approach can accommodate both declarative and procedural rationality; i.e., rationality as a process and as a product of learning.