Labor Relations, Unions and Collective Bargaining: A Political Economic Analysis

Trade unions, collective bargaining and macroeconomic performance: a review

Coordination through collective bargaining is recognised as an influential determinant of labour market outcomes and macroeconomic performance. This article provides a systematic review of the empirical literature on the subject. What emerges from the review is that it is different types and coverage of bargaining coordination, rather than cross-country variation in trade union density, that ma...

The Political Economy of Collective Bargaining

We construct a political equilibrium in which employers and labour unions bargain over labour contracts, wage-earners and profit-earners lobby the government for taxation and labour market regulation, and labour market legislation must be accepted by the majority of voters. We show that the voters rule out profit sharing, because otherwise the government would capture all the gain. Furthermore,...

Collective Bargaining as Industrial Democracy: Hugh Clegg and the Political Foundations of British Industrial Relations Pluralism

INTRODUCTION Sometime during the summer of 1949 Hugh Clegg first met Allan Flanders, who had arrived at Oxford to take up the post of Senior Lecturer in Industrial Relations (IR) from the start of the Michaelmas term. For the next twenty years, their partnership shaped the development of a peculiarly English IR paradigm. Flanders and Clegg were the nucleus of the early postwar 'Oxford School' o...

Unions, Bargaining and Strikes

How do labor and management view collective bargaining?

Since the passage of the National Labor Relations Act in 1935, collective bargaining has been the primary means by which U.S. workers can collectively negotiate terms and conditions of employment with their employer. Currently, more than 100,000 contracts are in effect, covering approximately 9 million workers and their employers in the private sector. (An additional 8 million workers are cover...