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Contemporary Collective Bargaining in the Private Sector. - book reviews

Administrative Science Quarterly, Sept, 1997 by Peter Feuille

For social scientists, the glamorous workplace subjects of the 1980s and 1990s include employee involvement, information sharing, self-managed work teams, pay for performance, and a host of other high-performance/high-commitment human resource practices designed to enhance employee productivity/satisfaction and organizational effectiveness. In contrast, U. S. union-management relationships have received correspondingly reduced attention as the unionized share of the labor force has declined - even though the nature of union-employer relations changed substantially during this period. In this volume, the editor and chapter authors nicely update our understanding of how collective bargaining is practiced in a period of increased economic competition and concomitant managerial resistance to union objectives.

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Collective bargaining has always had a paradoxical existence in this country. Employers, managers, investors, conservative politicians, and upwardly mobile employees usually dislike it; unions, do-gooders, liberal politicians, most social scientists, and selective groups of employees usually embrace it; and the large swaths of the population that are not in the labor force generally think it is a good idea in the abstract but are put off by union leader posturing, the (usually imaginary) inconveniences associated with work stoppages, and the low status that unions occupy in our social prestige hierarchy. This mixture of support and opposition is an understandable reflection of the fact that collective bargaining is an asymmetric interorganizational relationship in which one participant (the union) fervently loves the connection and wants it to endure, while the other participant (the employer) hates the practice and prefers to terminate the relationship.

From the late 1940s through the late 1970s collective bargaining - and the unions responsible for its existence - seemed to be a stable part of the private workplace landscape (even though unions never represented more than one-third of the labor force). During the past fifteen or so years, however, the institution of collective bargaining has been battered as at no other time since the early 1930s. During the 1980s union membership declined by the millions, and unions now represent only about one-ninth of the private sector labor force (though they have a much larger share of the government sector). During this same period, the balance of bargaining power shifted from unions to employers, as seen in the 85 percent decline in the annual number of work stoppages from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, and employers used their increased clout to insist on managerial-favorable terms (interestingly called "concession bargaining," a label that was never applied to decades of employers yielding to union negotiating demands). One result of these trends is the growth of a journalistic cottage industry that periodically (especially around Labor Day) announces that the labor movement is on its deathbed. As with Mark Twain's reported demise, this volume makes clear that these announcements are exaggerated. At the same time, the authors of these chapters accurately portray the recent tough times for unions and the collective representation they provide to workers' interests.

Because U. S. collective bargaining is practiced on a much more decentralized or employer-specific basis than in most other industrialized countries, and because bargaining practices tend to reflect the particular market circumstances within each industry, the changes that characterized union-management relationships during the 1980s are difficult to specify precisely on an economy-wide basis. For that reason, a collection of industry-specific analyses is an excellent way to understand how collective bargaining has changed in recent years. Accordingly, the chapters in this volume portray how union-management bargaining was practiced in twelve private-sector industries (papermaking, meatpacking, aerospace, steel, automobile assembly, auto parts, trucking, telecommunication, textiles, construction, hospitality, and agriculture) during the 1980s and early 1990s. Each chapter tells us of the economic trends in that industry, describes the pertinent unions, and specifies the changes in bargaining structures, practices, disputes, and outcomes.

The common theme that emerges from these industry studies is how the unions have coped with the key adversities confronting them, including (1) the loss of jobs, (2) employer resistance to union organizing drives, (3) employer concessionary bargaining demands (e.g., wage freezes or cuts, health insurance cost-sharing, work rule elimination, etc.), and (4) employer willingness to threaten and actually use permanent strike replacements if the union walks out. These chapters specify how employer bargaining and union-avoidance initiatives have been driven by increased competition in product markets (accompanied by the loss of hundreds of thousands of unionized jobs at those employers who were slow to react) and have been facilitated by a labor law system that allows employers and unions considerable freedom to play bargaining hardball with only modest penalties for rules violations. A few industries (trucking, telecommunications) experienced product-market deregulation, and this elimination of the protective regulatory umbrella resulted in additional labor relations turmoil in those industries.

Business Services Industry

Contemporary Collective Bargaining in the Private Sector. - book reviews

Administrative Science Quarterly, Sept, 1997 by Peter Feuille

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