Collective Bargaining in the Private Sector

INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS RESEARCH ASSOCIATION SERIES Collective Bargaining in the Private Sector EDITED BY Paul F. Clark, John T. Delaney, and Ann C. Frost COLLECTIVE BARGAINING IN THE PRIVATE SECTOR. Copyright © 2002 by the Industrial Relations Research Association. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used without written permission, except in the case of brief quo- tations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First Edition ISBN 0–913447–84–6 Price: $29.95 INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS RESEARCH ASSOCIATION SERIES: Proceedings of the Annual Meeting Annual Research Volume Membership Directory (published every fourth year) IRRA Newsletter (published quarterly) Perspectives on Work (published biannually) Inquiries and other communications regarding membership, meetings, publications, and general affairs of the Association, as well as notice of address changes should be addressed to the IRRA National Office. INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS RESEARCH ASSOCIATION University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 121 Labor and Industrial Relations Building 504 E. Armory Avenue Champaign, IL 61820 USA Phone: 217/333-0072 • Fax: 217/265-5130 Email: [email protected] • Website: www.irra.uiuc.edu ii CONTENTS INTRODUCTION—Private-Sector Collective Bargaining: Is This the End or a New Beginning?..................... 1 Paul F. Clark, John T. Delaney and Ann C. Frost CHAPTER 1—Airlines: Can Collective Bargaining Weather the Storm?....................................................................... 15 Nancy Brown Johnson CHAPTER 2—Autos: Continuity and Change in Collective Bargaining ..................................................... 55 Harry C. Katz, John Paul MacDuffie, and Frits K. Pil CHAPTER 3—Health Care: A Growing Role for Collective Bargaining ..................................................... 91 Paul F. Clark CHAPTER 4—Hotels and Casinos: Collective Bargaining During a Decade of Expansion...................................... 137 C. Jeffrey Waddoups and Vincent H. Eade CHAPTER 5—Newspapers: Collective Bargaining Decline Amidst Technological Change........................................ 179 Howard R. Stanger CHAPTER 6—Professional Sports: Collective Bargaining in the Spotlight ............................................................... 217 James B. Dworkin and Richard A. Posthuma CHAPTER 7—Telecommunications: Collective Bargaining in an Era of Industry Reconsolidation........................... 263 Jeffery Keefe and Rosemary Batt CHAPTER 8—Trucking: Collective Bargaining Takes a Rocky Road .................................................................. 311 Michael H. Belzer CHAPTER 9—Practitioner Commentary............................................... 343 Richard Bank iii CHAPTER 10—Practitioner Commentary............................................. 361 Peter Warrian About the Contributors ........................................................................ 375 iv INTRODUCTION Private-Sector Collective Bargaining: Is This the End or a New Beginning? PAUL F. C LARK Pennsylvania State University JOHN T. DELANEY Michigan State University ANN C. FROST University of Western Ontario Collective bargaining in U.S. private-sector industries is under siege. The unrelenting intrusion of global markets into corporate boardrooms and the general antipathy toward unions by managers have contributed to a substantial decline in union density since the 1950s. The inability of unions to organize new private-sector members, the rigid postwar legal framework regulating private-sector collective bargaining, and the pas- sage of free trade agreements now threaten to make collective bargaining an anachronism. More importantly, because it has not been able to adjust to the new realities facing private-sector business, observers are beginning to ask whether the American system of collective bargaining is suited to satisfying the needs of workers and employers today. This volume examines collective bargaining patterns in eight major industries in an effort to determine how the parties have responded to this challenging environment. While we make no claim that the sectors studied or experiences cited reflect the situation perfectly, we believe that the contributors offer an accurate view of the problems facing private-sector collective bargaining in the United States. Background—Collective Bargaining Today Over the past quarter century, the Industrial Relations Research Association (IRRA) has published three volumes of case studies examin- ing collective bargaining in North American industries. Gerald Somers published the first volume in 1980 and Paula Voos the second in 1994. With private-sector union density having fallen to 9 percent in 2002, the 1 2 COLLECTIVE BARGAINING IN THE PRIVATE SECTOR contributors to this volume chronicle a very different set of experiences from the contributors to the previous volumes. Jack Barbash’s assessment of the state of collective bargaining in the book by Somers, for example, emphasized the importance of power in collective bargaining (1980:587–88). At issue was how power should be exercised and how closely it should be regulated by government. This was an important consideration in the late 1970s because unions had consolidated considerable bargaining power in numerous industries during the first three-quarters of the century. This power presented a significant challenge to management and to government and allowed unions to play a strong role in determining societal outcomes. By the early 1990s, power was still an important issue in bargaining, but observers no longer characterized labor and management as equals. Contributors to the volume by Voos, instead, expressed concern about management’s increasing dominance of labor relations. It was feared that firms were using their power to impose their will on unions and workers. For this reason, the role played by U.S. labor law was seen as a decisive factor. As Voos noted, “If we want to foster cooperative joint efforts—and our public policy interest in promoting high-wage, high- productivity outcomes suggests that we should—it will be necessary to change both the economic terrain and the laws that govern organizing and collective bargaining” (1994:19). In recent years, the balance of power has continued to shift toward management’s favor. With no change in U.S. labor relations law and policy in sight, the outlook for unions is generally worse than it was a decade ago. While the decline of North American unions is not the focus of this volume, that stark reality is the context within which the chapters that follow are set. In some of the industries examined in this volume, circumstances have changed so greatly in recent years that the very future of collective bargaining is in question. Most notably, the trucking and newspaper industries may be nearing the end of the bargaining road. The dramatic decline of bargaining in trucking is illustrated by the assessments of the authors of the 1980, 1994, and 2002 IRRA volume chapters on that industry. Writing in 1980, Barbash summed up the state of collective bargaining in the trucking industry as one of “weak employers confronting a powerful union” (1980:562). In his chapter on the same industry for the 1994 IRRA volume, Mike Belzer suggested that the situation was almost desperate for the Teamsters union. And in his chapter for this volume, Belzer reports that things have gotten worse. A confluence of forces INTRODUCTION 3 threatens to eliminate the unionized portion of the trucking industry. According to Belzer, only a temporary delay of the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) trucking provi- sions has given breathing room to unionized truckers. The delay may end soon. Ironically, if Belzer is correct, that will mean that Jim Hoffa will oversee the decline of the union built and made famous by his father. While emerging trends are less dire in some industries, unions in most sectors face a difficult future in the collective bargaining arena. American unions face several critical challenges at the start of the twenty-first century. Perhaps the most significant challenge is bargaining in an environment of steadily decreasing union density. Over the past decade, the percentage of private-sector employees represented by a union has declined from about 13 percent to 9 percent. Similarly, representation rates in manufacturing industries declined from 21 percent in 1992 to less than 16 percent in 2001. As union density declines, so does union bargaining power. And as union bargaining power diminishes, so do the outcomes of bargaining for union members. For example, the union/nonunion wage differential has been affected by changes in union representation rates. Historically, union workers have earned about 15 percent more than nonunion workers in the same industry. In a 1997 National Compensation Study survey, the Bureau of Labor Statistics re- ported that the overall union/nonunion wage differential was 4.3 percent. Notably, the same survey indicated that the union/nonunion wage differential for blue collar workers was almost 38 percent. The results suggest that unions have been able to secure substantially higher compensation for employees with lower skill levels but not for higher skilled or service sector employees. This pattern, in turn, likely encourages employers to fight unionization efforts among lower-paid workers and discourages employees in high skill jobs and growing segments of the economy from joining unions. This one–two punch, in turn, reinforces

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