Allen Ponak

Collective bargaining goals of university faculty

This paper examines the collective bargaining goals of 1,800 faculty members at eight Canadian universities. A particular focus of the study was the relationship between bargaining goals and traditional academic governance. The results of the analysis showed that faculty distinguish firmly between academic and nonacademic issues and deliberately choose to restrict the scope of bargaining to a relatively narrow range of issues involving money, job security, and grievance procedures. A major factor influencing this restricted bargaining scope was the confidence with and perceived influence of the traditional system of academic governance. The way in which the governance system functions helps determine whether academic and policy issues reach the bargaining table, suggesting that strong governance structures are not threatened by the advent of collective bargaining.

Unionized professionals and the scope of bargaining: a study of nurses.

This study examines the common assumption that unionized professionals will seek to expand the scope of negotiations to include issues reflecting distinctly professional concerns. Two questions are posed: Do professionals distinguish professional collective bargaining goals from more traditional bargaining objectives and, if so, do they view these professional goals as more or less important than the traditional ones? The author asked a sample of unionized registered nurses to appraise in a mail questionnaire an array of collective bargaining goals. Half the goals reflected traditional objectives subsumed under wages, hours, and working conditions; the other half reflected professional concerns, such as inservice education. The results show that these nurses differentiated professional from traditional goals and attached more importance to the former. The practical and theoretical implications are discussed.

Using Event History Analysis to Model Delay in Grievance Arbitration

Applying event history analysis to data on a sample of arbitration awards in Alberta in 1985–88, the authors investigate the factors that contribute to delay in different stages of the grievance arbitration process. The analysis shows that a different combination of factors explains delay at each stage of the process. The length of time from the filing of a grievance to referral to arbitration is a function of the complexity and type of the issue; delay in arbitrator selection is associated with the use of legal counsel and the size of the arbitration board; scheduling delay is associated with the nature of the grievance and the use of outside legal counsel; and delay in preparing the decision is linked to the complexity and type of the issue, board size, the presence of legal counsel, and the arbitrators workload.

Book Review: Economic and Social Security and Substandard Working Conditions: Worker Participation and Ownership: Union-Management CooperationUnion-Management Cooperation. By SchusterMichael H., Kalamazoo, Mich.: W. E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, 1984. xiv, 235 pp.

growth of self-management, a discussion of the kinds of changes in economic and political structures needed to foster this growth, and speculations about how changes can be accomplished and who should do it. It is a mixed bag of constructive commentary (e.g., on the need for a new economic theory of the labor-managed firm) and loose thinking. These chapters would have benefited from considerable editing. Gunns problem is that he knows what he does not want (hierarchically structured, ownership-controlled work organizations in a capitalist economy), and he knows, in theory at least, what he does want (a noncapitalist economy with self-minanaged firms), but he does not know how to get there, or, more important, what real-life industrial society would look like after the transformatioln. It may be too inUich to ask that Gunn have a complete model of the alternative economic system and a plan of action. But better-developed arguments and more coherence in their presentatioln would have been a great help. Despite the last chapters, however, the book is good. The case studies are excellent and make good teaching material. The use of the ten criteria in the evaluation of case data gives conceptual coherence to the study of worker selfmanagement, and helps to expose obvious weaknesses in current practices of worker participation. The emphasis on financial data and economic considerations of labor-managed firnms is a much-needed addition to the existing literature.