Daniel J. B. Mitchell

Justice for Janitors in Los Angeles: Lessons from Three Rounds of Negotiations

We examine an important recent organizing success of the US labour movement: the ‘Justice for Janitors’ campaign in Los Angeles. This campaign has spanned a complete business cycle and shows the union’s capacity for growth over time. It illustrates the potential for unions to overcome pro–employer bias of labour laws, as well as their efficacy in appealing to the wider public. It exposes the importance of building coalitions, as well as the value of union analysis of legal, industrial, and political conditions. Our analysis suggests conditions under which unions might survive and thrive in the service sector in the twenty–first century.

Human resource management : an economic approach

1 An Economic Approach to Human Resource Management 2 The US Workforce 3 Productivity 4 Employee Appraisal and Reward 5 Alternative Pay Systems 6 Analysis of Pay Setting 7 The Compensation Decision 8 Making General Pay Adjustments 9 Making General Pay Adjustments 10 The Collective-Bargaining Relationship 11 Conflicts Between Employer and Employee Goals 12 The Employment Market 13 Training, Human Capital and Employment Stabilization 14 Economic Regulation, Social Insurance and Minimum Standards 15 Restricting Opportunity and Enhancing Opportunity: Immigration Control and EEO 16 International Side of Human Resource Management.

Systems of Employee Voice: Theoretical and Empirical Perspectives:

The mechanisms by which voice is provided to employees vary widely. Mandated voice systems, which are common in Western European nations, include works councils, codetermination, and legislated protection against unjust dismissal. Voluntary voice systems, which are common in the U. S., include unionism, accompanied by collective bargaining and grievance procedures, and nonunion grievance-like dispute resolution procedures. These nonunion procedures have become commonplace in large U. S. firms, but sometimes result in reprisals against employees and managers who are directly involved in their use. Thus it is important for businesses operating in the U. S. to make informed choices among the wide range of voluntary employee voice systems that prevail in the labor market.

Wage Pressures and Labor Shortages: The 1960s and 1980s

As THE U.S. unemployment rate fell during 1988 and early 1989 into the 5-5.5 percent range, observers worried about upward pressure on wage inflation. The concern grew naturally out of the experience of the 1970s, when wage inflation accelerated whenever the unemployment rate fell into the 6-7 percent range. But while such concern is understandable, it may be misplaced. Imagine an economic historian painting the following broad picture of the American labor market.

Management attitudes toward two-tier pay plans

Two-tier pay plans, under which new hires are paid on a lower pay scale than existing employees, have been used with increasing frequency in union-management contracts. The two-tier phenomenon appears to be associated with the wider concession bargaining movement that began in the early 1980s. In this study, management attitudes toward and forecasts about two-tier pay plans are explored by means of a questionnaire survey.In general, the management community is found to be optimistic about the spread and utility of two-tier pay plans in the near term. Managers in firms that actually have two-tier plans are more enthusiastic about their impacts than other managers. Over a longer term, however, the managers surveyed tend to believe that separate wage scales under two-tier plans will eventually be merged into a unified scale.

Employee Benefits and the New Economy: A Proposal for Reform

Employer-provided benefits such as pensions and health insurance are commonplace in the U.S. economy, thanks to generous tax subsidies. These benefits are often not 100% portable from job to job and thus interfere with labor mobility. Yet changes in the American economy are likely to make mobility more important in the future. It is important that benefits be made portable and that all sources of social insurance—not just employers—be made eligible for the same tax subsidies. There should be no public policy presumption that social insurance is best provided in the workplace.

Employer preferences for long-term union contracts

In recent years, the American industrial relations system has undergone considerable stress. One byproduct of a stressful period is that old ways of conducting industrial relations are being increasingly questioned. The fact that questions are raised, however, does not necessarily mean that the climate for change is receptive to all suggestions. In this paper we provide evidence that the management community would strongly oppose recent suggestions for the abandonment of long-term collective bargaining contracts.

Some empirical observations of relevance to the analysis of union wage determination

Six important empirical characteristics of the union sector need to be incorporated into future research on wage determination. These are 1) the extent of unionization, 2) the statistical correlates of unionization, 3) divergent trends in union and nonunion earnings, 4) union/nonunion wage differentials, 5) the determinants of union and nonunion wage change, and 6) wage imitation. Examination of these characteristics suggests the following about union wage determination. Union wages have advanced relative to nonunion since the mid 1950s, despite relative shrinkage of the union sector. Union wage changes show less sensitivity to business-cycle pressures than nonunion. Limited spheres of wage imitation surround certain major union negotiations. These observations can be fitted into recent analyses of wage determination under long-term employer employee relationships, and have relevance for anti-inflation policy.

Getting it Right: Empirical Evidence and Policy Implications from Research on Public-Sector Unionism and Collective Bargaining

The United States is in the throes of a public-policy debate about public-sector unionism and collective bargaining. The ostensible trigger of this debate is the fiscal crises that state and local governments have been experiencing since 2008. The debate largely centers on the extent to which public employee unions have contributed to this crisis through the pay and benefits they have negotiated for public employees. The role of government as employer is connected in this debate to the role of government as a taxing authority and provider of public services. These roles are often claimed to be in conflict with one another — that is, governments as employers are seen as not exercising the same due diligence in setting pay and benefits as private-sector employers. The research evidence indicates, however, that these claims about public employment are based on incomplete and in some cases inaccurate understanding.

The 1982 Union Wage Concessions: A Turning Point for Collective Bargaining?

Arguments that 1982 marked a turning point in union wage determination are overstated. While dramatic wage and other concessions were made during the 1982 collective-bargaining round—wage freezes were the most common type of concession, but absolute cuts were made in some wage levels—cuts and freezes touched only a small proportion of the contracts negotiated, and concession contracts themselves preserved the principles of multiyear duration and cost-of-living escalation. Some of the income security arrangements conceded by management in exchange for wage cuts or freezes will endure, and gain sharing could become a significant factor in wage determination if it is continued and becomes more widespread.