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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 November 2014
Multiple-employer collective bargaining includes all systems of bargaining in which representatives of a number of separate firms act as a group in negotiating with representatives of their workers. The group negotiations need not cover the whole content of the contracts signed by the participating companies, nor does the group action necessarily extend from negotiation to administration of the collective bargaining contract. The employers' bargaining unit may be of any size. Industry-wide bargaining is only one form of multiple-employer bargaining; characteristics of multiple-employer bargaining are also present, although sometimes less pronounced, in local or district bargaining systems.
A significant proportion of the collective bargaining systems in Canada are organized on a multiple-employer basis. The Department of Labour estimated that in 1946, 26 per cent of all workers under collective agreements were covered by agreements negotiated by associations or groups of employers. The ratio would be 46 per cent if workers covered by agreements extended under the Collective Agreement Act of Quebec were included. The relative importance of multiple-employer collective bargaining is probably much the same today.
1 “Extent of Collective Bargaining between Unions and Employers' Associations or Groups,” Labour Gazette, XLIX, 01, 1949, 21.Google Scholar
2 “The Act provides that a collective agreement signed between one or more employers in an industry and the bona fide representative of the employees may be extended to cover all the workers in an industry in the province or in a section of the province.” Ibid., 22.
3 Where the supply of labour to the firm is completely inelastic there would, of course, be no economic advantage to employers in bargaining in groups, but such a condition is rare. In some cases employers may embark on multiple-employer bargaining for non-economic reasons; see discussion of the origin of group bargaining in the pulp and paper industry below.
4 Fourth Annual Meeting of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science, Glasgow, 1860, Reports on Industrial Conflict and Union Organization in England (1845–1859), in Occasional Papers, Reprint Series no. 10, Sutro Branch California State Library, 1940.Google Scholar
5 The relationship cannot be evaluated solely in terms of the frequency of industrial disputes since strikes will be rare not only when there is harmony between union and management but also when there is great disparity in the power of the two parties. This does not mean, however, that it is impossible to evaluate the collective bargaining relationship. See below.
6 In Europe and other Commonwealth countries, where multiple-employer bargaining is more general than in Canada and the United States, government policies on wages and industrial relations have probably constituted a greater stimulus to multiple-employer bargaining than has the process of institutional change within the trade union whereby collective bargaining authority is centralized at the top of the organization.
7 Worldng conditions cannot be precisely defined since the relationship between union and management is an evolving one.
8 See, for example, Wolman, Leo, Industry-Wide Bargaining (Irvington-on-Hudson, N.Y., 1948), 28.Google Scholar
9 Or if the union has such influence over employers that it can affect the wage rate employers will offer and can prevent undercutting of this rate; cf. Friedman, Milton, “Significance of Labor Unions for Economic Policy,” The Impact of the Union (New York, 1951), 2, 3.Google Scholar It is probably significant that in the pulp and paper industry, the only one of the industries studied where the unions appear to possess such influence, the unions' influence on the wage policy of employers has been appreciably greater in times of prosperity than in times of recession when competition threatened to increase.
10 In fact the three locals of the Teamsters' Union in the interurban trucking industry in Southern Ontario stated in their brief to an arbitration board established in 1947 that “dealing on an industry-wide basis … the minimum of acceptance is offered in regard to Union Security rather than a fair cross-section of the opinion of the employers involved.”
11 This comparison is based on the change in certain basic wage rates in the industries studied: the starting rate in the newsprint division of the pulp and paper industry, journeymen rates in the commercial printing industry, and the rates of highway drivers in the interurban trucking industry. These data are admittedly unsatisfactory and the comparisons are suggestive but certainly not conclusive.
12 Dominion Bureau of Statistics, Canada Year Book, 1951 (Ottawa, 1951), 715.Google Scholar
13 Brown, E. H. Phelps and Roberts, B. C., “Wage Policy in Great Britain,” Lloyds Bank Review, 01, 1952, 28.Google Scholar