Building Strategic Capacity: The Political Underpinnings of Coordinated Wage Bargaining

Encompassing labor movements and coordinated wage setting are central to the social democratic economic model that has proven successful among the nations of Western Europe. The coordination of wage bargaining across many unions and employers has been used to explain everything from inequality to un...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:American journal of political science 2010-02, Vol.104 (1), p.171-188
Main Author: AHLQUIST, JOHN S.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Bargaining
Case Studies
Centralization
Collective bargaining
Confederation
Coordination
Decision making
Economic models
Empirical research
Employers
Employment
Endowments
Federations
Income inequality
Industrial Structure
Labor
Labor unions
Labour movements
Macroeconomics
Modeling
Negotiation
Political economy
Political parties
Political partisanship
Political science
Politics
Postdoctoral Education
Power
Social democracy
Strategic behaviour
Strikes
Trade unions
Unemployment
Union leadership
Union Members
Union membership
Unions
Wage determination
Wages
Wages & salaries
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Summary:Encompassing labor movements and coordinated wage setting are central to the social democratic economic model that has proven successful among the nations of Western Europe. The coordination of wage bargaining across many unions and employers has been used to explain everything from inequality to unemployment. Yet there has been limited theoretical and quantitative empirical work exploring the determinants of bargaining coordination. I argue formally that more unequally distributed resources across unions should inhibit the centralization of strike powers in union federations. Using membership as a proxy for union resources, I find empirical evidence for this hypothesis in a panel of 15 OECD democracies, 1950–2000. I then show that the centralization of strike powers is a strong predictor of coordinated bargaining.
ISSN:0003-0554
0092-5853
1537-5943
DOI:10.1017/S0003055409990384