Unions and Collective Bargaining in the Wake of the Great Recession (original) (raw)

The Microeconomic Impact of Trade Union Representatives: Evidence from Membership Thresholds∗

2018

Union representatives in firms are a potentially key but not yet studied source of the impact of unions. Their actions can shape multiple drivers of firm performance, including collective bargaining, strikes, and training. This paper examines the impact of union rep mandates by exploiting legal membership thresholds in Portugal: for instance, while firms employing up to 49 union members are required to have one union rep, this increases to two (three) union reps for firms with 50 to 99 (100-199) union members. Drawing on matched employer-employee data and regression discontinuity methods, we find that a one percentage point increase in the legal union rep/members ratio leads to an increase in firm performance of at least 7%. This result holds across multiple dimensions of firm performance and appears to be driven by increased training. However, we find no effects of union reps on firm-level wages, given the predominance of sectoral collective bargaining.

Bargaining regimes and wages in Portugal

Portuguese Economic Journal, 2002

In this paper we analyse the bargaining regime wage-effect in Portugal. The results indicate that the bargaining regime coverage is important in explaining the variability of wages. Wage differentials between bargaining regimes are substantial, a fact which may be related to a decentralised wage setting which prevails in Portugal. The highest wages are generated by multi-firm negotiations and the lowest are generated by sectoral contracts. Single-firm contracts align at an intermediate level in the ranking.

Recent Trends in Collective Bargaining in Europe

E-Journal of international and comparative labour studies, 2016

Europe has recently been undergoing a severe economic and financial crisis. Although several countries had already been introducing labour reforms in the past years, the crisis was undoubtedly an accelerating force that called for more and deeper changes. This paper considers such changes and how in a number of cases (e.g. Portugal and Greece), the reforms were even demanded by external entities as a condition for financial assistance.

The extension of collective agreements in France, Portugal and Spain

Transfer: European Review of Labour and Research

This article examines the role of extension provisions for collective agreements in France, Portugal and Spain, three countries that have faced pressure to introduce more flexibility in their employment regimes during recent economic crises. The article establishes the continuing importance of extension provisions for maintaining high bargaining coverage in all three countries and traces the origin of national differences in their evolution to the strategies of the various actors, governments, employers and trade unions, and the context in which they are operating. It also looks at the characteristics of the extension regulations themselves. Cet article examine le rôle des mécanismes d’extension des accords collectifs en France, au Portugal et en Espagne, trois pays qui ont été contraints d’introduire plus de flexibilité dans leurs régimes d’emploi durant les récentes crises économiques. L’article établit l’importance constante des dispositifs d’extension pour maintenir une couvertu...

The Impact of Unions on Wages in Brazilian Manufacturing

Studies in Economics, 1998

The empirical literature on the impact of unions on wages has stressed two major conclusions. Firstly, unionised workers earn a wage premium when compared to comparable nonunionised workers. Secondly, the dispersion of wages within the union sector is lower than in the nonunion sector. We examine the validity of these findings in the context of a developing country labour market. Our results show that unionism does create a positive wage differential for male, semi-skilled workers with formal labour contracts in Brazilian manufacturing, and that, contrary to the common finding in the existing literature, wage dispersion is greater in the union sector. We show that these findings can be explained by the greater variance in the characteristics of unionised workers, the vulnerability of nonunionised workers to market conditions, and the structure of wage bargaining.