Forthcoming Review of Economics and Statistics, 1999. The Effect of Collective Bargaining Legislation on Strikes and Wages (original) (raw)

Strike Activity Under Enterprise Bargaining: Economics or Politics?

Australian Journal of Labour …, 2004

Australia has moved rapidly from a centralised Award based wage determination system to decentralised enterprise bargaining. This move has been associated with a substantial drop in strike activity. The relationship between working days lost and a series ...

Is industrial unrest reviving in Canada? Strike duration in the early twenty-first century

Canadian Review of Sociology, 2013

Canadian data on strike frequency, duration, and volume imply that the strike is withering away. Some research also suggests that strike duration is countercyclical. However, the early twenty-first century was anomalous from the viewpoint of these expectations. After 2001, mean strike duration increased and was not countercyclical. This paper explains the anomaly by arguing that employers are seeking to scale back the wage gains of previous decades in the face of mounting public debt and the whip of an increasingly unfettered market. These conditions apparently motivate some workers to endure protracted work stoppages, irrespective of the phase of the business cycle, in an effort to protect their rights.