Abstract
During the first wave of concession bargaining, occurring in the 1980s, employers were reacting to the pressures of global competition, domestic nonunion competition, and deregulation by insisting that unions lower labor costs. New collective agreements frequently had wage cuts or freezes, changes in work rules, and reduced pensions. Concession bargaining became widespread in the airlines (among the older, legacy carriers losing in their competitive battles with the low-cost carriers) and in domestic auto making, and then spread to other industrial sectors. The first wave of concession bargaining eroded the foundations of the labor accord (the accommodation underlying the relationship between unions and employers), freeing employers to incite the ultra-concession bargaining that would appear around the turn of the next century.
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Notes
- 1.
Some (e.g., Schiavone 2008; McCartin 2011) continue to argue that the breaking of the strike by air traffic controllers in 1981 (the PATCO strike) by President Reagan signaled to employers that antiunion extremism was entirely appropriate and effective, and that this example led directly to the concession bargaining of the 1980s. However, there is no evidence of any causal linkage between the defeat of the PATCO strikers and changes in employer bargaining strategies and tactics or the intensity of their antiunion campaigns during organizing drives.
- 2.
For a bibliography of articles dealing with the early years of the first wave of concession bargaining, see Dworaczek (1984).
- 3.
- 4.
The legacy carriers were not able to compete with the low-cost carriers and the low-cost carriers kept their costs down by growing quickly. The low-cost carriers relied on point-to-point systems that did not integrate flights, instead focusing on low-cost traveling between sites. The legacy carriers used the hub and spoke system of operations under which passengers fly to hubs at major airports to connect to flights to their final destinations. This was a convenient way for traveling from small communities because it opened up worldwide routes, but it was 45 % more expensive than a point-to-point system (Chaison 2007).
- 5.
For an argument that the concessions negotiated at the automakers in the early 1980s set the trend for unions granting concessions see Slaughter (1983).
- 6.
For an overview of the relationship between the UAW and GM from the earliest days of organizing in the 1930s to the bankruptcy of GM in 2009, see de Gier (2010).
- 7.
For a review of the state of the UAW following the decline of the domestic car producers, see Seetharam and Korkki (2011).
- 8.
Some believed that the accord was neither entirely balanced nor pervasive. It was limited by geography (found mostly in heavily industrialized regions such as the Northeast) and by industry (primarily in manufacturing, mining, transportation, and construction). In these regions and industries, the workforce was so heavily unionized that employers had little to gain by resisting unions (Edwards and Podgursky 1986; Chaison and Bigelow 2002; Godard 2009). N. Lichtenstein, a major critic of the prevalence of the labor–management accord, wrote that the accord was “at best a brittle truce in which each side probed for weaknesses and division on the other side” (Lichtenstein 2011, 3). This critique is fully developed in Lichtenstein (2002, 98–140).
- 9.
As Marshall (2011, 2) described the basic understanding between labor and management: “workers offered loyalty and labor offered peace to companies in return for stable jobs and decent pay and benefits.”
- 10.
- 11.
As the accord unraveled so did workers’ loyalty to their employers. Many workers had thought that they would be rewarded for their efforts with long-term employment but after their unions agreed to concessions, they found that their assumptions about long tenure were being ignored by their employer and they could easily lose their jobs (Korkki 2011).
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Chaison, G. (2012). The First Wave: Concession Bargaining in the 1980s. In: The New Collective Bargaining. SpringerBriefs in Economics. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-4024-6_3
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