Collective Bargaining and Capital Accumulation

Abstract

Why are Japanese unions cooperative in their wage demands? Why has there been so little disruption of work through strikes over the last quarter of a century? Why have rates of capital accumulation been so high over the last four decades? In this chapter I address these disparate questions using my theory of integrated segmentation and my model of large-firm labour contracts, drawing from these theoretical concepts implications about the divisiveness of union bargaining strategy as constrained by the contracts governing employment in firms. Because the securing of costly on-going collective bargaining rights is of little interest to workers who work for their own families or work in small firms where the probability of job separation is high, most private-sector unions tend to be in companies operating with large-firm labour contracts and tend to be enterprise-specific (since extensive within-company training and the overriding importance of within company seniority make both unions and management ambivalent about interference from non-company outsiders), fissures have opened up not only within the membership of individual unions;but also between unions attempting to operate in consolidated federations, and between one federation and another. These fissures weaken the ability of unions to carry on protracted strikes, that is they dilute the capacity of labour to extract rents from the owners of capital.