¹ One observer notes that in 1955 “the subject of labor relations in public employment could not have meant less to more people, both in and out of government.” See Klaus, Ida, “The Emerging Relationship,” Collective Bargaining in the Public Service, ed. Kruger, D. H. and Schmidt, Charles F. Jr. (New York: Random House, 1969), p. 11Google Scholar. Within 15 years, 2.3 million government employees held union membership and an additional 1.7 million government employees were members of associations, often functioning indistinguishably from unions. Municipal employees are represented for bargaining purposes by unions or associations in more than 1,300 communities. For statistics on the extent of public employee unionization and strike activities, see Tax Foundation, New York, Union and Government Employment (New York: Tax Foundation, May 1972), Tables 1 and 2, pp. 8–9Google Scholar, and Table 10, p. 29, and Nelson, Richard H. and Doster, James L., “City Employee Representation and Bargaining Policies,” Monthly Labor Review, 95 (November, 1972), 43–50Google Scholar. For a comparison of union and association behavior in the field of public education, consult Muir, J. Douglas, “The Strike as a Professional Sanction: The Changing Attitude of the National Education Association,” Labor Law Journal, 19 (October, 1968), 615–627Google Scholar.

² Scholars have adopted a number of approaches in their efforts to describe and explain conflict and outcomes in public sector collective bargaining. Liston, for example, attempts to explain the causes of public employee strikes merely by asserting that government workers in the lower classifications want higher salaries. See Liston, Robert A., The Limits of Defiance: Strikes, Rights and Government (New York: Franklin Watts, 1971)Google Scholar. Wellington, and Winter, , in The Unions and the Cities (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1971)Google Scholar, Chapter 1, employ a conceptual framework which assumes “a municipality with an elected city council and an elected mayor who bargains with unions representing the employees of the city.” The conceptual framework is for the most part undefined and unaccompanied by indicators or constructs for its operationalization. Drotning, Lipsky, and Foster take a broad positivist approach to public sector collective bargaining. The outcome of interest to Drotning et al. is the mode of conflict resolution — mediation, fact-finding or conciliation. Although the authors fail to operationalize their approach, a more fundamental problem is the absence of any formal explication of the theoretical relationships underlying the variables. See Drotning, John, Lipsky, David, and Foster, Howard, “The Analysis of Impasse Procedures in Public Sector Negotiations,” Management of Personnel Quarterly, 9 (Summer, 1971), 21–30Google Scholar. For one of the more promising recent attempts to explain conflict see Kochan, Thomas A., “A Theory of Multilateral Collective Bargaining in City Governments,” Industrial and Labor Relations Review, 27 (July, 1974), 525–542CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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⁶ Equilibrium theory is presented and discussed in Barnard, Chester I., The Functions of the Executive (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1938)Google Scholar, and March, James G. and Simon, Herbert A., Organizations (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1958)Google Scholar.

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⁹ Thompson, , Organizations in Action, p. 106Google Scholar.

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¹⁵ Olson, Mancur Jr., The Logic of Collective Action (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), p. 79Google Scholar.

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⁴⁴ New York City, Office of the Mayor, Executive Order No. 49, March 31, 1958.

⁴⁵ Horton, Raymond D., Municipal Labor Relations in New York City (New York: Praeger, 1973), p. 30Google Scholar.

⁴⁶ New York City, Office of the Mayor, Executive Order No. 52, September 29, 1967. See Horton, Municipal Labor Relations in New York City for an extended discussion of the evolution of New York City's collective bargaining law.

⁴⁷ New York State Sessions Laws (1967), Chapter 392.

⁴⁸ These procedures are spelled out in the New York City Collective Bargaining Law, New York City, Administrative Code, chapter 54. For the establishment of the Office of Collective Bargaining, see: New York City Charter, chapter 54, section 1173.

⁴⁹ Sayre, Wallace and Kaufman, Herbert, Governing New York City: Politics in the Metropolis, 2nd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1965), p. 710Google Scholar.

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⁵² The Office of Labor Relations was created by Mayor Lindsay in 1966. Its primary function is to represent the City government and units within its jurisdiction in collective bargaining. For an inside view of its operations see Russo, Anthony C., “Management View of the New York City Experience,” Unionization of Municipal Employees, ed. Connery, Robert H. and Farr, William V., (New York: The Academy of Political Science, Columbia University, 1971, pp. 80–93Google Scholar.

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⁵⁵ New York City, Office of Collective Bargaining, Annual Reports, 1970–1971, pp. 6–7.

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⁵⁷ Sayre, and Kaufman, , Governing New York City, p. 709Google Scholar, characterize New York City as “imperial” among American cities.

⁵⁸ On this point, compare the 1971 and 1973 versions of the following publications: U.S. Department of Labor, Labor Management Services Administration, Division of Public Employee Labor Relations, Summary of State Policy Regulations for Public Sector Labor Relations: Statutes, Attorney General's Opinions, and Selected Court Decisions (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, November, 1971 and February, 1973)Google Scholar. For a general discussion of the diffusion of similar institutional innovations, see Walker, Jack L., “The Diffusion of Innovation Among the American States,” American Political Science Review, 63 (September, 1969), 880–889CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For an analysis of public employment bargaining laws see Kochan, Thomas A., “Correlates of State Public Employee Bargaining Laws,” Industrial Relations, 12 (October, 1973), 322–337Google Scholar.

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⁶¹ New York City, Office of Collective Bargaining, Annual Report — 1972; New York State Public Employment Relations Board, Detailed Listing of Public Employee Work Stoppages; and Economic Development Council of New York City, New York City's Public Sector Collective Bargaining.

⁶² New York City, Office of Collective Bargaining, Annual Report — 1968–1972. The bulk of information was contained in these reports. Additional information on impasses was retrieved from other unpublished documents within the Office of Collective Bargaining.

⁶³ An appendix containing the cases analyzed, the affiliations of the employee groups, and the year in which negotiations were conducted is available upon request from the authors.

⁶⁴ Communication from John T. Burnell, Director, Office of Labor Relations, March 23, 1974. The initial number of union demands was also supplied by the OLR.

⁶⁵ The content of the demands would have been extremely useful for further analysis, but the lack of uniformity in maintaining these as records within organizations and the often sensitive nature of their content militated against obtaining them.

⁶⁶ Hammermesh, Daniel S., “Who Wins in Wage Bargaining,” Industrial and Labor Relations Review, 26 (July, 1973), 1146–1149Google Scholar, at 1147.

⁶⁷ Ibid.

⁶⁸ D. S. Pugh, D. J. Hickson, C. R. Hinings, and C. Turner, “The Context of Organizational Structures.”

⁶⁹ Ibid., p. 106.

⁷⁰ Ibid., p. 107.

⁷¹ The number of employees in the bargaining unit was contained on the master lists used in sample selection. Most of the information on grievance arbitrations filed was obtained from internal records of the OCB.

⁷² New York City, Office of the Mayor, Executive Order No. 52, p. 19.

⁷³ Derber, Milton, Chalmers, W. Ellison, and Stagner, Ross, The Local Union-Management Relationship (Urbana, Ill.: Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations, 1960)Google Scholar.

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⁷⁵ Ibid.

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⁷⁸ These categories correspond to the frequently used empirical distinctions among wages, fringe benefits, and other terms and conditions of employment. Different terminology is used here to reflect more clearly the inclusion criteria for each category. Those provisions other than wages and salaries which either entailed a direct fiscal outlay or for which cost calculations could be made were placed in the nonsalary cost category. Items such as tuition reimbursement, uniform allowances, and meal allowances were included in this category. Among the items included in the noncost category were provisions covering contracting out, transfers, physical working conditions, and posting of vacancies.

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