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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 November 2014
Apart from its legal aspects, and legislative promptings and permissions, collective bargaining on this continent is pretty much of a single piece. The international trade unions play out their bargaining offers and techniques in Canada as in the United States, with little attention to the boundary line. In this paper on trends, therefore, I have chosen to move freely over the whole movement rather than limit the study to Canada where in fact little of the pioneering has been done.
Expansion. Collective bargaining on this continent is enjoying rapid growth after marking time or even falling back for a decade in the 1920's and early 30's. In the United States, the year 1933 marks a dividing point in time. But the longer history of trade union development has in fact been characterized by a series of up-surges followed by slow-downs or flat periods. These have been affected in some measure by business cycle conditions, but the sequence of prosperity and depression is not always the central and frequently not a very revealing feature in their explanation. One needs to consider the unevenness of trade union advance in relation to many matters such as changing attitudes toward recognition by employers, attitudes of different governments as expressed through legislatures and courts, periods of war and cost-plus contracts, the social and political philosophy of the men who give leadership to the two sides, the Carnegies, Girdlers, Fords, Gompers, Hillmans, and Lewises. Above all, one must examine its different rate of progress among different industries and trades. With respect to the last, one must examine the areas of early conquest and the special additions made from time to time. This paper attempts to examine only two or three strands of causation.
1 Cf. Twentieth Century Fund, How Collective Bargaining Works (New York, 1942).Google Scholar
2 The economist will desire to carry this type of analysis further to account for distinctions in the success of collective bargaining. Unfortunately the failure of the negotiating parties to think and act according to purely economic expectations, their concern for the immediate as contrasted with the long-term advantage, and the frequent conflict between a plurality of economic forces, makes the causation difficult to untangle. Inelasticity of demand for an industry's products, for instance, should be a circumstance favourable to wage bargaining and hence to early unionization of steel and rubber rather than of clothing and anthracite coal. But other influences were stronger. The long-heralded danger of substitutes for bituminous coal where its price is continuously high has apparently made little impress on union wage policies. Mostly the negotiators are concerned with direct competition from other firms often un-unionized, that produce the same goods, and with the distribution of gross returns, between the two parties—workers and owners. Elasticity of demand for labour owing to probable substitution of machinery for workers is likely to be more effective. It broke the organization of the shoe-workers in the 1870's and cramped the style of others such as glass blowers later. Only by controlling the operation of the machines have unions succeeded in advancing or maintaining their position. Again, considerations of maintenance of consumers' purchasing power may be debated in some negotiations but probably with little discrimination between appropriate and inappropriate situations.
3 Today the two main congresses claim 350,000 members under contract out of a total membership of 440,000.
4 See below, p. 348.
5 But adds the qualification “provided the agreement in the opinion of the Minister of Labour does not restrict or hamper productive output or endanger the health and safety of the workers.”
6 Cf. agreement between the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Tennessee Valley Trades and Labor Council, given in Collective Bargaining Contracts, by the Bureau of National Affairs, Inc. (New York, 1941), p. 693.Google Scholar
7 I hesitate to attempt to assess the wage-fixing orders as an influence on collective bargaining. Some see the two as incompatible. Such a view fails to recognize that wages are not fixed; also that collective bargaining is broader than wages. Nevertheless they have undoubtedly cramped labour's reach. It is interesting to note that labour today is arguing for freeing workers of less than 50 cents an hour from P.C. 5963.
8 For an excellent analytical compilation dealing with these matters consult, Industrial Relations Section, Queen's University, Bulletin no. 6, Trade Union Agreements in Canadian Industry (Kingston, 1942).Google Scholar
9 See Norgren, Paul Herbert, The Swedish Collective Bargaining System (Cambridge, Mass., 1941), chap. xv.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
10 This statement neglects the extension by government order to the whole province of the wage and hour agreements under the Collective Agreements Act of Quebec.
11 It should be noted that industry-wide agreements, and also local master agreements in the building trades, raise important economic issues connected with the eclipse of competition, possible exploitation of consumers, and failure to permit an optimum use of resources among industries generally (see American Economic Review, Supplement, 03, 1943, pp. 163 ff.Google Scholar). It should also be noted that the Ontario Collective Bargaining Act defines a collective agreement as involving a collective bargaining agency and an employer. It makes no mention of a collectivity of employers.
12 Cf. Bureau of National Affairs, Inc., Collective Bargaining Contracts.
13 Bureau of National Affairs, Inc., Collective Bargaining Contracts, p. 689.Google Scholar