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8 - CENTRALIZED BARGAINING AND WAGE RESTRAINT

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2010

By
Michael Wallerstein
Edited by
David Austen-Smith ,
Jeffry A. Frieden ,
Miriam A. Golden ,
Karl Ove Moene  and
Adam Przeworski
David Austen-Smith
Affiliation:
Northwestern University, Illinois
Jeffry A. Frieden
Affiliation:
Harvard University, Massachusetts
Miriam A. Golden
Affiliation:
University of California, Los Angeles
Karl Ove Moene
Affiliation:
Universitetet i Oslo
Adam Przeworski
Affiliation:
New York University
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Summary

Introduction

During recent years extensive research has centered on corporatist patterns of interest representation and centralized systems of collective bargaining. This research has associated corporatism and centralized bargaining with “labor quiescence,” to use David Cameron's (1984) label for the combination of low strike rates and wage restraint. Labor quiescence, in turn, is claimed to contribute to successful economic performance: lower rates of inflation and unemployment, higher rates of investment, and a less pronounced slowdown of growth following the oil crises of the 1970s.

Union cooperation with government policies to curb the growth of wages has been a central theme in the research on corporatism in Western Europe. In one of the first contributions to a burgeoning literature, Gerhard Lehmbruch (1977) observed: “Incomes policies appear to constitute a core domain of liberal corporatism” (96). Similarly, Leo Panitch (1977) argued that in “virtually every” corporatist society, policies “designed to abate the wage pressure of trade unions was the frontpiece of corporatist development” (74). Cross-national studies by Bruce Headey (1970) and Gary Marks (1986) have verified the existence of a close empirical relationship between union centralization and the successful implementation of voluntary incomes policies.

More recently, union centralization or corporatism has attracted the attention of economists seeking to account for the divergence in macroeconomic performance among advanced industrial societies since the mid-1970s.

Type
Chapter
Information
Selected Works of Michael Wallerstein
The Political Economy of Inequality, Unions, and Social Democracy
 , pp. 146 - 172
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2008

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