12 - Unions and the agenda of joint regulation

Summary

ABSTRACT

This chapter focuses, first, upon debates around collective bargaining and in relation to union strategy. Second, it examines how collective bargaining structures and practices develop and operate in distinct national and economic contexts. Third, it looks at rethinking the role of joint-regulation in terms of its dynamics, practices, aims and actors whereby a widening of the ways in which we view collective bargaining is required. So, collective bargaining and new variations of it need to be placed within a broader approach to the dynamics and politics of work since it has become an even more contested. Approaches linked to such a broadening allow a better understanding of the contexts that are beyond the “developed” economic ones.

Keywords: Collective bargaining; character and form of collective bargaining; challenges for unions

INTRODUCTION

In an episode of the American cartoon comedy series, The Simpsons, the young Bart Simpson has broken his leg and is resigned to spending summer in his room, unable to engage in fun activities with his friends. He turns to the television set in his room to take his mind off his predicament only to find that very old programmes are being broadcast due to staff summer holidays. To Bart's horror, they are reruns of black-and-white television interviews with union leaders about the crisis of collective bargaining. This clearly exacerbates the situation for Bart, but also serves as a gentle and albeit peculiar example of the way collective bargaining and related union issues are viewed in some popular circles. Even within various academic circles of a more sociological orientation – and even, increasingly, in some high-profile work-related journals – the question of collective bargaining is increasingly seen as a particular and limited feature of work and discussions pertaining to it. Hence, its exclusion as an acceptable theme on which to publish. Collective bargaining is seen as a narrow and minimalist dimension of the regulation and politics of work. Radical academics – a broad term that would include the present author – are also particularly worried about the way collective bargaining can sometimes be seen as being overstated, especially within the mainstream history of industrial relations debates.