Collective Bargaining, Interest Arbitration, and Police Salaries

Abstract

Previous research and conventional wisdom suggest that the practice of collective bargaining, the availability of interest arbitration, and the use of arbitration when available all have a positive effect on salaries. In this study, believed to be the first to incorporate all those variables, the authors analyze data on police salaries in more than 900 cities during the 1971-81 period. The results show that collective bargaining and the availability of arbitration do have positive although modest effects on salaries, but in states providing the arbitration option, salaries do not differ significantly between cities that use the option and those that do not.

Collective Bargaining, Interest Arbitration, and the Delivery of Police Services

“…This conclusion is strengthened by the fact that arbitration's influence on salaries, total costs, and contract provisions has occurred in addition to whatever impact collective bargaining by itself has had on these outcomes. A complete description of our index and its use is presented in Feuille, Hendricks, and Delaney (1984). NOTES 1 A more detailed analysis of these awards is presented in Delaney and Feuille (1984).…”

“…In the rest of this paper we will review our findings and speculate about their meaning (a thorough description of the sampling and research methods is presented in Feuille, Hendricks, and Delaney, 1984). After combining the divergent data into a large panel we used various multivariate techniques to estimate the impact of bargaining and arbitration on police wages, fringes, nonwage bargaining outcomes, and employment terms.…”

“…Each item in our index was constructed on a scale of zero points for the option least favorable to the union, ten points for the option most favorable to the union, and with intermediate points (of equal interval) for intermediate options (a complete description of this index may be found in Feuille, Hendricks, and Delaney, 1984). Each item in our index was constructed on a scale of zero points for the option least favorable to the union, ten points for the option most favorable to the union, and with intermediate points (of equal interval) for intermediate options (a complete description of this index may be found in Feuille, Hendricks, and Delaney, 1984).…”

Learning from Interest Arbitration: The Next round

“…First, the parties learn from the awards made in other bargaining relationships. In the first nine years of Wisconsin's municipal arbitration law, teachers in over a hundred different school districts used arbitration to establish wages for at least 'Previous research (Anderson 1979;Delaney 1983;Feuille and Delaney 1986;Currie 1989) has failed to find a statistically significantwage difference between parties that arbitrate and those that reach negotiated settlements under the threat of arbitration. These results suggest that average union and employer arbitration costs are equal.…”

Governance and the Impact of Public Employee Unions on Organizational Performance

“…Across a variety of program contexts and levels of government, including fire and police departments, public libraries, and public transit systems, among others, scholars have concluded that unionization has no direct impact on the outcomes produced by public agencies (e.g., coulter, 1979;feuille, hendricks, & Delaney, 1983;Perry, Angle, & Pittel, 1979; see Stanley, 1972). however, after considering the increased expenditures associated with unionization, scholars often treat null performance gains for public organizations as negative productivity outcomes.…”