Shop Committees: Substitute for, or Supplement to, Trades-Unions?

Douglas, Paul H.

doi:10.1086/253324

Cited by 31 publications

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“…Taylor himself advocated for labour-management cooperation in this process (Nadworny 1955 ). Th ese developments prompted debates around the degree to which the "shop committees" involving workers and managers and labour-management cooperation were an alternative to or a complement to trade unions and collective bargaining (Douglas 1921 ). Although this question has been resolved in the USA in unionised settings in favour of seeing labour-management cooperation and worker involvement in business operations as a complement to union representation and collective bargaining, it is still an open question since employee involvement can also 2 Th ere is literature on forms of employee participation in the nonunion sector as well as studies that compare participation in union versus nonunion workplaces (see, for example, Kaufman and Taras 2000 ;Eaton and Voos 1994 ).…”

Section: Early Examples Of Labour-management Partnershipmentioning

confidence: 99%

Developing Positive Employment Relations

Johnstone¹,

Wilkinson²

2016

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Section: Early Examples Of Labour-management Partnershipmentioning

confidence: 99%

Developing Positive Employment Relations

Johnstone¹,

Wilkinson²

2016

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“…Following on this line of thought, a number of pluralists (e.g., Douglas ; Seager ) recommended a two‐tier model of employee representation covering, respectively, the industry and the firm. At the industry or occupation/craft level, trade unions and collective bargaining set a floor under competitive conditions in labor markets through a common rule on wages and hours that all firms follow; at the firm level employee representation committees promote improved cooperation and problem solving through collective dealing.…”

Section: Pluralist Framementioning

confidence: 99%

Experience with Company Unions and their Treatment under the Wagner Act: A Four Frames of Reference Analysis

Kaufman

2015

Industrial Relations

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This paper reexamines American experience with company unions (also known as nonunion employee representation plans) before they were banned by the Wagner Act (1935). For the half‐century following the passage of the act, labor historians and industrial relations scholars painted a bleak portrait of company unions as anti‐union sham organizations. Since the 1980s, additional research has documented a more positive side; similarly, concern has grown that the Wagner Act's ban is stifling legitimate employee participation programs. This paper brings new theoretical and empirical evidence to both historical and legal parts of this debate, including examination of company unions through individualist, unitarist, pluralist, and radical frames; demonstration that the pluralists’ view of company unions was more diverse and positive than conventionally portrayed; presentation of new historical evidence and testimony on the company union experience; and a substantially revisionist assessment of the merits of the Wagner Act's ban. In particular, the conclusion is that, given any reasonable weighting of the four frames, the company union ban is overly restrictive and should be modified so companies can implement the positive side of nonunion employee committees but not the negative. The paper ends by noting that the unbalanced and narrowly critical treatment of company unions in the mainline industrial relations tradition is a case study of the field's perhaps fatal post–World War II core intellectual‐normative contradiction—professed inclusiveness of all frames of employment relations but, in practice, attention to and preference for a narrow union‐centric version of one frame.

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“…It is well known that these plans first appeared in the U.S. in the period 1914-20, a period in which union membership nearly doubled. See Paul H. Douglas [13]. Further, employees covered by such plans declined 18 per cent in the period 1928-32 and increased over 100 per cent between 1932-35 while union membership moved similarly.…”

Section: Review Of Economic Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…... (13) We assume that the extent of disequilibrium in both union and non-union labour markets depends on: (a) the economy-wide unemployment rate (UN), and its lagged value (UN-I), so as to allow for the possible effect of AUN; (b) the economy-wide rate of change of consumer prices (AP); and, following the lead of Perry [41J, Solow [49J, and others, (c) a dummy variable taking the value unity from 1962-66, and zero otherwise, to reflect the possibility of a negative effect on AW due to the wage-price guideposts (0). Letting W;t-W;':I = ao+a;UNt+aiUN t-1 +a3'AP t+a:Gt for the union sector, and W;t-W;~I = a~+a~UNt+a~UNt-1 +a;APt+a:G t ... (15) for the non-union sector, we may substitute (14) and (15) into (13) to get the estimating equation:…”

Section: Awit= {J(w;t-w;n_1)+[a(w: T-w;~i)-{j(w;t-w;~l)]ui'mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Trade Unions and the Rate of Change of Money Wages in United States Manufacturing Industry

Ashenfelter

1972

The Review of Economic Studies

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The purpose of this paper is to examine a formal model of aggregate wage determination in the union and non-union sectors of U.S. manufacturing industry in order to obtain testable implications concerning the effects of trade unions on the rate of change of average money wages. Section I contains a discussion of alternative contemporary models of wage inflation with an eye toward the explicit incorporation of the effects of trade unionism. This discussion leads to a simplified formal model of wage behaviour in the union and' non-union sectors and the spill-overs between these sectors that has some immediate implications for the structure of wage changes in the two sectors. A simple test of the empirical relevance of these implications using annual data for the post-war period leads. to more elaborate tests in Section II that use annual data spanning the period 1914-63. These tests include the estimation of a basic set of three simultaneous equations where wage changes, price changes, and union growth are taken as jointly determined; an examination of the stability of the estimated structures; and an exploration of the historical reduced form trade-offs between wages, prices and the exogenous variables. Finally, Section III contains a discussion of the implications and limitations of the results. I. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK A. Short-Run Wage DeterminationMost of the theoretical work on short-run aggregate wage determination has ignored the influence of trade unions." Lipsey's [32J well-known derivation of the Phillips curve is, based on a model in which firms bid among themselves for the available pool of labour. When a firm finds that its employment level is too low or that its rate of labour turnover is too high, it increases its wage offer in order to maximize long-run profit. Aggregating over firms and labour markets, one obtains the traditional negatively sloped relation between wage changes and unemployment: dW =f(UN, C),

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Shop Committees: Substitute for, or Supplement to, Trades-Unions?

Cited by 31 publications

References 0 publications

Developing Positive Employment Relations

Developing Positive Employment Relations

Experience with Company Unions and their Treatment under the Wagner Act: A Four Frames of Reference Analysis

Trade Unions and the Rate of Change of Money Wages in United States Manufacturing Industry

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