Collaborative Research on Trade Unions, Employers' Organizations and Collective Bargaining: Data Collection andAnalysis for Nineteen Countries

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9309391 Golden The organizational structure of trade unions, employers' associations and the process of wage bargaining in advanced industrial democracies has been the subject of considerable research in recent years. Since 1974, the striking cross-national differences in macroeconomic performance has led scholars to study the ways that wage-setting institutions affect how well the labor market functions. The majority of the literature argues that centralized bargaining systems produce superior macroeconomic outcomes, expecially lower unemployment, by preventing individual unions from seeking to improve their own members' wages at the expense of workers who belong to other unions or to no union at all. Yet many studies argue the opposite, that decentralized wage setting offers the greatest flexibility and sensitivity of wages to conditions in the local labor market. Most recently, the intermediate position that both highly centralized and highly decentralized systems work better than systems with intermediate levels of centralization has gained wide acceptance. All of the research to date has proceeded on a weak empirical base. The basic problem is that no one has developed adequate measures of the different attributes of wage-setting institutions that might matter for economic performance. In this research, the investigators continue their work of compiling a sustematic cross- national and longitudinal data base coverning the most important institutional characteristics of the wage setting process. In collecting the data, the investigators put together information from secondary sources, data supplied by the major labor market actors in each of the countries, and expert surveys. Their data will be constructed to allow reliable comparisons over time and between countries. On the basis of the data, which will be made publicly available for use by other scholars, the investigators propose to construct indicators of critical aspects of the organization of unions, employers and collective bargaining. Finally, they intend to use the indicators to test the relationship between bargaining institutions, wage formation, and various aspects of aggregate economic performance. ***