Collaborative Research on Applying Strategic Bargaining Models to Union Contract Negotiations

9423104彼得·克拉姆顿人们普遍认为，20世纪80年代的美国集体谈判与前几十年相比有了很大的变化。罢工活动的减少支持了这种看法，劳工领袖认为，这是由于公司永久取代罢工工人的倾向增加。本研究项目通过开发并实证检验一个正式的理论模型来检验这一关于企业讨价还价策略的主张，该模型描述了企业在发生劳资纠纷时决定使用替代工人的行为。该模型还被用来评估各种劳工政策(例如，禁止更换罢工者)的影响，并研究薪酬结构对谈判结果的影响。这项研究非常及时。在过去的一年里，有组织的劳工游说国会对劳动法进行修订，禁止使用永久替补工人。由于缺乏对这种禁令可能产生的后果的全面研究，对这项立法的认真审议受到阻碍。这项研究旨在填补我们知识中的这一重要空白。关于替补工人的工作将利用美国为该项目收集的关于替补工人的新数据，以及加拿大1967年至1993年大型私营部门合同谈判的数据。关于薪酬结构影响的工作将重点放在股权分享计划(ESOP)和利润分享计划上，使用关于ESOP的广泛数据集和关于日本利润分享计划的新的公司层面数据。

SBR-9423104 Peter Cramton It is widely believed that U.S. collective bargaining in the 1980s has changed substantially from earlier decades. This perception is supported by a decline in strike activity, which labor leaders argue is due to the increased propensity of firms to permanently replace striking workers. This research project examines this claim about the bargaining strategy of firms by developing and then empirically testing a formal theoretical model of the firm's decision to use replacement workers in the course of a labor dispute. The model is also used to assess the impact od various labor policies (e.g., a ban on the replacement of strikers) and to study the impact of the structure of compensation on bargaining outcomes. This research is very timely. This past year, organized labor lobbied Congress for an amendment to the labor law that would ban the use of permanent replacement workers. Careful consideration of this legislation was hampered by the lack of any comprehensive studies of the likely consequences of such a ban. This research is designed to fill in this important gap in our knowledge. The work on replacement workers will make use of new U.S. data on replacement workers collected for this project and Canadian data on large, private-sector contract negotiations from 1967 to 1993. The work on the impact of the structure of compensation will focus on equity sharing plans (ESOPs) and profit sharing plans using an extensive data set on ESOPs and new firm level data on profit sharing plans in Japan.