Collaborative Research on Applying Strategic Bargaining Models to Union Contract Negotiations

彼得·克拉姆顿人们普遍认为，20世纪80年代美国的集体谈判与前几十年相比发生了重大变化。这种看法得到了罢工活动减少的支持，劳工领袖认为这是由于企业更倾向于永久替换罢工工人。本研究项目通过开发和实证检验一个正式的理论模型来检验公司在劳资纠纷过程中决定使用替代工人，从而检验了关于公司讨价还价策略的这一说法。该模型还用于评估各种劳工政策（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。去年，有组织的劳工游说国会修改劳动法，禁止使用永久性替代工人。由于缺乏对这种禁令可能产生的后果的全面研究，妨碍了对这项立法的认真审议。这项研究旨在填补这一重要的知识空白。关于替代工人的工作将利用美国为本项目收集的关于替代工人的新数据和加拿大关于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集中在股权分享计划（ESOPs）和利润分享计划上，使用关于ESOPs的广泛数据集和关于日本利润分享计划的新公司层面数据。

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.