Miners and militancy: a study of branch union leadership

This article examines two explanations of militancy prominent during the 1984/85 British miners' strike, both of which focused on the importance of union leadership. Here the author reports the findings of a comparative study of ‘militant’ and ‘moderate’ union leadership at two otherwise similar collieries.     

A strike of ‘unorganised’ workers in a Chinese car factory: the Nanhai Honda events of 2010

This strike in a Chinese factory of the Japanese multinational Honda in 2010 received worldwide coverage. A young workforce sustained an on–off strike, with varying numbers of workers involved, for 19 days. Academic interest has focused on prospects for collective bargaining and union reform in China. This article, using interviews with former strikers, and newspaper sources, analyses the strike process. The workplace union, as a constituent of the All‐China Federation of Trade Unions and subject to the Chinese Party–state, was hostile; so the workers were in effect ‘unorganised’. Examples of non‐union strikes in the interwar car industry of the USA and UK show the similarity of situation with the Honda workers. Hiller's classic text, The Strike, provides a surprisingly suitable framework for understanding strikes of unorganised workers. The strikers' vocabulary ‘framed’ their demands initially as injustice, but incorporated anti‐Japanese sentiment and, then, dignity, in response to events.     

Rookes v. Barnard and the trade union question in British politics

In the 1950s, given the scope of the Trade Disputes Act 1906 that had granted immunity against specific torts (civil wrongs) to organisers of industrial action, the courts had little role in industrial relations. Hence, the importance of the House of Lords decision in 1964 that, in threatening to strike to secure Douglas Rookes's removal from the Heathrow design office of the British Overseas Aircraft Corporation after his resignation from the union, Alfred Barnard and others had used unlawful means because a threat to break a contract of employment came within the tort of intimidation that was unprotected by the Trade Disputes Act's statutory immunities, and thus, they were liable to pay damages to Rookes. The legal arguments deployed are analysed within growing unease in the Conservative Party and among employers at the emergence of workplace union organisation and national strikes. Despite being partially neutralised by the Trade Disputes Act 1965, Rookes was a harbinger of a new judicial activism that outflanked trade unions' tort immunities by creating novel common law liabilities. This in turn laid the political basis for subsequent Conservative legislation to restrict and regulate trade unions and industrial action, a project that is ongoing.     

百事与康师傅的共同冒险

一场长达7年的巨头联姻,突然以不可思议的方式落定,但却首先遭遇“后院起火”;最终,康师傅能接稳百事的“绣球”吗？     

The trend of strikes in coal mining 1949–1979

Explanations for the pattern of strike activity in British coal mining have focused upon the industry's changing economic fortunes or developments in its collective bargaining structure. The author examines these explanations and suggests four additional factors that account for the trend of coal mining strikes.     

The dispute at Times Newspapers Ltd: a view from inside

Paul Routledge examines the wider impact of Times Newspaper Ltd's suspension of publication for almost a year. As a participant in this significant dispute, he draws on his experience of the shutdown itself and the system of labour relations in the national newspaper industry.     

At the cutting edge of new realism: the engineers’ 35 hour week campaign

British engineering unions’ campaign for a 35 hour week in 1989–90 was a watershed dispute in terms of strike strategy and its impact on collective bargaining institutions. This article examines the dynamics of the dispute and the tensions between the national and local leaderships of the union campaign and compares it to similar ones waged by the German metalworkers’ union, IG Metall.     

Modern dilemmas in health care—the Israeli doctors' strike

Between March and June of 1983, for 118 days, Israel experienced one of the most prolonged doctors' strikes ever recorded. This article provides a conceptual framework for analysing the strike. It presents an outline of the role of different health agencies in Israel prior to and during the crisis and considers the status dilemma of modern doctors.     

“Imagine That—A Wildcat at Biomed!” Organizational Justice and the Anatomy of a Wildcat Strike at a Nonunion Medical Electronics Factory

Although the occurrences of wildcat strikes are inextricably linked to violations of organizational justice, only a minimal amount has been written with respect to the relationship between the occurrence of organizational injustice and the presence of employee collective action. And while research on wildcat strikes in unionized settings is fairly extensive, there has virtually been no treatment of nonunion wildcat strikes in the scholarly literature. This paper presents an industrial ethnographic account of a nonunion wildcat strike in terms of analyzing the conditions and process under which a breakdown in organizational justice leads to employee collective action. In analyzing this nonunion wildcat strike, Sheppard, Lewicki, and Minton's seven propositions are utilized to understand the conditions under which a breakdown of organizational justice increases the likelihood of the occurrence of employee collective action (Sheppard, B. H., Lewicki, R. J., & Minton, J. W. Organizational Justice: The Search for Fairness in the Workplace. New York: Lexington Books, 1992). The paper concludes with a discussion of an inexpensive human resource management practice that can be implemented for achieving some type of organizational justice in order to minimize the occurrence of nonunion wildcat strikes.     

Does public transit reduce car travel externalities? Quasi-natural experiments' evidence from transit strikes

One of the unanswered questions in the field of urban economics is to which extent subsidies to public transit are justified. We examine one of the main benefits of public transit, a reduction in car congestion externalities, the so-called congestion relief benefit, using quasi-natural experimental data on citywide public transit strikes for Rotterdam, a city with mild congestion levels. On weekdays, a strike induces travel times to increase only marginally on the highway ring road (0.017 min/km) but substantially on inner city roads (0.224 min/km). During rush hour, the strike effect is much more pronounced. The congestion relief benefit of public transit is substantial, equivalent to about 80% of the public transit subsidy. We demonstrate that during weekends, travel time does not change noticeably due to strikes. Furthermore, we show that public transit strikes induce similar increases in number of cyclists as number of car travelers suggesting that bicycling-promoting policies to reduce car congestion externalities might be attractive in combination with first-best congestion pricing.     

The reform of collective bargaining and strike activity in BL cars 1976–1982

Changes at BL after the Ryder Report were intended to assist the company's economic recovery and to help solve the perceived ‘strike problem’. This article argues that one consequence of reform was to change the pattern of conflict at BL into one which more closely resembles that of the industry as a whole.     

Bayesian inference in limited dependent variable models. An application to measuring strike duration

This paper presents a straightforward set of Bayesian techniques for analyzing models involving limited dependent variables; the techniques are demonstrated in an analysis of Kennan's (1985) data on contract strikes in US manufacturing. The data are analyzed by deriving posterior distributions—including probability distributions—of hazard functions for strike duration using numerical Monte Carlo methods. The distributions are employed to derive coverage intervals for hazard functions, to assess the relative plausibility of nonnested hypotheses concerning the shape of the functions, and to assess the impact of industrial production on duration.     

Privatisation and industrial relations in British shipbuilding

The causes of the 1993 strike by 1300 workers at Yarrow Shipbuilders are examined. A managerial offensive, which included a restructuring of the labour process, was instigated by the Thatcher government's privatisation of the shipbuilding industry. Drawing on shop stewards' committee minute books, particular emphasis is given to the trade union response to management's confrontationalist approach.     

Mělée on the Mersey: contracts,competition and labour relations on the docks

Although strikes on the waterfront are now rare, the Liverpool dock dispute is indicative of how deregulation of the dockland labour market has compelled operators to cut ever more deeply into labour costs, and casualise the employment relationship. This has had an adverse effect on port performance and undermines the ability of employers to compete effectively.     

Russia's official trade unions: renewal or redundancy?

Russia's official trade unions claim to have reformed themselves into independent organisations representing workers' interests. This article takes one branch union, the official miners' union, and, on the basis of research in the South Kuzbass mines, considers how far enterprise level unions have changed, and the potential for reform.     

Strikes and other forms of industrial action

In Britain, interest in industrial conflict is almost wholly focused on ‘the strike’, analysed mainly in terms of official strike statistics. John Kelly and Nigel Nicholson argue that this approach is unsatisfactory, given doubts about the accuracy of the statistics, the exclusion of small strikes and the lack of detailed attention given to other forms of industrial conflict.     

Commitment and strikes in wage bargaining

This paper analyzes the long-run strategic relationship between a firm and a union as a repeated bargaining game, where there is incomplete information on the player's motivation on both sides and each party has a fall-back position. The firm and the union will engage in a reputation-building activity, that will produce a limited number of strikes over time. The bargainer that succeeds in building up a reputation for toughness and obtains a favorable payoff in the long-run is, either the more patient (or alternatively the more centralized), or the party with a higher initial probability of stubbornness, or the party with a smaller fall-back position. Our model also offers predictions on the dependence of strike incidence over time on several parameters.     

The duration of contract strikes in U.S. manufacturing

This paper develops new evidence on the hazard function for strike duration, and on cyclical changes in this function, using data on contract strikes in U.S. manufacturing industries. A flexible duration model is estimated, and it is found that the hazard rate is generally a U-shaped function of strike age. The level of industrial production is found to have a significant positive effect on the hazard rate: strike duration is countercyclical. A convenient parametric model of heterogeneity and duration dependence is introduced, in which the logit of the hazard rate is a polynomial function of strike age, up to a random individual effect drawn from a beta distribution. Estimates of this ‘beta-logit’ model indicate that it is difficult to detect the influence of unobserved heterogeneity on the aggregate hazard function for strike duration.     

‘Ideational power’ as a resource in union struggle

Contributing to our understanding of ideas as power resources in union struggle, this article analyses a labour dispute in Israel's shipping industry. The article follows the union's foregrounding of a specific idea of the state contained within the collective understanding of Israel's history, by which the union legitimised its position in the dispute and significantly influenced a government decision. The article therefore suggests that ideas can be an important power resource, particularly when other power resources are lacking but that this power resource is dependent on the specific ideational context: effective foregrounded ideas draw on a shared narrative that enables political actors to claim the moral high ground, while accusing their adversaries of failing to fulfil their moral obligations as understood via the frame of that shared narrative.     

Strategic militancy and the probability of strikes in union-firm bargaining

The paper provides a model that explains the probability of strikes by the union's use of militancy as a strategic tool in bargaining. Militants are useful because they provide a credible threat, hence enhancing the union's bargaining position. Using a multi-stage bargaining game, we show that, in general, militants will be used by the union as a strategic tool. The strategic benefit of militancy is reflected by the fact that the wage and employment level will be higher in a union that uses militants, compared to a union that does not. We use the model to show that the level of militancy and the probability of a strike decrease with the union's power. This suggests that policies that increase the strength of the union will have, at least, a partial positive effect on social welfare. We also show that the model can be viewed as providing an equilibrium of a repeated game, an interpretation that can explain the probability of strikes even in the absence of militants.