When an Employer Breaks a Rule in a Collective Bargaining Agreement the Union Most Often

The Teamsters have a long-standing multi-employer bargaining relationship with the Cannery Council, an association of food processors with offices in central California, including Del Monte and Heinz. The latest collective agreement increased the wages of the 12,500 workers covered by the agreement by more than 10%.35 Given the consolidation of businesses and the increasing automation of the industry, the Cannery Council`s agreement includes far fewer employers and employees than before. At one point, the deal included up to 50,000 workers, but it now covers only about 25 percent of that number. Sources: Union density data follow the composite series of U.S. Historical Statistics; Updated in 2017 by unionstats.com. Income inequality (share of income in the top 10%) The data comes from Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, “Income Inequality in the United States, 1913-1998,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 118, No. 1 (2003) and updated data from the Top Income Database, updated March 2019. Once the NLRB`s collective bargaining unit is established, the union must win a representative election among the workers in the unit. One challenge for the UAW (and other unions in their respective industries) is that employers are trying to circumvent the terms of the collective agreement by setting up new operations outside the scope of the agreement.

For example, GM, along with its partner LG Chem, formed a new company, Lordstown Motors, to build a new plant next to the existing plant in Lordstown, Ohio, rather than doing the work at the Lordstown plant under the UAW-GM agreement.27 One of the consequences of this decline in union strength is a corresponding decline in the ability of unions in a particular sector or industry to set general standards for of salaries and benefits covering a high percentage. workers in that sector or sector. When unions were stronger, they were able to adapt the structure of collective bargaining to the organizational structure of their industry and negotiate agreements with employers that set wage standards for an entire industry.6 Union contracts set wages for unionized workers and non-unionized employers raise wages to remain competitive. In this way, unions have helped to raise the wages of all workers, unionized and non-unionized. Many people in the United States are members of unions that aim to protect the rights and interests of workers. One of the main functions of these unions is to negotiate or negotiate with employers on behalf of their members. It is an unfair labor practice for one of the parties to refuse to bargain collectively with the other party, but the parties are not obliged to reach an agreement or make concessions. Unions can obtain certification of a national collective bargaining unit from a single employer and negotiate a single collective agreement covering all of that employer`s locations, or they can bargain nationally on the basis of multiple employers. Examples of both will follow. After decades of organizing and fighting, the Communications Workers of America (CWA) reached a national collective agreement with AT&T that allowed the union to bargain for 500,000 workers in the telecommunications industry. But subsequent deregulation and the split of “Ma Bell” into eight regional companies (“Baby Bells”) in the 1980s destroyed the national single-employer agreement, and non-unionized companies quickly used deregulation to build operations and undermine standards. Now, CWA must negotiate with AT&T more than 11 individual and geographically dispersed bargaining units: six for traditional fixed service workers, four for mobile wireless service workers, and one focused on DSL customer service.

CWA also negotiates separately with the other regional bell companies that have become Verizon and CenturyLink. Today, the union represents about 100,000 AT&T workers across the country and another 50,000 to the remnants of regional bells. All telecommunications companies compete with non-unionized cables for the same broadband market, further undermining bargaining power.22 The NLRA should be amended so that workers can designate a collective bargaining unit with multiple employers or connect multiple collective bargaining units in collective bargaining with multiple employers with one or more unions. These negotiations can be horizontal (within an industry) or vertical (to capture the supply chain). Currently, the multi-employer bargaining game is at the discretion of the employer: employees, unions and the NLRB have no way of insisting on this format, even when it makes the most sense. The voluntary nature of negotiations between employers allows employers, employees and unions to play against each other in one place. The law should be amended to allow workers and trade unions to request negotiations between several employers, with the NLRB instructed to approve the request, unless there are compelling reasons why the approach should not be adopted. The NLRA could be amended to include provisions to extend the terms of a collective agreement to a group of workers reorganized by a union that is very dense in the industry.44 An example of this type of extension is the Baigent Ready proposal, named after two special advisors to the British Columbia Minister of Labour. Under the proposal, a union in a sector (defined as a geographic area where similar companies perform similar work) with low union density would have the option of applying for certification of a unit with multiple employers in the industry if it could demonstrate the support of at least 45% of workers at each location of the proposed entity […].