Trade Union Behaviour, Pay Bargaining and Economic Performance

This volume is comprised of two long theoretical papers accompanied by comments arising from discussants. It aims to explore the questions of how unions formulate their policy stance and which bargaining structure is superior in terms of economic efficiency. The first paper in this volume is by Robert Flanagan and deals with the process of policy formulation within unions. He compares the models generally used to analyze wage formulation with the empirical evidence of a solidaristic wage policy and uses collective choice analysis to shed light on the decision making within trade unions. Flanagan also considers the internal political processes and norms of unions which he argues are arranged to produce uniform preferences and reductions in the number of issues that are submitted to voting among union members. Alistair Ulph's commentary sharpens the issues raised in Flanagan's paper. The second paper concerns the structure in which unions operate, considering specifically the centralization of bargaining processes and the consequences of centralized bargaining for economic performance.
Moene, Wallerstein and Hoel create an economic model to investigate the impact of different levels of union centralization on the trade off between wages and employment.