Collective bargaining in UK, USA and Europe

United Kingdom

The British academic Beatrice Webb reputedly coined the term "collective bargaining" in the late 19th century: the OED quotes her use of it in 1891 in Cooperative Movement. Webb aimed to characterise a process alternative to that of individual bargaining between an employer and individual employees. Other writers have emphasised the conflict-resolution aspects of collective bargaining, but in Britain the most important refinement in usage came from Allan Flanders, who defined collective bargaining as a process of rule-making leading to joint regulation in industry. Most commentators see the process of collective bargaining as necessarily containing an element of negotiation and hence as distinct from processes of consultation, which lack the element of negotiation and where employers determine outcomes unilaterally.

In the United Kingdom collective bargaining has become, and has received endorsement for many years as, the dominant and most appropriate means of regulating workers' terms and conditions of employment, in line with ILO Convention No. 84. However, the importance of collective bargaining in the United Kingdom and elsewhere in the industrialized world has declined considerably since the early 1980s. Its decline in the public sector stems in part from the growth of Review-Body arrangements provided through the Office of Manpower Economics for groups of workers, including for the majority of National Health Service staff.

Despite its significance, in the United Kingdom there remains no statutory basis for collective bargaining in the fields of learning and training, a situation that has attracted the attention of both the Trades Union Congress and members of the Royal College of Nursing. A coalition has formed which actively seeks to remedy this situation by expanding the scope of collective bargaining to encompass learning and training.

United States

In the United States, the National Labor Relations Act covers most collective agreements in the private sector.

Many notable collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) in the United States involve major professional sports leagues. Because of a history of poor relations between the players' unions and owners of all the various major leagues, as well as because of the tremendous amounts of money involved, it has become difficult in recent years to work out agreements. A total breakdown in talks between the sides wiped out the entire 2004 2005 NHL hockey season, making the NHL the first major American sports league to lose an entire season to labor issues (the relevant parties reached an agreement in time to play the 2005-06 season).

The National Football League (NFL) had fears that disagreements over revenue allocation might force teams in 2006 to cut numerous star players in order to stay under the agreed-upon salary cap. Beyond this year, without an agreement for 2007, the salary cap provisions would have sunset. This could have caused players and owners both to seek substantially disparate compensation guidelines in their next CBA (e.g., sizes of pay increases year-to-year, the effect of signing bonuses on a team's cap, etc), raising the spectre of a strike in 2008. However, on March 8, 2006 the owners agreed in a 30-2 vote (the Buffalo Bills and Cincinnati Bengals voting against it) to accept the National Football League Players' Association's proposal, and also settled the revenue-sharing controversy, forestalling the above scenario.

The National Basketball Association's CBA also expired in summer 2005, and though the two sides ultimately reached an agreement, its last expiration caused the cancellation of one-half of the 1998-99 NBA season due to lockout. The NBA league has historically had poor labor relations, resulting in numerous lockouts of players and the shortening of a season.

European experience

Many continental European countries, like Austria, the Netherlands and Sweden, have a social market economy where collective bargaining over wages, is done on the national level between national federations of labour unions and employers' organizations.

Copyright 2008 - France BtoB from Wikipédia