CHAPTER 12. The specific variables of collective bargaining
Collective bargaining is defined as the instrument through which workers’ representatives and employers’ representatives, in their respective spheres, “self-establish” a set of rules governing their contractual relationship, using a standard tool: the collective bargaining agreement.
However, in order to reach this “perfect” state, as the result of any negotiation is perfect for the parties when it is an agreement, it is necessary to characterise it through a series of variables without which it would be impossible to articulate the internal functioning system of the negotiating tables.
- Ideological variables
Both workers’ and employers’ representatives are influenced and face their arrival at the negotiating tables, explicitly or implicitly, under a strong ideological burden. Workers and employers have, by definition, antagonistic ideological parameters, which are worth remembering.
As a result of the evolution of democratic systems, a phenomenon of the trade union “autonomy” has been detected in the relations between political parties and trade union organisations, which becomes more acute throughout legislatures and is reversed, with less and less incidence, in electoral processes, whether municipal, regional or national.
- Contextual variables
Collective bargaining is situated within an industrial relations system.
For Dunlop, an industrial relations system can be defined on the basis of the interplay of four major variables: the protagonists, the contexts, the ideologies and the rules of the game or system of norms that frame the process of collective bargaining.
Contextual variables are the most frequently studied in relation to the theory of collective conflicts and summarise the influence of a certain number of synergies on the initiation and development of the bargaining process. Thus, following Dunlop’s analysis, which was later developed by Dennis Carrier in “The Strategy of Collective Bargaining”, we find five sub-variables: technological, historical, political, economic and social, which will have a determining influence when it comes to an understanding the internal functioning of the Bargaining Tables.
Collective bargaining does not have a single environment, nor does it always develop under the same conditions. Determining factors of our labour law reality, such as strikes, are strongly influenced by the contexts we operate and negotiate.
- Institutional variables
Collective bargaining takes place within a system of rules that delimit the power of the parties involved in the bargaining process, which is granted to them by law, based on a process, in the case of unitary representation, electoral, in the case of trade union representation through the highest representation, and the case of company representation through the ownership of the company or the percentage of representation.
The collective bargaining tables’ internal functioning will depend on which of the bargaining spaces we operate in and which labour and management actors participate.