Abstract
The 2009 collective negotiations between the Boston Globe’s management and the Newspaper Guild illustrate a new form of concession bargaining—ultra-concession bargaining. A key premise of this study is introduced; collective bargaining has been transformed in significant and new ways, and the implicit code of conduct between employers and unions has been eroded. The new collective bargaining is defined, and a distinction is drawn between conventional collective bargaining and concession bargaining. The two waves of concession bargaining (the first in the 1980s and the second in the years since the turn of this century) are briefly described.
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- 1.
For details on the 2009 negotiations between the Boston Globe and the New York Times Company—the employers—and the Newspaper Guild—the Globe’s major union—see, for example: Boston Globe could file shut down notice Monday (2009), Gavin (2009), Gavin and O’Brien (2009), Kurtz (2009), Marks (2009), Perez-Pena (2009a, b, c), and What next for the Boston Globe? (2009).
- 2.
Lifetime employment at the Boston Globe protected against layoffs but not discharge for cause.
- 3.
- 4.
For example, concession bargaining has been defined in a legal webpage as “a kind of bargaining in which trade unions surrender or give back previously gained improvements in pay and conditions in exchange for some form of job security” (uslegal.com 2011). A dictionary of human resource management terms defined concession bargaining as “collective agreements in which trade unions surrender improvements in pay and conditions that they have previously secured in order to promote firm competiveness and protect employment” (Answers.com 2011).
- 5.
For example, a prominent textbook on collective bargaining (Katz and Kochan 2004, 457) defined concessionary bargaining as: “The negotiation of pay freezes, pay cuts, rollbacks, or work rules changes that occurred frequently in the 1980s.” And Freeman (1986, 131) wrote “Many have dubbed the eighties (1980s) the era of the ‘giveback’ in collective bargaining.”
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Chaison, G. (2012). Introduction: The New Collective Bargaining. In: The New Collective Bargaining. SpringerBriefs in Economics. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-4024-6_1
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