Chapter 7: Collective Bargaining in the Public Sector

Chapter 7: Collective Bargaining in the Public Sector

Collective bargaining is a bilateral decision-making process in which authorized representatives of management and labor: (1) meet and negotiate such matters as wages, hours, and working conditions; (2) produce a mutually binding written contract of specified duration; and (3) agree to share responsibility for administering the provisions of that contract. Strikes, slowdowns, and political action by organized employees trying to negotiate pay raises, improved benefits, better working conditions, and the right to participate in the making of personnel policies became hallmarks of public sector relations. Across the country, established private sector labor-management practices and concepts invaded the public sector, often to the extreme discomfort of public administrators who saw them as threats to their authority and to the merit principle. Labor management relations and collective bargaining were firmly established as objects of public personnel policy, and they became administrative responsibilities as well as areas of technical expertise.

Collective bargaining stands in contrast to the traditional merit system because it makes many of the terms of the employment relationship a matter of bilateral negotiations between representatives of two organizations: the public employer and the labor union. Collective bargaining usually takes place within a highly formalized system of laws, rules, and procedures. Collective bargaining is based on statutes or ordinances except in a few cases where they have been set up by executive orders.

Most collective bargaining statutes do not specify which individual positions are to be considered supervisory. This determination is left to the administrative agency that decides bargaining units, and some of these agencies will closely examine the actual duties of positions with supervisory titles and exclude only those involving clearly supervisory duties and powers.

Management usually seeks to narrow the scope of bargaining. In the public sector, overriding laws and court rulings may effectively remove certain issues from the bargaining table. The scope of bargaining in government is generally likely to be narrower than it is in the private sector. Provisions of civil service laws, state education codes, special legislation covering the pay of blue-collar workers and other statutes make many issues nonnegotiable. A “management rights” clause often is included in collective bargaining statutes. It is designed to specify managerial powers that may not be bargained away or shared with labor organizations. Management rights clauses are usually replicated in contracts, but determining what they mean in specific cases is often a responsibility of the labor relations agency.

In some ways, collective bargaining may have protected the merit principle and advanced the cause of professional public management. The most important impact of collective bargaining in the public sector has been a transformation of the relationship between employer and employee. Traditional civil service merit systems are based on the proposition that management’s “rules of the workplace” set the terms of the relationship between the employer and the individual worker. Under collective bargaining, management is required to negotiate those rules with another organization, the labor union or employee association.