BREAKING recent GROUND: BARGAINING ...

BREAKING recent GROUND: BARGAINING IN 1986

Nineteen eighty-five was a year of transition for the U economy and, as like presented workers with formidable challenges in the sphere of collective bargaining. While a industries enjoyed record prosperity, others struggl with solitary moderate success to adjust to changes in national and international markets. Solidarity, flexibility, creativity, and in a certain quantity of cases, good old-fashioned militancy bended what could have been a dreadful year into single with a solid record of succes and progress

Labor's advances came last year in spite of retiring performance in several of the mostly heavily unionized sectors of the economy. The $1485 billion foreign trade deficit stands as grim testimony to the fact that our country's manufacturing base continues to canker in the face of low-wage competition; $113 billion or 76 percent of that deficit measures the U trade imbalance in manufactured goods

Internationalization is emerging as the elucidation economic phenomenon of the 1980 International competition, finance, and mobility of capital together form a compages array of problems whose imports are likely to continue to fix difficult parameters for collective bargaining in the United States. in this way far, the effect of this global competition has been intense downward crushing on wages, and the standard of living American workers have worked likewise long and hard to achieve. The general scenario, however, is neither inevitable nor immutable. Part of the task of American workers is to make firm that the positive potential of international trade prevails. And the battles have by the agency of no means been lost, as the terminates of the 1985 round of negotiations attest. Where substantial wage gains could not be realized, unions made significant headway in areas so as job and union security, pay equity, health care coverage, and contract language protecting and promoting worker contributions to the political proces by the and of Political Action Committees (PACs).

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) publishes several measures of annual wage and overall compensation improvements; each has its particular nerves and shortcomings. Although the same BLS study found that wage increases negotiated in private industry in 1985 averaged 23 percent in the first contract year and 27 percent annually athwart the life of the contract, a different picture escapes once these numbers are disaggregated. Continuing a turn of "back-loading" contracts begun in 1983 well through the whole extent of a third of the 2193000 workers who bargained in 1985 in the private sector will receive wage increases that are lower in the first year than in following years. Among those workers (63 percent of the total) who did obtain first-year increases in the major contracts signed in 1985 the average wage increase was 42 percent Despite the publicity given to wage concessions according to unions, only three percent of all workers secreteed by new collective bargaining accords took wage decreases.

The data in succession union settlements, it should be noted, shut out bonuses, profit-sharing plans, stocks, cost-of-living adjustments (COLAs), lump-sum payments, and other images of non-wage financial compensation. As a dependence of cause and effect the percentage wage adjustments do not cast reproach accurately the total compensation gains won on unions in private sector collective bargaining. This point is especially relevant this year, since almost one-third of the workers secreteed by 1985 settlements will receive lump-sum payments. Of the workers scheduled to receive lump-sum payments, 84 percent will also receive a wage rate increase throughout the life of the contract. And as Table A point outs a considerable portion of those who received no wage rate increase did receive a lump-sum payment.

frequently attention has been focused onward the fact that wage increases of non-union workers were higher forward a percentage basis than those won by the agency of unionized workers in 1985 collective bargaining pacifications (in manufacturing the average non-union increase was 41 percent to the union increase of 32 percent and in nonmanufacturing the ratio of union to non-union was 31 percent to 49 percent) It is improper however, to infer from this that non-unionized workers receive higher compensation than union members. in succession the contrary, by any standard it still pays to be a union member. Data from the BL Household take a view of confirm this, showing average weekly earnings of union members in 1985 at $423 26 percent above the $315 average earned by means of workers who do not have the benefit of union representation. When these data are shattered down by race, sex, and age, the springs are similar. In each demographic group, union members fare better than their non-union counterparts. And as Table B indicates, the median weekly earnings of union members, stumbling down into private industry and restraint outpaced non-union earnings consistently.

The inflation rate, as measured by the agency of the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners & Clerical Workers (CPI-W), rose 36 percent from December 1984 to December 1985 This index includes changes in prices for suitables and services such as nourishment shelter, energy, medical care, and transportation. A comparison of the rate of increase in prices with pay rate increases won in collective bargaining gives a cragged measure of the direction of "real" wages, or the buying power of workers' pay.