What’s next for global labor? Power dynamics and industrial relations systems in a hyperglobalized world

Abstract

The dismantling of long-established collective bargaining arrangements globally is without precedent, and collective bargaining coverage has shrunk across the advanced industrial world to levels not seen since the 1950s. Everywhere, fewer workers are involved in collective bargaining, an institution that once gave workers new power and status (ILO, 2010). Nowadays in France, the United Kingdom, and the United States, private-sector union membership has fallen to record lows, representing less than 10 percent of the workforce. For Canada, the corresponding number is about 15 percent, which is trending down more slowly than in the United States where contracting out and deindustrialization have hollowed out its collective bargaining system. In the Organization for Economic Development and Cooperation (OECD) countries, union density levels have dropped from a high of 60 percent of the workforce in the 1980s to just around 30 percent (OECD, 2011). The retreat of labor at the negotiating table appears to be structural and long term, with large-scale consequences for employers who have profited from the pro-market environment. Once thought to be off limits, the EU's prized social market has begun to lose ground, and state workers’ public pensions, previously declared untouchable in any labor negotiations, now are threatened by the global fiscal crisis (Standing, 2012). The latest evidence from the OECD is that wages have trended downward in many member states as unions have lost their leverage at the bargaining table. The most extreme case is that between 2000 and 2010, wage increases in the majority of U.S. collective bargaining agreements have been negative or less than 1 percent. The benchmark standard is labor's share of national income, and it has been trailing the top income earners for at least two decades. Robert Reich has documented that U.S. median income has fallen every year since 2007 (Reich, 2012). Fifty-seven percent of the post-recession American jobs are low wage, paying between $7.70 and $13.85 an hour. Middle-income jobs are no longer there and are not coming back. However, the share going to capital has grown over the last two decades as investment income has produced deeply rooted income inequalities between the median paid worker and the take-home pay of the corporate elite. In the global South, for millions the picture is stark (Reich, 2012).