Globalization and Employer Collective Action: Two Reconcilable Realities?

This article examines the manner in which employers determine their preferred structures of collective bargaining. A common feature amidst the restructuring and rescaling of the global economy and nation-state are employer-led attempts to decentralize collective bargaining structures in industrialized nations. However, there are exceptions, as is evident in the case of Quebec’s menswear industry—the focus of this study—where centralized bargaining persists. Through in-depth interviews and a review of literature, we develop an analytical framework that emphasizes four factors that influence employers’ preferred bargaining structure: economic, organizational, institutional, and strategic.

We make two primary observations throughout our empirical analysis. First, we find that employers and unions are often simultaneously motivated to pursue centralized bargaining, and that there is a propensity for employers to adhere to centralized bargaining despite marked diversity in firm size, target markets, and the capacity to remunerate employees. Second, our results suggest a tension between the factors considered by our framework. In some cases, economic and organizational factors influence actors to individualize collective bargaining; in others, institutional factors impose constraints that limit actors’ strategic choices and lead to centralized bargaining. Therefore, our results demonstrate that the factors generally associated with globalization do not necessarily determine the actions of employers and unions. Conversely, such actors retain the ability to maneuver in reaction to the pressures of the market.

Keywords: collective bargaining structures, bargaining centralization, employer strategies, employer association, institutions