IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/restud/v56y1989i3p449-465..html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The Incentives to Make Commitments in Wage Bargains

Author

Listed:
  • Alistair Ulph

Abstract

It is commonly believed that a workforce of identical workers will be better off organised in a single union rather than separate unions that bargain independently with an employer, for this will prevent the employer playing off one union against another. In this paper I show that there are circumstances where this need not be the case. If it is impossible for the firm and workers to sign long-term binding contracts on wages and employment, then the firm will wish to invest in a capital stock below the efficient level; by organising in separate unions the firm will be induced to raise its level of investment, to ensure it has enough capacity with each union to make a threat to switch production to another union credible. The effect on workers' payoffs from a higher capital stock can outweigh the loss of bargaining power as a result of the workforce being in separate unions. There will also be circumstances where the firm will invest in a capital stock that exceeds the efficient level.

Suggested Citation

  • Alistair Ulph, 1989. "The Incentives to Make Commitments in Wage Bargains," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 56(3), pages 449-465.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:restud:v:56:y:1989:i:3:p:449-465.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.2307/2297558
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Arijit Mukherjee & Kullapat Suetrong, 2007. "Unionisation structure and strategic foreign direct investment," Discussion Papers 07/22, University of Nottingham, GEP.
    2. Renu Bansal & Dibyendu Maiti, 2024. "Capital Inflow, Strategic Subcontracting, and Formal Employment," Working papers 348, Centre for Development Economics, Delhi School of Economics.
    3. Mukherjee, Arijit & Pennings, Enrico, 2011. "Unionization structure, licensing and innovation," International Journal of Industrial Organization, Elsevier, vol. 29(2), pages 232-241, March.
    4. Debasmita Basak & Andreas Hoefele & Arijit Mukherjee, 2014. "Union Bargaining Power and Product Innovation: Relevance of the Preference Function," CESifo Working Paper Series 5007, CESifo.
    5. Gaston, N., 2000. "Unions and the Decentralisation of Collective Bargaining in a Globalising World," ISER Discussion Paper 0495, Institute of Social and Economic Research, Osaka University.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:restud:v:56:y:1989:i:3:p:449-465.. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/restud .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.