Coalition Bargaining in Municipal Government: The New York City Experience

This paper analyzes the emergence and development of two-tier coalition bargaining in the municipal government of New York City from the late 1960s through the 1980 negotiations. The reduction of interunion rivalries, growth of pattern bargaining, and enactment of the city's Collective Bargaining Law in 1967 were important precedents to formal coalition bargaining, but it was the fiscal crisis of the mid 1970s that provided a major thrust to the adoption of this type of bargaining structure. Through it, management and union officials were able not only to reach master and subsidiary agreements covering wages and conditions of employment, but to bargain broader fiscal rescue agreements with representatives of the federal and state governments who, in the wake of the fiscal crisis, acquired greater political control over the nation's largest city. The empirical findings are linked to theories of bargaining structure and provide the basis for predicting the continuance of coalition bargaining in New York City during the 1980s but only limited adoption of this bargaining format elsewhere in the American public sector.