Collective bargaining takes place between a union or worker organisation and employer(s) or decision-makers with a goal of improving and regulating conditions for workers.
This section of the Power Resources Tool Kit will cover how to prepare for and conduct bargaining. It will help you create a specific plan for your bargaining. The words bargaining and negotiations are used interchangeably in these materials.
The materials have been developed to be useful in a wide variety of circumstances. Whether you are an informal workers’ association, a formal union or works council bargaining at company or industry level, or a Global Union Federation bargaining for an international framework agreement, you will need to prepare for bargaining, prioritise the most important contract demands through worker meetings and surveys, and draft written proposals.
It is important to coordinate your collective bargaining work with your campaigning and organising work. Uninvolved union members and unorganised workers pose a threat to the working conditions of all workers.
Collective bargaining translates associational, structural and societal power into institutional power - agreements and policies that define working conditions and the framework in which to operate. Many employers do not want collective bargaining to take place and use all kinds of strategies and tactics to avoid sitting at the table with unions and worker organisations. Achieving an initial collective agreement is a significant achievement and one to be celebrated.
This chapter on “Collective Bargaining” provides materials, tools and activities to help create a bargaining plan for your situation.
If you are planning a contract campaign to build power for your negotiations, you will also need to review the materials from Campaigning and Organising and Core Materials.
Your negotiations may be governed by social dialogue. Social dialogue, as it has developed in Europe and some countries in other parts of the world, is a legally mandated framework for “social partners” (trade unions and employer organisations, and sometimes government) to work together. Social dialogue can include collective bargaining or simply be an exchange of views and information.
In Uruguay, social dialogue exists at three levels:
A Tripartite High-Level Council, made up of representatives from trade unions (6), employers’ organisations (6) and government (9), discusses general economic trends, wage guidelines for collective wage negotiations in wage councils and adjustments to the national minimum wage (subsequently determined by government).
Wage Councils are organised by the sector in 24 branches of activity with tripartite composition. They negotiate minimum wages by category, along with wage increases and other working conditions. Wage provisions are extended by the Ministry of Labour to cover all enterprises in the sector with the possibility for enterprises in difficulty to opt out.
Enterprise-level collective bargaining between an employer and one or more trade unions. These can improve on standards set at the other levels.
Only after all the legal steps are taken can the union call a strike by workers.
ILO Collective Bargaining: A Policy Guide, p. 50. https://www.ilo.org/travail/whatwedo/instructionmaterials/WCMS_425004/lang--en/index.htm
You need to be familiar with the laws and regulations governing collective bargaining in your country and/or sector.
Discuss these questions about your collective bargaining context:
What person or body has the authority to make the changes you are seeking?
Who are the parties to collective bargaining? Do the parties need to be formally recognised for the purposes of collective bargaining?
Create a rough timeline that includes when you expect negotiations to begin and end. Is there a deadline by which the parties must reach agreement or do you need to create one?
What rights and access do workers have to collective bargaining?
If you are a union of formal workers with bargaining rights, is it possible to bring informal workers into the negotiating structures?
If you are a union or workers’ association without bargaining rights or process, what can you do to formalise a written collective agreement developed and ratified by workers?
What are the key subjects for bargaining?
At what level(s) (workplace, enterprise, regional, national, international) will the collective bargaining take place? Are there different issues that are decided in different forums?
Learn about a level of bargaining that is different from your own – workplace, enterprise, regional, national, international. Are there any useful lessons to be drawn? What level would be ideal for the collective bargaining to take place?
If you are bargaining with more than one employer or for an entire industry, discuss whether you might want to single out one or more employer, either positively or negatively, to pressure other employers.
If your union has a collective bargaining agreement, do you know how it was achieved and what collective actions were taken by workers?
Could you trace its history and what it teaches you for today’s situation?
Workers around the world are facing increasing informalisation of work. According to ILO 2018 estimates, 61% of all workers are informally employed – that’s 2 billion workers worldwide. Formal workers need to know how to bargain for and represent informal workers. Informal workers need to know how to build their power by making their bargaining process more formalised with written contracts and enforcement mechanisms ratified by workers.
Precarious and informal workers may not have recognised bargaining structures. The bargaining process might be as informal as a meeting between a workers’ association and a local or national government.
You might need to decide who you are going to bargain with. Your first struggle may be to get the decision-maker to agree to negotiate with you and to create the bargaining process. Informal workers can formalise the bargaining by putting agreements in writing with timelines and dispute-enforcement procedures.
If there is no clear timeframe for the bargaining and no deadline for the parties to reach agreement, you will need to create one. To create a deadline, let the employer or decision-maker know that you will be prepared to take collective action if an agreement is not reached by the given date. A collective decision taken by workers to take action on the date (a mandate) will underscore the deadline.
Bargaining for precarious workers is key to improving working conditions. The process will be similar, but perhaps not as lengthy or as formal. For example, you will probably still need to draft written proposals even if this is in the form of a short letter signed by the parties, and you will still need to determine the cost of what you are proposing.
Below are a few examples of precarious and informal workers using the bargaining process.
Street venders in Zambia work with several different negotiating counterparts. “We negotiate with councillors, town clerks, state police commandants, the Zambia Revenue Authority et cetera. Issues of collective bargaining on the local level are around levies, services such as garbage collection, security and harassment.” Lameck Kahiwa, General Secretary, AZIEA
WIEGO, Collective Negotiations for Informal Workers
www.wiego.org/sites/default/files/resources/files/ICC4-Collective-Bargaining-English.pdf
“Domestic workers formed the Pune City Domestic Workers’ Organisation. In India, Labour law does not apply to domestic workers. They have no bargaining partner. They drew up collective demands on wage rates for different jobs, time off, holidays, bonus et cetera. They put forward these demands through strikes, newspaper publicity, marches, and submissions to individual employers and to the municipality that sets by-laws. Over the past twenty years they have managed to get many employers to implement their demands.”
Sujata Gothoskar, New Initiatives in Organising Strategy in the Informal Economy
WIEGO, Collective Negotiations for Informal Workers
www.wiego.org/sites/default/files/resources/files/ICC4-Collective-Bargaining-English.pdf
The union of informal sector, mainly women workers, in India, LMKS, employs different strategies of collective bargaining based on the specific conditions of informal garment factory workers and home-based garment workers.
For workers in informal garment factories, the most pressing problems at the shop floor level include arbitrary dismissals, retention of wages, harassment, and non-payment of overtime as well as non-payment of medical support in case of injuries.
When a problem occurs, first, only two or three union activists and the workers involved intervene, talking to the factory owner. If the employer refuses to listen, all the 11 union activists join them. In many cases this strategy has been successful due to the union’s reputation of protest and collective action along with their official registration and status as a trade union at the state level.
For home-based subcontracted workers, the union works through collective action against contractors and factory-owners, and also works to generate jobs and higher piece-rates through direct orders from factories and malls.
If contractors cheat on workers, for example by retaining the entire wage if the worker has made a mistake in the finishing work on a product, union activists negotiate with the contractors to pay at least half of the piece-rate. The union also collects data and identifies unequal piece rates which are paid for the same pieces and mobilises members to stand together to demand an equal piece-rate.
If the contractor refuses to equally pay the highest piece-rate, workers collectively stop work, which delays the orders. For most workers, it is difficult to establish and maintain direct individual order relationships with factory-owners rather than the subcontracting companies.
In 2012, it was therefore decided, in a union meeting, that in order to increase employment security and increase the piece-rate, the union should facilitate orders for the members from the factories. Union activists negotiate with the factory owners and distribute the work to the members, avoiding the commission taken by the contractor (up to 80% on each piece), enabling union members to get a piece-rate which is much higher than what they would get through a contractor:
The piece-rates facilitated through the union are two to four times higher than the contractors’ rates. The union takes a much lower commission of 20%, which is used to pay for transportation costs of activists and to build savings for future orders which require the purchasing of material.
You may need a contract campaign to build power for bargaining. A contract campaign should usually run prior to and alongside the bargaining. If you have not already done so, use the Tool Kit section on Campaigning and Organising to discuss and create a contract campaign for your situation. You will need to review the materials to decide which materials fit best.
The key to successful negotiations is knowing that a good contract takes much more than having smart negotiators and bargaining team members. It also takes the power of an involved and active workforce and the capacity to use this leverage effectively. All negotiations involve some level of campaigning and organising, particularly if the employer or decision-maker is not ready to agree to key workers’ demands.
Collective bargaining is an excellent opportunity to increase worker participation and involvement in the union. The more preparation, campaigning and organising the workers and the union do before and during your collective bargaining process, the more power you will have at the negotiating table.
In 2009, the Seoul & Gyenonggi Local of the Korean Public Services Union (KPSU) began organising cleaners, targeting the workers at universities in Seoul with the support of university student organisations, the KCTU and other civic and union groups. The KCTU had been pushing for higher minimum wages through legislation every year since 2000 without success.
In 2011 the union entered negotiations, demanding a higher wage as a top priority. With a deadlock on wages in bargaining, the cleaners organised collective action with students and allies on the premises of the university. The cleaners went on strike on International Women’s Day, 8 March 2011, with the slogan “we are not ghosts” and fought for the “right to a warm lunch”.
Middle and old-aged female cleaners who have the lowest status in the trade unions as well as in society found a voice. The cleaners won a pay rise which exceeded the level of the statutory minimum wage for the first time. The workers visited cleaners at neighbouring workplaces and talked to them about joining a union, relating their victorious achievement as unionists.
If applicable, discuss how the timeframe of a contract campaign might align with the negotiation timeline.
Identify when you will need maximum campaign pressure on the decision-maker. What might the maximum campaign pressure look like?
If you are planning a contract campaign, review the “Core Materials” and “Organising Campaigns’” and “Collective Bargaining” sections of the Tool Kit and decide which sections fit your situation.
Below is a sample workshop agenda to plan the bargaining process. You might only include the bargaining team members as participants in your workshop, or you can also involve other union leaders, particularly those who might be involved in planning the contract campaign that may run before and during the negotiations process. The workshop can take place online or in person.
Below is a sample workshop agenda that combines the contract campaign and bargaining planning in one longer workshop.
Here is an example of agenda topics for a series of weekly meetings in preparation for bargaining. The meetings could be held in person or online.
Preparation for Bargaining
Week 1 – Introductions and review and update of the organising campaign
Week 2 – Bargaining research
Week 3 – Legal frameworks and subjects for bargaining
Week 4 – What it takes to win
Week 5 - Arbolitos / worker communication networks
Week 6 - Bargaining proposal meetings and surveys
Week 7 – Ratifying the bargaining proposals
Week 8 – Drafting contract language and costing out contract proposals
Week 9 – Bargaining team
Week 10 – Conducting the negotiations
Week 11 – Identifying differences and agreements
Week 12 – Priorities and proposal packaging
Week 13 – Settlement, ratification and strikes
The materials in this section of the tool kit have been adapted from
Australian Trade Union Institute (ATUI) www.atui.org.au
Teamsters Training and Development Department https://teamster.org/training-and-development/
Women in Informal Employment: Globalising and Organising (WIEGO) https://www.wiego.org/