The Politics of Job Loss

Abstract

This paper undertakes a rational choice analysis of a problem in political economy: namely, why trade unions, confronted with firms equally intransigent in their commitments to work-force reductions, sometimes actively resist job loss and at other times passively acquiesce. Cases investigated are British Leyland and Fiat. Unions at British Leyland acquiesced, whereas those at Fiat resisted mass work-force reductions in 1980. The literatures on corporatism and on contemporary industrial relations both class Italian and British labor relations as antagonistic. They thereby fail to anticipate the different outcomes for these two cases. The outcomes may be understood as products of the rational calculations that union leaders make within the constraints of labor market institutions. Specifically, I show that union responses to the threat of large-scale work-force reductions vary with the presence or absence of seniority-based mechanisms for allocating job loss. Where seniority is used, the union acquiesces in job loss, since seniority effectively protects the union's own shop stewards. Where, conversely, the firm enjoys discretion in selecting workers for job loss, the union may resist if it believes the selection will be discriminatory, hence threatening its own shop floor organization.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 12 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.