First Contract Arbitration and the Employee Free Choice Act
Bibliographic record
Abstract
One provision of the proposed Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) would address the catastrophic underenforcement of the statutory right of employees to bargain, which results in half of all newly certified or recognized unions failing to secure a first collective bargaining agreement. It is an important reform for a seriously dysfunctional aspect of federal labor law and it will be a substantial improvement over the status quo. While political and media conversation surrounding EFCA has largely focused on the changing the process by which unions are selected, the provision for first contract arbitration is as important to the protection of the right to unionize.This Article argues that some form of mandatory interest arbitration for first contract disputes is an appropriate means of stabilizing employee-management relations given the extraordinary difficulties that unions currently experience in negotiating first contracts, the weakness of current NLRB and economic remedies, and the rippling effects of these difficulties on nascent unions. The Article surveys the empirical literature on the operation of interest arbitration in the public and private sector in the United States and in Canada and demonstrates that interest arbitration would increase the incentive for employers to negotiate in good-faith and make reasonable proposals. The Article shows that none of the alternative reforms to the law of collective bargaining and to NLRB procedures for protecting the right to bargain will be effective in addressing failures to bargain to a first contract. The Article also demonstrates that a statutory requirement of first contract arbitration is well within Congress’ power and does not represent an unconstitutional delegation of legislative authority.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.028 | 0.052 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.019 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".