Globalization and Employer Collective Action: Two Reconcilable Realities?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the manner in which employers determine their preferred structures of collective bargaining. A common feature amidst the restructuring and rescaling of the global economy and nation-state are employer-led attempts to decentralize collective bargaining structures in industrialized nations. However, there are exceptions, as is evident in the case of Quebec’s menswear industry — the focus of this study — where centralized bargaining persists. Through in-depth interviews and a review of literature, we develop an analytical framework that emphasizes four factors that influence employers’ preferred bargaining structure: economic, organizational, institutional, and strategic. We make two primary observations throughout our empirical analysis. First, we find that employers and unions are often simultaneously motivated to pursue centralized bargaining, and that there is a propensity for employers to adhere to centralized bargaining despite marked diversity in firm size, target markets, and the capacity to remunerate employees. Second, our results suggest a tension between the factors considered by our framework. In some cases, economic and organizational factors influence actors to individualize collective bargaining; in others, institutional factors impose constraints that limit actors’ strategic choices and lead to centralized bargaining. Therefore, our results demonstrate that the factors generally associated with globalization do not necessarily determine the actions of employers and unions. Conversely, such actors retain the ability to maneuver in reaction to the pressures of the market.
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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 | 0.008 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.000 |
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".