Collective Bargaining in the Face of Instability: A Resource for Workers and Employers in the U.S. Aerospace Industry. April 2001. Collective bargaining agreements are a core factor in the employment relationships among participants in the aerospace industry. In unionized facilities these agreements govern many aspects of day-to-day interaction as well as important processes such as promotion, job rotation, and employee development. In non-unionized firms bargaining agreements do not physically exist, but their impact on the shaping workplace conditions is still felt. Contract language and bargaining agreements result from reactions and strategic initiatives often in response to actual or anticipated instability reflected in the cyclical nature of the industry. Therefore the LARA project undertook a study of the existing contract language in order to understand the role of collective bargaining with respect to instability in the aerospace industry.

Both sponsoring unions, the UAW and the IAM, cooperated in providing bargaining agreements for sites they represent in the aerospace industry. The known universe of sites represented by all unions in the industry is approximately 500. From the contracts available, 28 were selected using criteria that tried to insure a broad view of different types of organizations, different sectors within the industry, and differing sizes of facilities.

Once the contracts for review were selected, categories of actual language were defined. These were developed initially based on categories in the contracts analyzed and then adjusted with input from the IAM and UAW.

The contractual topics include:

• High Performance Work Organization Language
• High Performance Work Organization Layoff Benefit Language
• Joint Governance
• New Technology Language
• Movement of Operations
• Outsourcing Language and Subcontracting Language
• Transfer Language
• Transfer in Lieu of Layoff (Bumping) Language
• Seniority Language
• Upgrading Language
• Layoff Language and Layoff Benefit Language
• Recall Language
• Leave of Absence Language
• New Hire Language
• Temporary Workers Language
• Shift Preference and Transfer Language
• Job Consolidation
• Training Language

The resource highlights language that is unique for its innovativeness and responsiveness to contemporary issues in the industry, with a particular focus on those issues most related to instability. The resource contains a list of the selected contracts with demographic information about the facility, and a tabulation of the numbers of contracts that contain language related to the topic categories. Further, an exemplar of language was included to illustrate a standard or innovative contractual clause.

This Collective Bargaining Resource is a first step to more in depth investigation of the state of collective bargaining in aerospace.

Download Collective Bargaining in the Face of Instability: A Resource for Workers and Employers in the U.S. Aerospace Industry

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