Assessing the legal value added of collective bargaining agreements

Abstract

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30,000 Minimum Wages: The Economic Effects of Collective Bargaining Extensions

“…For instance, the OECD Employment Protection Legislation comparisons typically place Portugal in the top positions across most of its different dimensions during the period covered in our empirical analysis (OECD 2012). This implies that the most important provisions that are actually introduced by collective agreements (and extensions, in a second stage) concern the minimum wages per job type — and not other aspects of the employment relationship, as shown in Martins and Saraiva (2020). Moreover, the revisions of collective agreements typically focus exclusively on the increase in the minimum wages applicable in the industry.…”

“…The collective agreement text listed over 180 clauses, including provisions on minimum wages by worker category, description of main job titles, health and safety, fixed‐term contracts, trial periods, holidays, overtime and replacement of workers. Many of these clauses repeated or changed only marginally the provisions already in place in the general labour law and in the original 2005 version of the collective agreement (see Martins and Saraiva 2020, for a detailed analysis of this and other agreements). The agreement was published in late March 2010, establishing wage floors that came into effect from January 1.…”

“…As explained above, collective agreements tend to be revised regularly, on a yearly or lower frequency. Such revisions tend to be focused on the wage floors set for each job type and job category although they occasionally also include other provisions (Martins and Saraiva 2020). This time linkage allows us to use the information collected by the Ministry of Employment regarding the agreements — and their potential extensions — namely, along the range of industries potentially affected.…”

Measuring What Social Partners Do About Wages Over the Business Cycle

“…However, such CB wages can function as reference or even focal points in the hiring of new workers or upon the promotion of existing workers to a higher job category. Moreover, while collective agreements include many other clauses than those specifically about (minimum) wages, the former tend to add relatively little value compared to the already applicable regulations stemming from statutory employment law (Martins and Saraiva, 2019).…”

The Microeconomic Impacts of Employee Representatives: Evidence from Membership Thresholds

“…Incidentally, this norm has been remarkably stable over time, having exactly the same wording since 1975, when it was first introduced, despite the many labor law reforms since then. Moreover, while the Labor Code allows collective bargaining to change the numbers above, we know of only one case in which this happened (in banking, in which the number of extra union reps increases from one to four, and not two, at the fifty threshold (Martins and Saraiva )). The same view was expressed by a number of union and employer association leaders with whom we discussed this matter.…”