Collective Bargaining and the Gender Pay Gap in the Printing Industry

Abstract

This paper considers the effect of collective bargaining on the gender pay gap in the printing industry. This sector was subject to multi-employer bargaining for around 90 years, until 2010. The article analyses gendered collective bargaining processes through the mechanism of symbolic power, that is, the power of interpretation and definition, and utilizes Walton and McKersie's seminal work on bargaining behaviour to understand the processes that have prevented the closing of the pay gap. It finds that symbolic power operates within the sub-processes of attitudinal structuring and intra-organizational bargaining to de-legitimize women's role in equal pay bargaining, alongside distributive bargaining tactics that preclude equal pay bargaining, thereby creating the impression that women are irrelevant to bargaining processes and ensuring relative invisibility for issues of importance to equality bargaining.

Battles through and about statistics in French pay equity bargaining: The politics of quantification at workplace level

“…Both companies called on us to play an expert role during the previous or actual bargaining process, in 2007 for the management side in Power.inc for Author A, in 2015 for the union side in Info.inc for Author B. This approach based on participant observation of collective bargaining has allowed access to behind‐the‐scenes negotiations, internal tensions among stakeholders evolving through the bargaining process, archives and intermediary documents, rather than merely to official statements by management or unions (Acker, ; Dawson, ).…”

“…In the first ethnography of a ‘comparable‐worth’ implementation, Joan Acker () has shown how the technical is always political: management manipulated job evaluation techniques — provided by private consultants — and unions resisted wage redistribution — potentially detrimental to their male members. In the British printing industry, Tricia Dawson has revealed that both trade unionists and management, mostly male, do not discuss the form of the gender pay hierarchy, reflecting the symbolic power that lies in defining the ‘appropriate bargaining issues’ (bonus and extra payments, male advantages linked to skilled jobs) and the tendency for gender issues to fall off the agenda (Dawson, ). In the Finnish centralized and consensual industrial system, a national pay equity strategy was built in the 1990s, influenced by the Canadian experience and feminist scholars, as an ‘interactive social problem‐solving’ about comparable worth (Hieskanen, ).…”

Bargained Equality: The Strengths and Weaknesses of Workplace Gender Equality Agreements and Plans in France

“…Understanding of such relationships is filtered through existing beliefs, attitudes and positioning of key actors. If collective bargaining is by nature a conflictual process which seeks to resolve antagonistic views (Barbash ), equality bargaining therefore presents an additional set of potential conflicts (Chappe and Pochic ; Dawson ; Laufer ). Conflicts over proposed actions are not necessarily apparent in the text of an agreement: as noted above, they may become visible where an external actor has intervened to demand revision of an agreement; they also appear in some cases where a formal statement of non‐agreement is appended (Datatech, Gazia), but such statements are not always included.…”

Sisters (can’t) unite! Wages as macro‐political and the gendered power orders of corporatism

“…More recently, the Finnish centralized collective bargaining system has protected male privilege in the labour market through the strong tendency to uphold gendered divisions in the market and in collective bargaining. In collective bargaining, gendered power relations operate so that women's interests tend to become marginalized in the process (Dawson, ).…”

“…In collective bargaining, gendered power relations operate so that women's interests tend to become marginalized in the process (Dawson, 2014).…”