Contracts and Strikes in Canada, 1952-1988 Author(s): Alan Harrison Source: The Canadian Journal of Economics / Revue canadienne d'Economique, Vol. 29, Special Issue: Part 1 (Apr., 1996), pp. S76-S83 Published by: Wiley on behalf of the Canadian Economics Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/135964 . Accessed: 18/06/2014 07:15 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . Wiley and Canadian Economics Association are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Canadian Journal of Economics / Revue canadienne d'Economique. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 195.34.79.228 on Wed, 18 Jun 2014 07:15:59 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
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Contracts and Strikes in Canada, 1952-1988Author(s): Alan HarrisonSource: The Canadian Journal of Economics / Revue canadienne d'Economique, Vol. 29, SpecialIssue: Part 1 (Apr., 1996), pp. S76-S83Published by: Wiley on behalf of the Canadian Economics AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/135964 .
Accessed: 18/06/2014 07:15
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
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Between 1952 and 1979, Labour Canada collected data on something in excess of 5300 contracts. An earlier subset of these data, covering 1953- 1973, was used in work by, inter alia, Riddell (1979, 1980), but in recent years they have not been widely studied. The reason is perhaps that, in the early 1960s, while Labour Canada was still assembling what is usually referred to as the Wage Chronologies File, work also began on the collection of contract data for what is known as the Wage File; this data collection, which continues to the present day, has generated what many view as an unparalleled source of detail about wage agreements, and most analyses of Canadian contracts focus on the Wage File alone.
This short paper briefly describes some aspects of the preparation of both data sets for analysis, including the incorporation of information on strikes, when they occurred. (A longer version of this paper that is available from the author dwells in considerably more detail on these issues.) The other main focus of this paper is on some preliminary evidence from a combination of the two samples, covering contracts from 1952 to 1988. Specifically, the combined sample reveals several insights into changes over time in strike behaviour and contract length. In future papers, it is planned to use an extended version of the data (beyond 1988) to explore these and other issues for a period of over 40 years.
The paper is organized as follows. Section II describes the two sets of contract data, paying particular attention to the use of Labour Canada's Work Stoppage File to supplement the information on those contracts that were settled only after a strike. Section III outlines one way of combining the contract data sets, and reports on the changes over time in strike behaviour and contract duration thus revealed.
Canadian Journal of Economics Revue canadienne d'Econonique, XXIX, Special Issue April avril 1996. Printed in Canada Imprime au Canada
0008-4085 / 96 / S76-83 $1.50 ? Canadian Economics Association
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1. The Wage Chronologies File In his use of these data, Riddell selected only contracts for firms in manufacturing (coverage of even manufacturing industries was not complete but the coverage in non-manufacturing was distinctly inferior) and only master contracts. This yielded 2360 contracts for Riddell's analysis. Subsequent to the preparation of the data set for his analyses, Riddell was provided with revised data by Labour Canada. These supplemented the original data in two ways. First, the range of industries covered within manufacturing was somewhat expanded (with the addition of textiles, for example); second, contract information for a number of years beyond 1973 was added. I therefore began with this enhanced data set, from which I produced a sample of 3219 contracts.
My selection criteria were generally similar to Riddell's. I confined attention to private-sector manufacturing, which provided coverage of most (but still not all) industries. I excluded a few contracts with incomplete information, and any that were clearly sub-contracts of a master agreement. In the latter case, I determined which contracts to eliminate on the basis of explicit coding, and also sometimes by examining settlement, effective, and expiry dates: if these were consistently identical through time, and if there was other evidence to suggest this was simultaneous bargaining and not just coincidence, I selected one agreement as the master and omitted the remainder even when this was not explicitly coded.
Since strike behaviour is a primary focus of some of the analyses I intend conducting with these data, I wished to match strike information from Labour Canada's Work Stoppages File' to those contracts that were settled only after a strike. There is, however, nothing in the Wage Chronologies data to indicate which contracts involved strikes, and it was therefore necessary to examine the strike data in some detail to determine, for each contract, whether a matching entry could be found.
For a variety of reasons, this exercise had to be conducted manually. The size of the strike data made a full manual search of even the information for the relevant years and industries impossible, but some of the details coded on each strike, notably the contract status of the strike (whether it occurred during, or at the expiry of, a contract), reduced the scope of the exercise somewhat. Lest this coding were unreliable, I did conduct a full search for a few randomly chosen years, and no further matches were found. I also had the benefit of examining the matches that Riddell had identified in his sub- sample of the Wage Chronologies data, in connection with his investigation
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of the effect of strikes and strike length on wage settlements (Riddell 1980). Though this did reveal one match I had previously overlooked, my own search also found a number that he had not detected; additionally, I rejected some of Riddell's matches.
2. The Wage File For the Wage File, Labour Canada confines attention primarily to large bargaining units (those covering 500 workers or more).2 In other respects, though, the coverage of the data in the Wage File is much more comprehensive than that of the data in the Wage Chronologies File: the range of non-manufacturing industries is much broader, for example. I chose to look only at private-sector contracts, in both manufacturing and nonmanufacturing, between 1965 and 1988.
Once again, Labour Canada's Work Stoppage File was used to provide details on a strike when one occurred. The Wage File data have the distinct advantage that the stage of settlement is coded; this indicates whether settlement was preceded by a strike, so that, in principle, not all contracts had to be considered as potentially involving a strike. Armed with this information, matches were located by comparing, inter alia, the company and union names and the location of the firm. In some cases, no strike was found by the stated matching process though the contract data indicated that there should be one. When this happened, additional (and sometimes differing) information on the stoppage was consulted in various issues of the annual publication, Strikes and Lockouts in Canada (for years from 1965 to 1985), and the monthly publication, Collective Bargaining Review (for years from 1986 to 1989). These sources were also helpful in grouping strikes when a contract covered several locations of the same firm, but strikes at all locations were separately recorded in the Work Stoppage File. Finally, in a few cases, everything except the company matched; then, all contracts for the firm-union pair with the same identifier in the Wage File were checked to determine if the firm had changed its name at some time in its history, and if this did not resolve the question, reference was occasionally made to Scott's Directory.
An analysis by Card (1990) of contracts in manufacturing firms up to 1985 had required a similar merging of strike data to that which I attempted. Card generously provided me with his listing of contracts and stoppages, the latter drawn from various issues of Strikes and Lockouts in Canada. This revealed a number of matches of strikes to contracts not identified in the Wage File as involving a strike. I replicated Card's methods for the years
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beyond 1985, by consulting various issues of the Collective Bargaining Review, and did likewise for the entire non-manufacturing sample, in each case adding to the contract data the appropriate strike details thus uncovered.
HII. A COMBINED CONTRACT DATA SET, 1952-1988
Both the data from the Wage Chronologies File and those from the Wage File are useful as separate sources of information, and have been thus analyzed. They also, however, hold out the prospect of being combined into a data set spanning a period from 1952 to the present. Whether this is a useful exercise depends, of course, on how closely comparable the two data sets are for the years they both cover, viz, 1965 to 1977.
There are some immediately obvious differences, which will be evident even from the brief data descriptions above, and any sensible comparison should therefore be conducted on appropriately chosen subsets of the two sets of data. First, only manufacturing firms in the Wage File data can be considered because coverage in the Wage Chronologies data of the non- manufacturing sector is sketchy at best. Second, even within manufacturing, the Wage Chronologies data do not include a number of industries (specifically, leather, knitting mills, clothing, furniture, printing, metal fabricating, and miscellaneous manufacturing), so a further culling of the Wage File data is necessitated. Third, the Wage File data are confined to bargaining units of 500 workers or more, but many of the contracts in the Wage Chronologies data cover units of considerably fewer workers.
In terms simply of sample sizes, the foregoing can be summarized as follows. For the relevant sub-period, 1965-1977, there are 1366 manufacturing contracts in the Wage Chronologies data, and 1574 in the Wage File data. Removing the smaller (less than 500 workers) bargaining units from the former reduces the 1366 to 484 contracts. Restricting the industry coverage of the latter lowers the 1574 to 1282 contracts. It appears then that, even within the industries covered by the Wage Chronologies data, the Wage File data include many contracts whose details the Wage Chronologies File, for whatever reason, overlooks.
Of the 484 contracts in the appropriate subset of the Wage Chronologies data, 427 appear also in the Wage File data. Additionally, 23 of the 882 contracts in the Wage Chronologies data that cover bargaining units of less than 500 workers appear in the Wage File data, indicating that the coding of the size of the bargaining unit in one or the other of the data sets is in a few cases imprecise.
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In the light of these observations, I began by selecting the sub-sample of contracts from the Wage File that covered bargaining units in those manufacturing industries that were included in the Wage Chronologies File. To assess comparability between the two data sets, I then plotted the annual mean agreement length and annual strike incidence (the proportion of contracts that involved a strike) in this sub-sample for the period for which the Wage File overlaps with the Wage Chronologies File, that is, 1965 to 1977. The important consideration was whether to discard the Porter data for smaller bargaining units (and hence the 23 that match contracts in the Labour Canada data). The evidence from the plots indicated that though there were only minor differences between the two data sets when only large bargaining units from the Wage Chronologies data were selected, including the smaller bargaining units considerably exaggerated the differences. I therefore proceeded by confining attention to the contracts in the Wage Chronologies data that cover larger bargaining units.
Thus I chose the relevant sub-samples to be contracts that were (a) large enough to be included in the Wage File (those covering 500 workers or more), and (b) in manufacturing industries covered by the Wage Chronologies File (all manufacturing except leather, knitting mills, clothing, furniture, printing, metal fabricating, and miscellaneous manufacturing).
This having been established, I next plotted the same two variables, annual mean agreement length and annual strike incidence, for each of the relevant sub-samples over the entire period covered by the data from which they were drawn (1952-1977 in the case of the Wage Chronologies data, 1965-1988 for the Wage File data), and, for each variable, I combined the plots into a single figure. These are presented here as figure 1 and figure 2.
The first point to note is that, as I have already suggested, there is a close correspondence between the two samples in each of the figures for the period for which they overlap. This encourages me to believe that the figures present a realistic picture of what they purport to show, namely contract duration and strike incidence between 1952 and 1988.
Beyond this, there is little to say about the figures that readers cannot glean for themselves. Suffice to say here that, during the 1950s and early 1960s, both contract duration and strike activity (as measured by strike incidence) were appreciably lower than at any subsequent time. More pertinently, perhaps, the additional observations on these variables provided by the Wage Chronologies data reveal a picture very different from that analyzed by those (including the current author; see Harrison and Stewart 1994) who look only at the evidence from the Wage File. Explaining the
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variations in contract duration and strike incidence from 1952 to 1988 (and beyond), as opposed to simply describing it, will no doubt be commensurately challenging.
NOTES
I should like to thank Garfield Clack, Harry Grossklegg and Michel Legault of Labour Canada for their advice, and David Card and Craig Riddell for their generous help with the data; funding from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (grants #410-90-0565 and #410-92- 1464) is also gratefully acknowledged. Finally, the research described herein would not have been possible without the excellent assistance of Deb Fretz. 1 A full description of these data can be found in Harrison arid Stewart
(1993); see also, Harrison and Stewart (1989). 2 I use the word "primarily" because some data were at one time also
collected on smaller bargaining units: those with at least 200, but fewer than 500, workers. These data are not publicly available, but were released to Gunderson, Kervin and Reid (1986) for analysis.
REFERENCES
Card, David (1990) 'Strikes and wages: a test of an asymmetric information model.' Quarterly Journal of Economics 105, 625-59
Gunderson, Morley, John Kervin, and Frank Reid (1986) 'Logit estimates of strike incidence from Canadian contract data.' Journal of Labor Economics 4, 257-76
Harrison, Alan, and Mark Stewart (1989) 'Cyclical fluctuations in strike durations.' American Economic Review 79, 827-41
(1993) 'Strike duration and strike size.' Canadian Journal of Economics 26, 830-49
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