ABSTRACT
Multi-employer bargaining is an outgrowth of collective bargaining that began to centralize since the 1960s and has become prevalent in many sectors before September 1980. Mass strikes that emerged in their midst were an important catalyst as political objectives began to gain importance within the union movement and relations hardened between employers and workers. Despite their diminished prevalence since the 1980s along with the global weakening trend of unionization, they remain important both quantitatively and in terms of their impact on union bargaining strategy. In the 1970s, multi-employer bargaining was pushed for by employer unions and initially opposed by workers unions. However, in the aftermath of mass strikes in the late 1970s, and later in the mid-1980s, workers unions attitude began to shift. The objective of this paper is to analyze the emergence and evolution of multi-employer bargaining and discuss how the attitudes of both capital and union movement towards it have changed over time.