Appendix 12.2: Coding and Scaling of Labor Law
Table 12.1 presents an outline of the categories used in the actual coding. The first step in scaling the data generated by this coding involved constructing “subscales” that corresponded to the nine headings in Table 12.1. Considering first the five subscales concerned with registration, monopoly of representation, compulsory membership, subsidy, and control of collective bargaining and strikes, one can see that there is an inherent ordering among the categories under each of these headings and that at any given time, each country can logically be in only one of the categories under each heading. Hence, as they stand, the categories under each of these five headings represent unidimensional scales.Footnote 20
Inducements
1. Registration. Countries were scored 0 or 1 according to whether there was a provision for the registration of labor unions.
2. Right of Combination. Countries were scored 0 or 1 according to whether they had each of the following provisions:
a. Employers may not make membership in a union an obstacle for obtaining or retaining employment.
b. Employers cannot refuse to participate in collective bargaining with a legitimate representative of the workers.
c. Unions may form into federations and confederations.
d. Employers may not be organizationally involved in unions.
e. Union leaders have some form of job security.
3. Monopoly of Representation. An ordered scale was constructed on the basis of the following values: 0 = No provision.
1 = Either multiple, competing unions are allowed to register and to represent members and bargain collectively, or there is the single restriction that for the purpose of collective bargaining, competing unions must form an inter-association committee.
2 = Competing trade or works unions may exist, but only the largest union among those representing the same sector may enter into collective agreements.
3 = Within a given sector, only singular unions are permitted.
4 = Prohibition of all unions except for one works union per enterprise.
4. Compulsory Membership. An ordered scale was constructed on the basis of the following values:
0 = No provisions.
1 = Either dues collection (or its equivalent) or collective bargaining agreements apply to both members and nonmembers. 2 = Both dues collection (or its equivalent) and collective bargaining apply to members and nonmembers.
3 = Closed shop or union shop clauses are permitted in collective bargaining agreements.
3.5 = Once a union is legally formed, membership is compulsory. 4 = Legal requirement of universal membership.
5. Subsidy. An ordered scale was constructed on the basis of the following values: 0 = No provision.
1 = Dues check-off permitted if union requests it.
2 = Dues check-off combined with closed shop provision or compulsory membership, or dues check-off that applies to members and nonmembers.
2.5 = Some form of on-going, state involvement in the financing of unions, such as the provision in Chile for a form of profit-sharing in which a portion of the profits of the enterprise are paid to the union via a state agency.
3 = Syndical tax.
Constraints
1. Collective Bargaining and Strike. An ordered scale was constructed on the basis of the following values.
0 = No provision.
1 = Voluntary conciliation and/or arbitration preceding a strike.
2 = Compulsory conciliation preceding a strike.
4 = Compulsory arbitration to be initiated at a specified time after a strike begins.
5 = Compulsory arbitration before a strike.
7 = Strikes outlawed.
Because there are often special conciliation, arbitration, and strike provisions that apply to the public sector, to public services, or to other sectors viewed as crucial to the economy, additional points were added to this score as follows: one point if strikes were outlawed in the public sector; one point if strikes were outlawed in public services or other “strategic” sectors; half a point if the score for the public sector on the above scale was higher than the score for industrial disputes in general (unless it was equal to 7, in which case it got a whole point); and half a point if the score for public services or other strategic sectors on the above scale was higher than the score for disputes in general (again, unless it was 7). The highest possible score was thus 9.
2. Other Constraints on Demand-Making. Countries were scored 0 or 1 according to whether they had each of the following provisions:
a. Collective bargaining agreements must be approved in order to be legal.
b. Political activities of unions prohibited.
c. Political and/or solidarity strikes prohibited.
d. Boycotts and/or picketing prohibited.
e. Calling an illegal strike constitutes grounds for dissolving a union.
f. Union officials can be removed for calling an illegal strike.
3. Leadership. Countries were scored 0 or 1 according to whether they had each of the following provisions:
a. Salaries of union officials regulated.
b. Union officers must be workers in the occupational grouping which their union represents.
c. Union leaders must meet citizenship and/or residence requirements.
d. Political activists associated with certain political parties or ideologies are excluded from union office.
4. Internal Governance. Countries were scored 0 or 1 according to whether they had each of the following provisions:
a. The state can audit union financial records.
b. Expenditures of union funds regulated.
c. State official may attend union meetings.
d. State authorized to assume direct control of unions (to “intervene” them).
e. State may dissolve unions. For this crucial provision a score of 0 was assigned if there was no provision; a score of 1 if it could be done by judicial decision only; and a score of 2 if it could be done through a more discretionary administrative or combined administrative and judicial decision. A further point was added if the permissible causes for dissolution went beyond narrow procedural criteria to include broader political criteria. The maximum possible score for this trait was thus 3.
The provisions under the remaining four headings – right of combination, other constraints on demand-making, leadership, and internal governance – are not inherently mutually exclusive. Rather, it is logically possible for any one country to have several of the provisions simultaneously. Guttman scaling was therefore used to discover if cumulative, unidimensional scales were present. The provisions did in fact follow a Guttman scale pattern,Footnote 21 and for each of the scales each nation was given a score according to the number of provisions in the scale that it possessed.
The relationships among these nine subscales were then analyzed to determine the degree to which it was statistically appropriate to form an overall index of inducements and of constraints. On the basis of cluster and factor analysis we concluded that there were strong associations both among the five subscales under the inducement heading and among the four subscales under the constraint heading. It was therefore appropriate to group the scales in this way.Footnote 22 Aggregate measures of inducements and constraints were then derived on the basis of these analyses.Footnote 23 It should be noted that the composite scales of inducements and constraints are themselves strongly correlated (0.84). Hence, it would also be meaningful to form an additional composite scale that combines all nine subscales which could be referred to as an overall measure of “corporatism.” In any particular analysis, whether one analyzes the two dimensions separately or together thus depends on the theoretical concerns of the study. In the present chapter, our goal is to discover whether interesting patterns emerge if these two logically distinct dimensions are treated separately, and therefore we have employed them as separate indices.
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