Antecedents of concession bargaining in the Great Recession: evidence from Ireland

• Author: William K. Roche,Paul Teague
• Date: 01 November 2015
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/irj.12119
• Published date: 01 November 2015

Antecedents of concession bargaining in the

Great Recession: evidence from Ireland

William K. Roche and Paul Teague

ABSTRACT

Concession or ‘give back’bargaining involves firms seeking changes in pay and

conditions of employment from trade unions in return for pledges of enhanced job

security and sometimes other forms of reciprocation. Several distinct modes of

concession bargaining are distinguishable in the literature, and three modes of

concession bargaining have been identified in Ireland during the Great Recession:

integrative, distributive and minimal engagement. Deploying qualitatively informed

quantitative data on the conduct of collective bargaining during the Great Recession,

this article examines a series of antecedent influences on the choices firms make in

conducting concession bargaining with unions.

1 INTRODUCTION

What has happened to the conduct of collective bargaining in firms during the Great

Recession that started in 2008 is a matter of ongoing debate. At the popular level, it

is relatively easy to find bleak assessments of how employers ‘are not wasting a good

recession’. Yet careful studies of pay and employment conditions, particularly in

unionised firms, during previous recessions do not point in one direction. Instead, they

suggest that a variety of adjustment strategies are open to unionised firms in response

to the arrival of harsh business times. Surprisingly, the number of studies focused on

the dynamics of concession bargaining during the current Great Recession is not

extensive. This article seeks to address this shortcoming in the literature by

examining the nature, extent and antecedents of concession bargaining in Ireland—

one of the country’s worst hit by the economic crisis. A puzzle it sets out to address

in particular is why firms adopted the concession bargaining strategies they did.

2 MODES AND ANTECEDENTS OF CONCESSION BARGAINING

Concession bargaining refers explicitly to the impact of recessions or economic shocks

on established collective bargaining arrangements. The term first entered the indus-

trial relations literature in the early 1980s when scholars examined developments in

collective bargaining during the early 1980s recession in the United States (Freeman

1986; McKersie and Cappelli 1982; Mitchell 1994). General agreement emerged from

these studies that a core feature of concession bargaining involved unions offering

❒William K. Roche, University College Dublin, Graduate School of Business, and Paul Teague, Queen’s

University Belfast, Management School. Correspondence should be addressed to William K. Roche,

University College Dublin, Graduate School of Business, Dublin, Ireland; email: bill.roche@ucd.ie

Industrial Relations Journal 46:5–6, 434–445

ISSN 0019-8692

© 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd