There has been a convergence in the area of labour rights toward private ordering of employment relations and away from the idea of work and employment being a matter subject to public ordering. By private ordering, we mean the idea that work and employment terms and conditions are primarily determined at the level of the individual organization, whether through collective bargaining between unions and employers at the organizational level, through individual negotiations, or through unilateral employer establishment of the terms and conditions of employment. The shift away from public ordering of work and employment is most dramatic in the cases of Australia and New Zealand, where the publicly established system of centralized Awards has given way to organizational level ordering of employment relations through workplace or individual level agreements. In the United Kingdom, the shift to greater private ordering is most evident in the breakdown of multi-employer collective bargaining, the weakening of industry wide standards enforced by strong unions, and the growth of nonunion representation at the enterprise level. By contrast, the much lesser degree of change in the labour rights area in North America reflects the historical situation that the Wagner Act model was from the outset a model built around the idea of private ordering. When we turn to the area of employment rights, we also see a convergence across the six Anglo-American countries toward a model in which the role of employment law is to establish a basket of minimum standards that are built into the employment relationship, which can then be improved upon by the parties.

Within these general trends, we do see some variation in the degree of convergence on these models of labour and employment rights regulation across the Anglo-American countries. The strongest degree of similarity in adoption of the private ordering in labour rights and the minimum standards basket in employment rights is found in four of the countries: Canada, the United Kingdom, New Zealand and, with recent legislative changes, Australia. Each of these countries has adopted labour laws that favour organizational level economic ordering, but with reasonably substantial protections of trade union organizing and bargaining rights, and a set of minimum employment standards that includes similar sets of minimum wage, basic leave entitlements and unfair dismissal protections.

The first outlier in this study is Ireland. The Irish employment relations system stands out as the only one that has continued to have a significant degree of central coordination and public ordering of employment relations. Although there is substantial coordination at the central level, at the organizational level, the Irish system resembles the other Anglo-American countries much more closely, suggesting that it has the potential to evolve in a similar direction. The other outlier is the United States. Structurally its system is similar to the other Anglo-American countries in emphasizing private ordering in labour law and the role of employment law as being to establish a minimum basket of basic standards. However, where the United States diverges from the other countries is that its system has involved a general favouring of the interests of employers over those of employees and organized labour in the implementation of the model.

The growing use of ADR in employment disputes has occurred both inside and outside collective bargaining. In some union workplaces, the parties attempt to resolve statutory claims using the grievance and arbitration procedures in their collective bargaining agreements. In other union workplaces, many, if not most, statutory claims are handled outside the collective bargaining arena. Employees in many such organizations pursue their statutory claims through the normal channels of agency and judicial resolution. In a minority but growing number of union-management relationships, the parties have created procedures for resolving statutory claims that are separate or "sheltered" from the collective bargaining agreement.

The growing use of arbitration and mediation to resolve employment disputes has been especially noteworthy in the nonunion sector. In the United States, as most people know, the proportion of the work force that is unionized has been steadily declining for over 40 years and currently stands at about 14 percent. Although the Canadian labor movement has not suffered as steep a decline as in the United States, a similar trend is apparent there. The growth of employment ADR in the nonunion sector is largely the consequence of employer attempts to avoid the high costs and long delays associated with the use of judicial and administrative means to resolve disputes. Of course, some nonunion employers are also motivated by a desire to provide their employees with fair and equitable dispute resolution procedures.

The growing use of ADR in employment disputes has occurred both inside and outside collective bargaining. In some union workplaces, the parties attempt to resolve statutory claims using the grievance and arbitration procedures in the collective bargaining agreement. In others, many, if not most, statutory claims are handled outside the collective bargaining arena, with employees pursuing their claims through the normal channels of agency and judicial resolution. In a minority but growing number of union-management relationships, the parties have created procedures for resolving statutory claims that are separate or “sheltered” from the collective bargaining agreement (Dunlop and Zack, 1997, particularly pp. 53–72; see also Zack, 1999, pp. 67–94).

The growing use of arbitration and mediation to resolve employment disputes has been especially noteworthy in the nonunion sector. In the United States, as most people know, the proportion of the workforce that is unionized has been steadily declining for over forty years and currently stands at about 14 percent. Although the membership in the Canadian labor movement has not suffered as steep a decline, a similar trend is apparent there. As in organized workplaces, the growth of employment ADR in the nonunion sector is one consequence of employers’ attempts to avoid the high costs and long delays of the judicial and administrative routes. Of course, some nonunion employers are also motivated by a desire to provide their employees with fair and equitable dispute resolution procedures (Bingham and Chachere, 1999, pp. 95–135).

The authors of this paper have conducted numerous evaluations of ADR programs in both the public and private sectors, and it has been our experience that the desire of the evaluators and the program sponsors to have an impartial and objective evaluation of a program has often been frustrated by political considerations. This paper will focus on the politics of the evaluation of ADR systems and programs. We maintain that there are three types of political factors affecting ADR programs: One type involves ideological and policy debates about the desirability of ADR; a second type involves political factors within an organization (whether private or public) that affect the adoption, implementation, and maintenance of an ADR program; and the third type is the political struggle that can sometimes emerge between the managers and practitioners who sponsor ADR programs and the academics and consultants who evaluate them. Here we concentrate particularly on the differences that arise between program sponsors and outside evaluators. Academic evaluators, for example, value the so-called purity of their research and strive to conduct evaluations consistent with accepted social science standards; program sponsors and administrators have evaluation objectives that are much more instrumental and pragmatic. All parties in an evaluation may very well have legitimate objectives, but political differences can arise out of the incompatibility of those objectives, an incompatibility that is often the consequence of the "clash of cultures" between academics and practitioners.

In our view, political factors will invariably influence program evaluation. It is clear that some of the political differences that affect the evaluation of ADR programs (for example, ideological debates) are beyond the control of either the program sponsors and administrators or the evaluators. But there are other political factors that the parties can potentially manage, or at least influence. On the one hand, political differences can threaten the integrity of an evaluation. On the other hand, not all political factors have negative consequences for an evaluation. The trick for sponsors and evaluators alike is, first, to recognize the political factors they can control and, second, to distinguish between those that have positive effects on the evaluation and those that have negative effects.

I begin in the first main section with a brief history of hours of work legislation in the United States that includes a conceptual framework that I have found useful in analyzing proposed changes in hours legislation. The variety of empirical analyses I have undertaken that pertain to the wisdom of raising the overtime premium are discussed in the second section. My analyses of proposals to require employee consent prior to the working of overtime are discussed in the third section. The paper ends with some brief concluding remarks.

In this paper, I examine these two trends in employment dispute resolution and explore the tensions between them. I begin by discussing the increase in organizational ordering of terms and conditions of employment and how it is reflected in the development of organizationally focused dispute resolution mechanisms. Then I turn to examining examples of types of growing employment conflicts that revolve around issues relating to the formation and termination of employment relationships. Following this, I conclude by discussing how dispute resolution procedures and systems might be re-envisioned to better fit a world in which standard long-term employment contracts with a single organization are no longer the paradigmatic model.

Yet we have been told that this is not possible. The pundits look at our membership figures as clear evidence that workers are no longer interested in organizing and that unions, like the coal-fired furnace and the rotary phone, are relics of an industrial era – no longer relevant in today’s world.

We have even let this negativism seep into our own ranks over this last difficult decade. Under the crushing weight of laws that do little to protect workers, rabidly anti-union employers, a burgeoning management consultant industry, and betrayal by our supposed friends in government and academia, we have at times forgotten to believe in ourselves, our vision, and our importance to American workers.

These problems have led to proposed reforms aimed at assuring the financial stability of the systems. The question addressed here is: what effects will these reforms have on three variables - retirement ages, retirement incomes, and the Social Security system. This paper presents estimates of the effects of four actual or proposed policy changes. The basic model and some of the estimated effects are drawn from previous work; see Fields and Mitchell (1984) and the references cited therein. However, the estimates presented here of the effects of Social Security reforms on the Social Security system itself are new.

The United States government has two sets of interests in labor standards. The Department of Labor is supposed to "foster, promote, and develop the welfare of the wage earners of the United States, to improve their working conditions, and to advance their opportunities for profitable employment." The Agency for International Development seeks to "help the poor toward a better life" in a variety of ways, among which are increasing employment and earnings and achieving a more equitable distribution of income. Although this conference is sponsored by the Department of Labor, the interests assigned to AID should not be forgotten.