The Impact of Collective Bargaining Legislation on Disputes in the U.S. Public Sector: No Policy May Be the Worst Policy

This paper estimates the impact of collective bargaining legislation on disputes during labor negotiations in the U.S. public sector. We use a large national sample of U.S. state and local government contracts to compare the incidence and intensity of disputes by similar workers under different forms of collective bargaining legislation. The breadth of our data allows us to examine the impact of five different forms of legislation. Our principal finding is that strike costs, measured by strike duration and the number of working days lost, are highest in jurisdictions that provide no explicit framework for bargaining or dispute resolution.