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Organizational power and distributional conflict within OECD nations
Author(s) -
WIDMAIER Ulrich
Publication year - 1987
Publication title -
european journal of political research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 3.267
H-Index - 95
eISSN - 1475-6765
pISSN - 0304-4130
DOI - 10.1111/j.1475-6765.1987.tb00873.x
Subject(s) - economics , bargaining power , wage , unemployment , salary , business cycle , rigidity (electromagnetism) , constraint (computer aided design) , collective bargaining , politics , labour economics , economic system , macroeconomics , microeconomics , market economy , political science , mechanical engineering , structural engineering , law , engineering
. This article claims that a predator‐prey model of cyclical growth is a useful concept for studying the dynamic relationship between wage and salary shares of GDP and employment. The rate of growth of employment is considered as an indicator of union bargaining strength; the change of the wage share is treated as a reflection of an ongoing distributional conflict between profits and wages. The paper discusses some of the analytic properties of the formal model. It continues with an attempt to fit the model to West German data for the period from 1960 to 1985. Given the formal rigidity of the model, this strategy is only partially successful. As a consequence, a more complex model is introduced which also relies heavily on the idea of a predator‐prey cycle. As a fully‐fledged political‐economic model of the OECD type of systems, it allows us to study, among other issues, the implications of different union policies under the constraint of a serious unemployment problem.