In 1983, General Motors Corporation signed a collective bargaining agreement with the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, under the wage provisions of which new employees joining the bargaining unit were to be paid at a different (lower) hourly rate than current members.

A so-called two-tier wage scale resulted from the arbitration of a Postal Service dispute that same year.

Since then, a number of other unions have accepted two-tier systems as concessions in their collective bargaining agreements. Labor negotiators commonly refer to such two-tier wage concessions as “selling the unborn.”

Can you articulate an argument on behalf of these “unborn” (new employees) that two-tier labor contracts violate the union’s duty of fair representation?

Do you see an Equal Employment Opportunity implication to such an agreement?

See “IRRA Panelists Address Two-Tier Implications for Fair Representation and Equal Opportunity”

[No. 1 DLR A–5 (1985)].