which of the labor organization steps do you believe would be most challenging and why

Definitions of Bargaining Structure A formal bargaining structure is defined as the bargaining unit or the negotiation unit - that is, the employees and employers who are legally bound by the terms of an agreement. The informal bargaining structure is defined as the employees or employers who are affected by the results of a negotiated settlement, through pattern bargaining or some other nonbinding process. There is no exact estimate of the number of bargaining units in the United States. Each year, however, the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service gets approximately 20,000 notices that a bargaining unit will be negotiating a new agreement. (These notifications are required for a union to engage in a lawful strike, so nearly all unions covered under the National Labor Relations Act file 180 Part III. The Functional Level of Labor Relations Table 7.1 Types and examples of bargaining structures to having a separate contract for each site. Typically, these cor are supplemented with local agreements that cover the worki are specific to a given site. Another intermediate employer case occurs in public schoo single agreement typically covers all the unionized teachers schools in the district. Police and firefighters also commonly that covers the various stations or districts in a city. Determinants of Bargaining Structures Bargaining leverage, public policies, and organizational facto elements that affect the degree of centralization in bargaining Employees who work in the same firm typically are very aware of what other employees in the firm are receiving in the way of pay or fringe benefits and are very jealous of any differences that emerge. The practice of internal promotion (and other features of an internal labor market) within a firm serves to heighten such comparisons. Pattern bargaining follows when one negotiation closely follows the terms set in another negotiation. This is most common across the blue-collar employees of the same firm, but it can also occur where unions represent both blue- and white-collar employees. One of the most complicated labor relations issues arises when two unionized firms merge and need to integrate their compensation, seniority, and related contract provisions. The airline industry has had considerable experience with this process because of the mergers that have taken place among major airlines in recent years. Integrating pilot contracts is especially complicated because firmspecific seniority determines not only compensation but also rules about layoffs and flight and aircraft assignments. Often this process has ended up in arbitration. the remaining firms began to take place on a company-by-company basis. Although the settlements that resulted after 1986 carried through many of the common features of the earlier ones, significant variations across the agreements were introduced: in wages, fringe benefits, profit sharing, work rules, and the extent of employee participation in management decision making. Since the mid-1980s, the number of firms in the coal and trucking industries has declined substantially. In addition, there have been major declines in the number of workers covered by multiemployer or industrywide contracts in these industries. Some of the decentralization in bargaining structures has been caused by industry deregulation. By far the most significant effects of government policy on bargaining structures have come in recent years from the deregulation of product markets in trucking, airlines, and communications. In all of these cases, deregulation has opened the industry to pay wages and benefits below the unionized rates in the industry and has put pressures on unionized firms to seek labor contract terms in ways that will match the practices of the new competitors. As a result, firms in all three of these industries have attempted to decentralize