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To purchase or authenticate to the full-text of this article, please visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1743-4580.2008.00199.x Byline: Ellen Dannin (*), Michelle Dean ([dagger]), Gangaram Singh ([dagger]) Abstract: Despite Congress' having made clear policy statements in the National Labor Relations Act that the law was intended to promote equality of bargaining power between employers and employees, to promote the practice and procedure of collective bargaining as the method of setting workplace terms and conditions of employment, and forbidding construing the law 'so as to either interfere with or impede or diminish in any way the right to strike,' by early 1940, the courts had given employers the right to permanently replace strikers and implement their final offer at impasse. Judges have often justified these doctrines as promoting balance in bargaining. Critics contend that the doctrines have the capacity to destroy the right to strike, unbalance bargaining power, and divert parties from the process of bargaining collectively. Some have proposed allowing temporary but not permanent striker replacement. We use a bargaining simulation followed by a survey and debriefing comments to test these opposing claims. Author Affiliation: (*)At Penn State Dickinson School of Law ([dagger])At San Diego State University Article note: Fannie Weiss Distinguished Faculty Scholar, and Professor of Law, Penn State Dickinson School of Law, 311 Beam Building, University Park, PA 16802-1912, USA. Telephone: 814 865-8996. Facsimile: 814 865-9042. E-mail: ejd13@dsl.psu.edu.

This article responds to Leo Troy's description of a system of individual representation in his article 'Beyond unions and collective bargaining'. The author questions the basic assumptions of that system and describes the complex interactions between unorganized and unionized work; empirical evidence from New Zealand's experiences under a system similar to the one described by Troy is also provided.

This article discusses some implications of the National Labor Relations Act (NRLA), the labor law allowing the employer to implement its final offer if an impasse is met with union negotiators, which the authors believe allows employers to subvert labor law and deunionize. NRLA controls collective bargaining rights for most private-sector workers; the authors argue that collective bargaining is discouraged because the employers are allowed to enforce their final offer, allowing them to bargain on bad faith; 74% of impasse cases were found to be on insufficient grounds, revealing that employers use the law to deunionize; the authors also found that most of these cases are not on economic grounds such as wages or benefits, but on issues of control over the workplace to give employers unilateral control over job classifications, seniority, management and internal union matters.

Contingent academics, which could be used as part of a strategy to erode tenure and conditions for all academics, put a lot at stake. But in spite of several legal and practical barriers, contingent academics is overcoming them by organizing itself.