Negotiation and Dictation in Employment Contract Formation in New Zealand

Abstract

Previous research reports had identified and catalogued three separently distinct employer approaches to the development of collective employment contracts under the Employment Contracts Act 1991: dealing directly with the workforce, dealing directly qith employees individually and dealing with employee representatives. This paper shows through further analysis of research data that the first two of these approaches are more properly grouped with the development of individual contracts under a non-negotiation model, in which employers rarely moved significantly from initial contract proposals once presented, and in which the rate of adoption of employee concessions proposed by employers was very high. In contrast is a largely unionised representative collective negotiations model, in which parties exhibited conventional bargaining behaviour, and in which the adoption rate of employer proposed employee concessions was significantly below that of the non-negotiation model. Workforce size and pre-Act union strength are seen to be the primary factors associated with the likelihood of employers being involved in the unionised negotiation model.