As the economist John Kay wrote in yesterday's FT, only a rabid ideologue could fail to appreciate that pay is not purely a question of productivity; it is also a question of bargaining.
The most contentious issue to emerge in the recent labor battles has been the question of collective bargaining rights.
In oral arguments in Washington, key justices who could sway the nine-member court indicated they would side with the plaintiffs on the central question of whether collective bargaining with public sector employers was an inherently political activity.
And the decision is only the latest in years of Supreme Court losses for organized labor on central questions of collective bargaining, decisions that have "seriously circumscribed the capacity of a post-industrial work force to engage in effective group action," as Professor James J. Brudney, a labor law expert at Fordham Law School, put it in a recent conversation.
Professor Leigh Thompson of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and author of The Mind and Heart of the Negotiator, for instance, reports from her own controlled experiments conducted in 1991, that 93% of all negotiators fail to ask "diagnostic questions" of their bargaining partners when to do so would significantly increase the negotiation outcome for both parties.
"Customers looking for this type of property generally regard it as buying a work of art, where it is not so much a question of picking up a bargain, but having the privilege of owning a rare object," he said.
In a telephone interview, Linda Douglass, a White House spokeswoman on health matters, said the question of government drug-price bargaining "was not discussed during the negotiations".
Part of what was at issue in the Jacksonville store was the question of what constituted a union bargaining unit.
"Black Friday", with its promises of in-store bargains – such as 40-inch LED TVs at £139 a pop at Asda or cheap tablets at Currys PC World – draws the more ravenous of bargain hunters to stores, even if many still question the logic of an annual UK sales event pegged to the US Thanksgiving holiday weekend.
The cause of truth is failed because a plea bargain decides the question of guilt without adjudicating the evidence.
The question is, what kind of bargaining chips can they create?" At PBS headquarters in Alexandria, Va., executives are busy trying to develop advanced, interactive programming that will not only better fulfill its educational mission but also make its services more compelling to digital cable carriers.
