Two trends occurred in the collective disputes accepted by labor arbitration institutions from 1993 to 2011: the scale of disputes was reduced, and, in contrast to individual disputes, the frequency of collective disputes also decreased (see Fig. 1).
However, the statistics from 2008 did not reflect any significant change, demonstrating the continuation of a decreasing scale of disputes in spite of the enactment of the Law of Mediation and Arbitration.
Nowadays a union branch office will sometimes have two or three on hand, from 15 to 30 feet long, depending on the scale of the dispute.The unions insist the rats are a form of "symbolic speech", protected by the constitution.
The scale of labor disputes is calculated as the ratio of total number of workers involved in labor disputes to the number of collective disputes admitted by arbitral institutes of labor disputes across the country.
Statistically speaking, arbitral mediation resulted in a substantial reduction in the average scale of collective disputes but did not directly reduce the proportion of collective cases among all labor disputes.
Hypothesis one: Mediation has reduced the scale of labor disputes admitted by arbitral institutions.
In model 9 and model 11, the regression coefficients of the mediation capacity of arbitral institutes toward the scale of collective disputes are −1.298 and −3.636 and significant at the 5 % level.
The small scale of the disputes reflects the parochial concerns of voting DNC members.
Through statistical testing of provincial-level panel data from 1999 2011, this article finds that mediation by labor arbitral institutes has significantly reduced the average scale of admitted labor disputes but failed to lower the occurrence of collective disputes.
As a result, although statistically the average scale of collective labor disputes decreased due to the resolution of large-scale collective disputes, in reality, the number of small-scale and individual disputes still remained high.
The scale of collective labor disputes has declined significantly since the early twenty-first century.
