You Can’t Always Get What You Want? Collective Bargaining Demands and Outcomes

Trade union demands are a key input for collective bargaining negotiations. However, there is relatively little quantitative evidence on these demands and how they shape the outcomes of negotiations. We leverage novel, manually digitized data on union demands for wages and non-wage amenities to examine the relationship between demands and realized outcomes in German collective bargaining negotiations (CBNs) over the last three decades. A key insight of our work is that demands and outcomes in CBNs cover a much richer set of issues than merely wages, specifically non-wage amenities such as working time, training and holiday entitlement. We show how these objectives are traded-off against each other in the demands made by unions, as well as in the outcomes agreed by bargaining parties. We further investigate these patterns in the context of current macroeconomic and labour market conditions, such as inflation, unemployment and labour market tightness.