Capitalist-Worker Conflict and Involuntary Unemployment

Martin Osborne

The Review of Economic Studies, 1984, vol. 51, issue 1, 111-127

Abstract: We study a simple model of the determination of the level of employment in which a capitalist decides how many workers to hire, and then bargains over the wage with those whom he hires. If the capitalist hires all the available workers, his position is weak since, in the event of a strike, he is unable to hire strike-breakers; for this reason he chooses to leave some workers ("involuntarily") unemployed. An increase in unemployment benefits which raises the cost of hiring strike-breakers affects the bargaining power of both capitalist and workers; under some conditions it leads to a reduction in unemployment.

Date: 1984
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.2307/2297708 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:restud:v:51:y:1984:i:1:p:111-127.

Access Statistics for this article

The Review of Economic Studies is currently edited by Thomas Chaney, Xavier d’Haultfoeuille, Andrea Galeotti, Bård Harstad, Nir Jaimovich, Katrine Loken, Elias Papaioannou, Vincent Sterk and Noam Yuchtman

More articles in The Review of Economic Studies from Review of Economic Studies Ltd
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().