ABSTRACT
Most collective bargaining regimes operate by establishing a right to bargain collectively at enterprise or industry level. In theory, the law operates to facilitate such bargaining by providing that employers must not refuse to bargain collectively with employee representatives where a sufficient number of employees wish that to happen, even where individual employees are in a weak bargaining position relative to their employers. This is consistent with Article 4 of the Right to Organise and Collective Bargaining Convention 1949 (No. 98) of the International Labour Organization (ILO), which protects the right of employees and employers and their representatives voluntarily to engage in autonomous collective bargaining, but does not provide any basis for mandatory collective bargaining systems (Creighton and Stewart 2010: 718; see also Creighton in this collection). In practice, the presence of what is largely a procedural protection will not necessarily lead to the exercise of collective bargaining rights, let alone the achievement of collectively bargained agreements or other outcomes (see, for example, Ewing 2008; Sachs 2010).
