Too Little, Too Weak? Family Policies and Workers’ Bargaining Response

Vincent Jerald Ramos , Centre for Population Change / University of Southampton

When legal minimum standards for work and family benefits are deemed insufficient, how do workers respond and compensate? Looking at advanced economies points us to an idea—unionization and collective bargaining (CB) are ways to afford workers better conditions and increase benefit entitlement than what is statutorily guaranteed. Whether or not this “success story” applies in other contexts with weaker and more decentralized systems for workers’ representation, as is the case in many developing countries, is a persistent gap in the literature partly owing to limited data availability. To address this, we construct a novel dataset of the provisions of all workplace-level CBAs in the Philippines over a 6-year period to: (1) descriptively show the prevalence of family policies in CBAs and (2) analyze the causal effects of a 2019 maternity leave reform, which increased benefit entitlement from 7-8 weeks to 15 weeks, on the inclusion of family provisions in CBAs using a quasi-experimental design. Preliminary findings show that around 65% of CBAs contain reinforcing provisions that merely restate the statutory leave entitlements, while only 5% contain augmenting provisions that provide higher leaves. This lends support to the idea that where compliance and enforcement of family policies are weak, redundancy is as much of an objective as augmentation is in the collective bargaining process.

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 Presented in Session 119. Flash session Policy Development and Measurement