Collective Bargaining / Quality of Life Methodology
Riding off the back of a Data User Guide centered around diversity in the early-mid 1900s of baseball, we were interested in a narrative that would be much more “business-focused,” as it aligned with our collaborative interest.
At first, we were interested in looking at oil imports arriving in Boston from the angle of where the oil was coming from and what type of oil was being shipped. Unfortunately, there weren’t many other datasets for us to use, and with the tea in the waters of the Boston Harbor, the oil story sunk to the bottom of the ocean.
It wouldn’t be too long until we stumbled upon our next prospect, one we would set sail with until the very end.
Discovery of our data source and initial thoughts
Exploring the data portals provided to us in class, we found that the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) had hundreds upon hundreds of datasets, all speaking to different areas of economic and social performance. Our three selections ended up being:
Although we weren’t sure that we necessarily wanted to explore labor relations, the combination of these three data sets was too good to pass up. It is generally accepted (on Emerson’s campus, at least) that union organizing and collective bargaining, as a rule, lead to better conditions for workers; we wanted to know whether that impression was actually borne out in the data. And even beyond that, we wanted to determine the extent to which “quality of workplace” overlapped with “quality of life.”
Methodology
Cleaning the data
The datasets by the OECD were relatively clean, but we encountered a few minor issues while importing them into Tableau. For example, with the “Quality of the working environment dataset”, it became apparent that the measure values were not appearing in Tableau. Though it was not immediately clear why the values were blank, by delving into Excel and removing all the preceding null fields (selected below), we managed to resolve the issue.
Why we chose our Visualizations
Given that our story relied on establishing the variations between collective bargaining rates in different countries and over different time periods, it was obvious that the best way to represent this would be through the map function in Tableau. So as to not overwhelm the reader, we decided to break the map up into three broad regions of OECD member states (Europe, North America, and Asia/Oceania), as well as use a “slider” function to allow the reader to easily switch between years.
For the elements of job strain and hourly wages, we determined that the best way to illustrate correlation was through a scatter plot. Additionally, we added a linear regression calculation to objectively determine the strength of our supposed relationship(s). Sure enough, the P-values yielded were well within the mathematical range of moderate-to-strong correlation.
We plotted a third scatter plot measuring labor market insecurity against collective bargaining rate, but opted to exclude it from the purview of our investigation due to unclear terminology and less-than-strong correlation.
In the interest of utilizing all three datasets and allowing the ready to be able to interact with our story, we created three graphs each with a drop-down option to let viewers compare country-to-county within the data.
Above is a comparison between the collective bargaining over time in Hungary and the country’s working environment factors. Below is another graph showcasing the Quality of Life factors in Hungary.
One of the more difficult components of the data was the number of factors or questions presented on the surveys given to the employees in each country. There were a total of 39 indicators used in the Quality of Life averages, but for the sake of the reader being overflowed with bars, we decided to limit the viewing to seven factors. As the working environment deals with more emotional elements, these are much more focused on fiscal and social characteristics.
There were a couple of other difficulties with creating these histogram-styled visualizations, one major one being that not every year has data for each indicator. This is because the questions change from year-to-year on the surveys, but we chose a statistic like job strain in the collection as it was important to our overall narrative.
For the Working Environment visualization, I choose to leave the survey responses unfiltered because it showed the full picture in a digestible fashion. It did hurt to have this data being restricted from 1995-2015.
Sources
As many of our colleagues expressed in their own projects, it wasn’t easy to get into contact with people for the narrative. However, we were extremely interested in talking to experts in economics, social behavioral psychologists, or union representatives to aid in describing the topic.
Below is a list of sources we attempted to contact (* indicates an interview)
From the interviews we were able to conduct, there was a good amount of information that was vital to our understanding of the topic. Sudbury, for example, used his experience with union organizing to give us a helpful breakdown of the differences in labor relations between European social democracies (like Belgium and Austria) and North American countries like the United States.
However, we were still disappointed to not speak with some of the other experts, such as an economist, listed as we believe they would have enhanced our knowledge that much more.
Questions still left unanswered
Through our research, we found that countries with more collective bargaining and union support typically had higher quality of life and working environmental responses. This was no groundbreaking conclusion to the project, but it was interesting that the numbers support this idea.
Unfortunately, the data only represented time periods prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. With layoffs and mental health issues surging during this time period, we are very curious about how collective bargaining impacted the past couple of years. Have there been similar trends to those seen in the aftermath of the 2008 recession? Has the rate of collective bargaining increased since then, or has it continued to decline as it did after the neoliberal reforms of the post-2008 recession era? All of these questions would be interesting to explore in another investigation.
