ANALYSIS: How Long Does It Take Unions to Reach First Contracts?

Every once in a while, a Bloomberg Law subscriber in the labor relations practice area presents us with a poser: Do we know how long it takes newly unionized employers and their newly organized workers to reach a first contract?

It’s a hard statistic to pin down. Parties to private-sector collective bargaining agreements aren’t required to notify the government when they ratify a contract at all, let alone identify whether such a deal was a first contract and report how long it took to negotiate it.

But the answer is: Yes, we do know. By cross-referencing two of the databases ...