Kheel Center Digital Collections Guide: Collective Bargaining Agreements

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) was established in 1884 to collect information about employment and labor in the United States. As mandated by the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, the BLS was formally tasked with responsibility for soliciting, collecting, and analyzing collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) from public and private establishments, and making the agreements publicly available. In the early 1980s, this was function was limited to union contracts made with employers of 1000 or more employees.

In 2002, the National Archives and Records Administration authorized the BLS to donate inactive, non-confidential agreements which were 5 years or more past their expiration date to the Kheel Center where they would be preserved and made available to the public. The Office of Labor-Management Services took over responsibility for collecting and analyzing CBAs in 2011, and continues this donor relationship with the Kheel Center. Visit our CBA finding aids for information pertaining to CBAs that are not digitized yet. 

Collective Bargaining Agreements - Collective bargaining agreements are labor contracts between one or more employers and one or more unions. As such, they provide a lasting record of important workplace issues including pay, benefits, conditions of work, and remedies to conflicts. Within that context they also offer information about gendered labor, family units, religion, immigration, language, and regional experiences through time. Scholars can conduct full text and metadata searches of most agreements, excepting those few that were handwritten and not transcribed. The Labor Unions and the Internet guide provides a listing of collective bargaining agreement collections held elsewhere.