The anti-union practice of illegal extension of benefits and the concept of historical benefits

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to determine the meaning and scope of the anti-union practice consisting of the unlawful extension of benefits contained in a collective agreement, through a dogmatic analysis of the rules governing this matter and of labor court case law. The analysis confirms that this practice applies exclusively to benefits whose original source is collective bargaining and does not extend to benefits derived from other sources, such as historical benefits. Based on this finding, the article proposes an interpretive criterion for determining the conditions under which workers hired after the execution of a collective agreement may receive such benefits without constituting an anti-union practice.