Whats the difference between lobbying and collective bargaining?
Hiring people to lobby legislators is a form of collective negotiation, but it is not collective bargaining in its formal sense. The main difference is that collective bargaining results in a legally binding contract between the parties to the bargaining (the management and the workers’ organization). During the life of the agreement, neither party may unilaterally change the terms. In addition, the workers covered by the agreement generally must vote to ratify it. Currently, only the legislature gets to vote. It must be noted that this is a slightly idealized presentation of the situation. Currently, labor law gives employers many more rights and privileges than workers enjoy under the law. In spite of that, the relationship is more nearly equal than the relationship between state employees and legislators that exists today. When state employees contemplate the possibility of losing all of the legal protections that they enjoy under the State Personnel Act (unsatisfactory as they are,
