Guide to the BLS Collection of Collective Bargaining Agreements (Part 13)

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.

The US Department of Labor Historical Collective Bargaining Agreements Collection, 6178, is made up of 21 series of expired public- and private-sector collective bargaining agreements dating from 1887 to 2003 and totals 685 linear feet plus 10 CDs of digitized documents and 320 reels of microfilm. In addition to the CBAs, a small volume of related documents such as union constitutions, pension and health plans submitted to the BLS, are also available.