April 03, 2023
Jeremy Singer-Vine published a public records request response from the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service (FMCS) that provides the schema for the service’s case management system.
These records show all the different tables (i.e. spreadsheets) that the case management software uses to tracks data. For each table, the records list the column names.
Using a schema, you can get a pretty good idea of all the information that the FMCS tracks digitally.
I was very interested in it because it appears that the at least employers and maybe bargaining units have unique IDs in their system.
That would mean it would be possible to get longitudinal dataset of bargaining units from the record of F-7: Notice of Intent to Bargain forms.
I’ve thought about that dataset for a while and have started on the fuzzy matching to try to build it, but if we can get it straight from the FMCS that would be much better.
If you know anybody that has familiarity with the FMCS’s data systems, it would be great to talk to them on background. If you have ideas, please let me know.
Looking through the data exports from the previous NLRB case management systems, there’s a lot of interesting fields that are not available for current cases through the NLRB website (industrial classification is the one that makes my heart ache).
I put together a public records request for the schema of the NLRB’s NxGen case management system, and they fulfilled it.
The case information that is available on the NLRB website is a subset of the data in the NxGen system, and so the schema can be a useful guide to finding information that the NLRB tracks but does not routinely publish. Much of that unpublished data should be accessible through a public records request.
The first quarter of 2023 looks a lot like the first quarter of 2022. While the scale of organizing is still not near enough, NLRB organizing appears to be continuing at a levels we haven’t seen since the 2000s.
Subscribe to get Notes on Labor Data as an email newsletter.