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Reprinted with permission from NATIONAL
POLICY ASSOCIATION.
1424 16th Street, N.W., Suite 700
Washington, DC 20036
e-mail: npa@npa1.org
Tel (202) 884-7623 http://www.npal.org
The Evolution of U.S. Labor-Management
Relations
by Thomas J. Schneider
and John R. Stepp
Thomas Schneider is
President and CEO, Restructuring Associates Inc.
John Stepp is Associate, Restructuring Associates Inc.
Intense competition,
technological advancements, and changing demographics
are driving radical changes in the workplace and in
labor-management relations in the United States. This
chapter examines these recent workplace innovations
and their linkage to labor relations.
CHARACTERISTICS
OF THE OLD LABOR-MANAGEMENT MODEL
The critical elements
of the old labor relations paradigm were forged during
the 30-year post-World War II period. Unlike most other
industrialized countries, the United States emerged
from the war with its production base intact. As a consequence,
it sat astride the global economy, dominating key industries
and their markets. Industry gave little consideration
to cost or quality. The results were oversized bureaucracies
that mass produced standardized products. Detailed rules,
policies, and practices, accompanied by lengthy labor
agreements, codified workplace expectations. “Taylorism”
and “Fordism” were further polished and
refined, leaving a largely disengaged workforce in their
wake. As industry prospered, so did labor unions, which
spread quickly throughout manufacturing. Although management
never warmly embraced unions, it did little to resist
organizing efforts, and an uneasy truce emerged between
large companies and the labor movement. Despite the
ritual of hard bargaining, settlements were generous.
In exchange, management was granted the right to run
its business as it saw fit. And the Wolf Finally Came:
The Decline of the American Steel Industry paints the
rest of the picture:
Cut off from decision-making
responsibilities, unions focused on protecting workers
from exploitation by using Taylorism as a base of shop-
floor power. They negotiated multiple job classifications,
linked wage rates to the job instead of a worker’s
skills, and established seniority as the basis for promotion.
This “job control unionism” gave unions
a negative power to hamstring management, but not a
positive power to influence operations. Rules bred more
rules, eventually straitjacketing the production system
and creating unproductive hierarchies in both companies
and unions. 1
This tacit arrangement
dissolved in the 1980s in industry after industry. Today,
major steel producers are nonunion; automobile companies
in Ohio, Tennessee, Kentucky, and elsewhere are nonunion;
the U.S. coal industry is less than 40 percent organized.
The seeds of the demise
of the traditional American labor model were sown from
within. The model had two fatal flaws. First, it seemed
incapable of recognizing and responding to the changes
occurring in the United States and beyond. Second, it
generally failed to acknowledge that labor and management
had a mutual responsibility for creating and distributing
wealth.
FAST-PACED
CHANGES
By the mid-1970s,
foreign products had invaded U.S. markets. Countries
devastated by World War II had acquired new capital
and technology and were producing superior goods at
lower prices than American products. Simultaneously,
phenomenal technological advancements greatly reduced
both product and process life cycles. Moreover, several
key industries such as communications and transportation
were being deregulated. In 1981, the U.S. government
served notice of its changed view of labor relations
when it dismissed 11,000 striking air traffic controllers.
Henceforth, the government would no longer function
as the benevolent protector of the collective bargaining
process.
The makeup of employees
was also rapidly changing. Minorities and women were
entering the workforce in unprecedented numbers. The
baby boomers had arrived. Each group brought a different
set of expectations and an unwillingness to accept the
authoritarian work ethic characteristic of their predecessors.
Many of these new employees also viewed the control
exerted by unions through collective bargaining agreements
as excessively rigid, bureaucratic, and restrictive.
By the mid-1980s,
many businesses, recognizing that the ongoing changes
represented more than the normal ebb and flow of a business
cycle, began to experiment with a variety of employee
involvement strategies, some of which had their origins
in programs undertaken in the 1960s and 1970s. These
measures took the form of parallel systems, nonthreatening
to the traditional structure and hierarchical order
within firms. In terms of labor-management relations,
the bargaining process and administration of the labor
agreement remained sacrosanct and adversarial.
The great upheavals
in the early 1980s generated little gain. Labor and
management generally behaved as though no real change
was needed in the institutions, policies, and practices
that had been developed over the previous decades. They
seemed to believe that it was necessary only to make
cuts and tweak the system and then continue to act as
they always had.
But they were wrong.
The old systems of organizing work and work relationships
were no longer productive. U.S. companies remained unable
to produce quality products at competitive prices in
global markets. Further, economic, political, and technological
changes were rendering many aspects of the traditional
industrial relations model obsolete. The master contract
had vanished, the strike weapon had been blunted, and
many unions had been added to the “endangered
species” list. By the late 1980s, widespread concern
about U.S. competitiveness and its link to Americans’
declining standard of living led to a search for ways
to attain higher levels of performance. 2
THE EVOLUTION
OF WORKPLACE INNOVATIONS
Employee involvement
was first promoted in the late 1960s and early 1970s
as an antidote to growing disaffection with the industrial
workplace. Worker “alienation” was attributed
to a more affluent, better educated society and a breakdown
in the influence of traditional sources of authority.
3 Young people in particular brought changed expectations
about life into the workplace. When they experienced
the tight controls, fragmented jobs, and deadening routine
of traditional factory work, they exhibited what the
popular press clubbed “the blue collar blues.”
Quality of
Work Life Programs
In 1973, Irving Bluestone,
head of the United Automobile Workers (UAW) General
Motors (GM) division, negotiated a joint committee to
encourage efforts that would provide a more satisfying
work environment for employees and, as a by-product,
lead to greater productivity. The GM-LAW Quality of
Work Life (QWL) program became the model for hundreds
of similar efforts that blossomed across the United
States during the 1970s and early 1980s.
In a notable extension
of the QWL approach, the United Steelworkers of America
(USWA) joined basic steel manufacturers to set, up labor-management
participation teams in the early 1980s. Given the rapidly
declining fortunes of the steel industry, the USWA acknowledged
up front that a primary goal of these teams was improvement
of company performance, not just of employee morale
or working conditions.
However, because most
QWL efforts existed outside official decisionmaking
channels and had limited scope, they were basically
unsuccessful in creating widespread organizational change
or in substantially improving performance. Nonetheless,
virtually every major union was involved in at least
one QWL project by the mid- 1980s.
A few companies had
been pursuing more radical innovations in the late 1960s
and early 1970s.4 Consumer product giant Procter &
Gamble was probably the first U.S. firm to experiment
with the participative management and sociotechnical
design concepts espoused by Eric Trist at Britain’s
Tavistock Institute and elaborated by Einar Thorsrud
and Fred Emery in Scandinavia. 5 However, it was not
until General Foods opened its Topeka, Kansas, pet food
plant in 1971 that these ideas received widespread attention
in the United States.
The Topeka plant represented
a major departure from the traditional organizational
structure. 6 The plant’s new system was designed
to elicit commitment from employees rather than to promote
management control. It featured many innovations now
commonplace in high involvement/high performance work
systems, including few levels of management; no status
differentiation between workers and managers: employee
teams accountable for an interrelated group of tasks,
often focused on an entire product; decisionmaking at
the lowest levels in the organization; pay systems that
rewarded continuous learning: flexible job assignments;
and ongoing organizational learning and change.
Throughout the 1970s,
this type of comprehensive organizational change was
typically observed in nonunion startups (“greenfield”
sites). While substantial and impressive performance
results occurred in most of the new systems, these revolutionary
concepts remained relatively uncommon. Most U S. firms
were content to dabble with various forms of QWL. However,
this changed as concern with worker alienation was replaced
with concern about company performance. By the early
1980, a new worry was facing most of American industry—the
invasion of high quality; low cost Japanese imports.
Quality Circles
In the 1980s, two
books that profiled Japanese management techniques—Theory
Z and The Art of Japanese Management7—fueled the
growth of the quality circle (QC). In this employee
involvement system, small groups of volunteers, trained
in the basics of problem solving and group skills (and,
to a lesser extent, in the use of statistical quality
tools) attack quality and productivity problems in their
work areas. QCs. led by a management facilitator, usually
have a narrow focus on quality or work methods, and
any solution they develop is turned over to management
for approval and implementation. By 1982, almost 90
percent of the Fortune 500 companies reported using
quality circles.
Total Quality
Management
In the mid-1980s,
total quality management (TQM) emerged as a more comprehensive
organizational change strategy emphasizing quality.
TQM proponents argue that performance improvements are
achieved when die enterprise focuses on business processes.
Employees are allowed to standardize the processes and
then to continuously improve them.
As competitive pressures
increased in the late 1980s, U.S. industry recognized
that productivity improvements were no longer a luxury,
but a matter of survival. To improve their performance,
companies and unions continued to pursue comprehensive
organizational changes, generally TQM or high involvement
management. 8
Reengineering
The drive for performance
led management in the early 1990s to return to some
of the analytical strategies used in the earlier sociotechnical
systems to “reengineer” their organizations.
However, the more recent efforts differed in that they
were initially implemented by management, geared solely
to performance, and not focused on employees. Although
these reengineering attempts have improved performance,
the results have been limited largely because of the
resistance of employees and unions or the failure of
ownership by the people who have to make the organization
work. 9
NEW PARTNERSHIPS
Because of the limitations
of the different workplace innovations discussed above,
organizations have begun to merge the approaches into
four basic concepts. (1) Organizations are systems,
which means that achieving high performance requires
changing the entire organization, not merely a few of
its parts. (2) People are the critical element in achieving
high performance. Employees must understand the business,
have the skills as well as the opportunities to self-manage,
and be rewarded for performance. (3) Serving customers
well is the crucial priority. (4) Processes are essential
in achieving consistent outcomes, which means that processes
must be analyzed, reinvented, standardized, and followed.
Example #1—Hunt
Wesson
One organization that
has embraced these concepts is the Hunt Wesson food
oil refinery in Memphis, Tennessee. After piecemeal
attempts in the late 1980s to institute elements of
a TQM program, union and management joined in a total
system change effort in 1990. Together, plant management
and the local United Food and Commercial Workers International
Union revitalized an old plant with an adversarial labor-
management relationship, turning it into a productive,
cost-efficient anti high quality refinery.
Hunt Wesson’s
new work system includes co-governance based on joint
union-management committees. Self-directed work teams
on the shop floor are internally managed, and team members
rotate through several coordinator roles while performing
their regular production tasks. The teams determine
the procedures needed to meet external standards and
customer demands. They set policies at regular team
meetings, manage daily activities through hourly coordinators,
and rely on management team advisors only for guidance
and information. The traditional supervisor or foreman
job has been parceled out among the hourly team members.
The teams propose their own performance standards for
approval by their department committees and are accountable
for results at regular review sessions. There are new
systems for training and compensation (including a pay-for-skills
system), as well as for information, hiring and selection,
and problem solving.
The results of Hunt
Wesson’s efforts are impressive. Productivity,
as measured by cases per worker hour, is up 58 percent,
and cost efficiency is up 29 percent. Material waste
is down 10 percent with downgraded or bad products reduced
47 percent. Absenteeism is down 62.5 percent; turnover
is down 98.4 percent; grievances are down 96 percent;
and lost time due to accidents is down 50 percent. 10
Example #2—Saturn
Perhaps the most radical
manifestation of a partnership between management and
union espousing the four concepts outlined above is
GM’s Saturn division in Spring Hill, Tennessee,
and the UAW. This fully integrated automobile manufacturing
facility, which employs 7,000 people, encompasses most
of the elements found in the Hunt Wesson plant, but
goes much further. Half of the middle managers in the
organization to whom Saturn’s self-directed work
teams report, are usually LAW members who are partnered
with Saturn managers. This unique partnering arrangement
extends to nonoperational departments, such as sales,
service and marketing, industrial engineering, quality
assurance, health and safety, training, and organizational
development. 11 In real terms, labor and management
jointly run the business at all levels.
Other Examples
of Labor-Management Partnerships
Others are following
Saturn’s lead. The United Steelworkers of America
proclaimed in the opening salvo of its 1993 collective
bargaining goals. “In many enterprises, experience
has shown that the task of management is far too important
to be entrusted to the managers.” The USWA has
actively pursued agreements with the major steel companies
to guarantee a role for their members at all levels
of decisionmaking, “whether those decisions are
made on the shop floor or in the corporate board room
and whether they involve the design and implementation
of new technology or simply how work should be performed.
12 Partnership agreements have been signed with Inland
Steel, National Steel, and Bethlehem Steel that cover
about 26.000 workers.
In May 1997, Kaiser
Permanente and some 50,000 bargaining unit employees,
spread across seven international unions, approved by
a nine to one margin an unprecedented national labor-management
agreement that is both broad in scope anti inclusive
in its coverage. Strategic initiatives, business planning,
quality, member satisfaction, employment security, and
work design are within its framework. “Its goal
is to demonstrate by any measure that labor-management
collaboration produces superior health care outcomes,
market leading competitive performance, and a superior
workplace for Kaiser Permanente employees.” 13
It is the intent that the partnership concept become
pervasive throughout 400- plus Kaiser Permanente facilities.
AFL-CIO President
John Sweeney characterized this as a model agreement,
historic in nature, the largest labor- management partnership
ever, and the first national partnership in the health
care industry. 14
Similar alliances
have been formed between Xerox and UNITE; Levi Strauss
and UNITE; Northwest National Gas and the Office and
Professional Employees International Union; Corning
Glass and the American Flint Glass Workers; and Wisconsin
Energy and the four unions representing its employees.
Labor and management
in all of these partnerships agree that meaningful involvement
in the new work systems has certain requirements. These
include access to information that was formerly the
prerogative of management; education to help understand
and use that information; extensive technical and management
skills training; union autonomy in selecting its members
to sit on joint committees; a serious commitment to
employment security; and development of an interest-
based problem-solving model for negotiating and for
day- to-day conflict resolution.
The trend in the United
States is clearly toward comprehensive restructuring
of work and work processes to develop systems that focus
on quality, continuous improvement, and employee involvement
in managing the business. The number of organizations
whose operations are based on these concepts is growing
dramatically, and the performance results of individual
companies are substantial.
As the next century
approaches, organizations burdened with inflexible work
practices, rules, and labor agreements will have difficulty
surviving as the pace of change overwhelms them. Traditional
adversarial labor- management relations and Tayloristic
work systems will continue to decline. Consequently,
employers are now confronted with two quite different
alternatives.
DEUNIONIZATION
OR THE NEW LABOR-MANAGEMENT MODEL?
One alternative is
union avoidance—deunionization. A majority of
private sector employers are moving in this direction.
They often strategically divest or close their older,
less efficient union facilities while carefully selecting
greenfield sites for new capital investment, in which
new employees, management, and work systems virtually
ensure the maintenance of a nonunion workplace.
The second alternative
is adoption of the new labor- management model. As discussed
here, these partnerships are developing across a wide
range of industries and unions and hold great promise
for improving competitiveness and ensuring the future
of collective bargaining. They are also financially
rewarding to the partners, as demonstrated in a survey
funded by the Upjohn Institute of 56 unionized manufacturers
that either ousted unions or developed cooperative relations.
A 29 percent increase in value added per employee over
a 10- year period was reported by companies that actively
pursued joint relations with their unions. In contrast,
companies that sought to oust their unions reported
a 15 percent decline. 15
Nevertheless, the
dominant trend today is toward deunionization. Moreover,
this trend will continue until a number of the new high
performance organizations are successfully operating
and the changes are well tested. For unions and companies
that recognize the necessity to change and seek to develop
a new partnership, the challenges are great.
NEEDED: A
PROCESS FOR LARGE-SCALE CHANGE
In the past, even
when the parties were conceptually prepared to make
rapid and substantive changes in the workplace, the
greatest obstacle to a new labor- management partnership
was lack of an effective model. Now, after almost 20
years of experimentation with new systems of organizing
work and work relationships, the process for comprehensive
change is becoming clear. The following elements provide
the framework for large-scale change and the development
of a partnership in a unionized environment:
- a jointly
developed strategic vision for the organization
- a jointly
administered business education process
- aim effective
system for resolving day-to-day issues
- a problem-solving
method of negotiating collective agreements
Companies and unions
are increasingly working to develop one or two of these
elements. But only the benchmark organizations are moving
forward on all fronts; these firms are on the cutting
edge of innovative union-management relations in the
United States.
A Joint Strategic
Vision
A clear strategic
vision provides the road map for converting a traditional
organization into a high performance organization. This
vision of the company’s current and future objectives
is essential in cementing the foundation for large-scale
change and in guiding the labor-management partnership.
The vision must be a mutual labor-management objective.
The vehicle for creating
a joint strategic vision is a union-management leadership
committee. 16 Its goals are for those who implement
the vision to be involved in its development and to
provide clear direction for decisionmaking and action.
Because of labor’s involvement in the development
process, subsequent discussion is about how, rather
than about what or whether. Experience shows that a
strategic vision frames and guides labor contract negotiations.
To achieve these ends,
the joint strategic vision must have substance, and
it must be precise. It should delineate market and customer
requirements, performance expectations, work design,
organizational structure, governance, pay and rewards,
and technology needs. The vision must also describe
operating processes, employee involvement, employment
security, information systems, education and training,
and union-management roles. It should set forth the
core competencies, and it should specify the skills,
attributes, and capabilities that the organization,
the union, and the employees need for future success.
Business Education
To be actively involved
in decisionmaking and to share responsibility for performance,
labor leaders and employees must understand the business.
In a traditional organizational structure, managers
receive relevant information and understand its meaning.
But in a partnership, a thorough business education
is necessary to enable employees to understand corporate
financial statements, industry trends, the company’s
cost accounting system, and how their individual performance
relates to specific cost elements.
When employees and
union and management leaders have the same level of
understanding about the business, they typically reach
similar conclusions. This diffusion of knowledge throughout
the organization provides credibility and removes the
perception of manipulation. Business education is thus
essential in the process of developing and maintaining
a labor-management partnership.
An Issue-Resolution
System
Like managers, union
leaders must meet or exceed their customers’ needs
and expectations. A union’s customers are its
bargaining unit employees, who provide the votes and
dues that are a union’s life-blood. In exchange
for the union’s commitment to improving organizational
performance, management must be willing to address the
needs of the union and its constituents. An effective
issue-resolution process is an important step in achieving
this. Two critical elements are necessary.
The first is ease
of entry. Employees should not have to file a grievance
to be heard. Further, they should not have to allege
that their complaint violates the collective agreement
to have access to time resolution process, as is the
case in traditional grievance procedures. Companies
that treat issues not as problems but as opportunities
for improvement reinforce the value of worker participation
and empowerment.
The second critical
element is the expectation that most problems will be
resolved when they occur. In an issue-resolution system,
buck passing, game playing, and reliance on third parties
are not acceptable ploys, nor is the use of “hostage
holding” as a basis for resolving differences.
Union and management representatives know and honor
the collective bargaining agreement.
Supervisors and stewards
are jointly trained in solving problems and managing
conflict. Methods are established to detect troublesome
issues or trouble-prone relationships quickly. Most
important, such a system conveys an important message
to employees—it says that they matter and that
their problems will be acknowledged and resolved fairly.
Interest-Based
Negotiation
In recent years, substantial
progress has been made in new methods of negotiating
labor agreements. The classic 1981 study Getting to
Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In provided
the procedural framework for interest-based negotiation
(IBN). 17 The authors set forth four basic principles:
separate the people from the problem; focus on interests,
not positions; invent options for mutual gain; and insist
on the use of objective criteria. Since this seminal
work, much experimentation and refinement have occurred
within the context of collective bargaining.
From a union perspective,
collective bargaining provides procedural comfort and
equality and remains the most important forum for joint
decisionmaking. It has the added advantages of helping
to sustain and institutionalize the results of a change
process. Collective bargaining also plays a major role
in workplace reform, but at a sophisticated level.
Traditional bargaining
focuses largely on distributive issues and is the ritual
for carving the proverbial economic pie. The patchwork
of provisions in current agreements often make little
sense given today’s realities. The new bargaining
methods focus on improving the organization’s
competitiveness so that employees, unions, and companies
all thrive.
During the bargaining
process, IBN makes possible two outcomes that are difficult
to achieve in traditional negotiations. First, IBN enhances
the relationship between union and management and promotes
a tolerance to listen to opposing viewpoints. Issues
are problems to be solved, not victories to be claimed.
The second major outcome
is that IBN expands the traditional scope of bargaining
by encouraging frank discussion of complex issues. Under
current labor law, strategic issues that fundamentally
affect the future of all parties are not mandatory subjects
for bargaining. Because management is seldom enthusiastic
about bargaining in the combative atmosphere of traditional
negotiations, it often unilaterally exercises its “management
rights” prerogative. But when IBN is coupled with
a clearly developed strategic vision, management’s
fear of union rigidities is removed, and bargaining
becomes an engine that drives strategic change.
ACHIEVING
TRANSFORMATION
Radical and dramatic
changes are occurring in corporations throughout the
United States and in other industrialized nations. Yet
fewer than half of the 2,000 corporate executives surveyed
in a recent study reported that they had achieved their
cost-saving goals, and even fewer had met operating
objectives such as improved productivity and customer
satisfaction. Despite such limited success, only 7 percent
of the leaders surveyed predicted a decrease in future
restructuring; instead, they anticipated an increase,
driven by customer demands and increased competition.
These pressures will
drive labor-management relations in the United States
for the foreseeable future. The restructuring and transformation
of the workplace will continue in both nonunion and
union settings. The trend toward nonunion organizations
will dominate unless management and labor more readily
adopt the high performance partnership models that yield
world-class performance.
A high performance
partnership requires the reinvention of management of
the structure of the organization, and of the content
of the collective bargaining agreement. Management must
share information and involve union leaders and employees
in decisions about major workplace issues, competitive
costs, technological changes, and long-term employment
opportunities. Involvement strengthens unions and enhances
employee satisfaction. In cutting-edge organizations,
success is now defined by meshing human values with
business goals. Where these cooperative relationships
exist, they are achieving dramatic results. Senior managers
and labor leathers have a joint responsibility to align
the union-management processes with current and future
business realities. Management and unions have a mutual
stake in the organization’s success. They must
work together to transform and restructure their organizations,
or the trend in labor- management relations that has
dominated throughout the 1990s will continue unabated
into the 21st century.
NOTES
1. John Hoerr. And
the Wolf Finally Came: The Decline of the American Steel
Industry (Pittsburgh, PA: Pittsburgh University Press,
1988)
2. Thomas J. Schneider
and Anne F Comfort, “Employee Participation Gets
High Profile in USA,” Involvement and Participation
(Autumn 1993), pp. 14-17.
3. Richard E. Walton,
“How to Counter Alienation in the Plant,”
Harvard Business Review (November-December 1972); and
John R. Kimberly et al., “Establishing and Maintaining
High Commitment Work Systems,” The Organizational
Life Cycle (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 1986).
4. Edward E. Lawler
III, High Involvement Management (San Francisco, CA:
Jossey-Bass. 1986).
5. E.L. Trist, G.W.
Higgin, H. Murray, and A.B. Pollock, Organizational
Choice (London, England: Tavistock Publications, 1963);
and F.E. Emery and E. Thorsrud, Form and Content in
Industrial Democracy (London, England: Tavistock Publications,
1969).
6. Richard E. Walton,
“From Hawthorne to Topeka to Kalmer,” in
Man and Work in Society, ed. E.L. Case and F.G. Zimmer
(New York, NY: Van Nostrand Reinhold Co., 1975); and
Richard E. Walton, “Work Innovations at Topeka:
After Six Years,” The Journal of Applied Behavioral
Science, Vol. 13, No. 3 (1977), pp. 422-433.
7. William G. Ouchi,
Theory Z (Reading, MA: Addison- Wesley Publishing Co.,
1987); and Richard Tanner Pascale and Antony G. Athos,
The Art of Japanese Management (New York, NY: Simon
and Schuster, 1981).
8. Lawler, High Involvement
Management; and Eileen Applebaum and Rosemary Batt,
High Performance Work Systems, American Models of Workplace
Transformation (Washington, DC: Economic Policy Institute,
1993).
9 Michael Hammer and
James Champy, Reengineering the Corporation (New York,
NY: HarperCollins Publishers, 1993).
10. Laurel Campbell,
“Pact Makes Hunt Wesson Winner,” The Commercial
.Appeal (Memphis), (October 23, 1994).
11. Saul Rubinstein,
Michael Bennet, and Thomas Kochan, “The Saturn
Partnership: Co-Management and the Reinvention of the
Local Union,” Paper presented at the Conference
on Innovation in Negotiation and Grievance Handling
in the New Industrial Relations Order (Cambridge, MA:
Sloan School. MIT, May 1993).
12. “Statement
of USWA Wage Policy Committee’s Bargaining Goals,”
Daily Labor Report, December 17, 1992, pp. D-1 - D-9.
13. Kaiser Permanente
and the Industrial Union Department, AFL-CIO, The National
Partnership Agreement, May 1997.
14. Kaiser Permanente
and the Industrial Union Department, AFL-CIO, video
conference announcement, April 24, 1997.
15. William Cooke,
“Labor-Management Cooperation: New Partnerships
or Going in Circles?” (Kalamazoo, MI: W.E. Upjohn
Institute for Employment Research, 1990).
16. For a good example
and analysis of a joint strategic vision process, see
the Harvard Business School Case Study 9-587-1111, “General
Mills Manufacturing Year-2000 Task Force” (Boston,
MA: Harvard Business School, 1986).
17. Roger Fisher and
William Ury, Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without
Giving In (New York, NY: Penguin. 1981).
18. Frank Swoboda,
The Case for Corporate Downsizing Goes Global,”
The Washington Post, April 9, 1995, p. H5.
“The Evolution
of U.S. Labor-Management Relations,” by Thomas
J. Schneider and John R. Stepp, has been reprinted by
permission of the National Policy Association. It appears
as Chapter 1 in “Part I: Historical and Current
Perspectives” of Through a Glass Darkly: Building
the New Workplace for the 21st Century, ed. James A.
Auerbach (148 pages, 415.00; quantity discount are available).
The full-length study can be obtained from:
NATIONAL POLICY ASSOCIATION
1424 16th Street, N.W., Suite 700
Washington, DC 20036
Tel (202) 884-7623 Fax (202) 797-5516
e-mail: npa@npa1.org
Interne:t www.npa1.org
RESTRUCTURING ASSOCIATES
INC.
1050 17th Street, N.W., Suite 350
Washington, DC 20036
Tel (202) 775-8213 Fax (202) 223-0346
Reprinted by permission
of the National Policy Association. Published as Chapter
1 in Through a Glass Darkly: Building the New Workplace
for the 21st Century, edited by James A. Auerbach (148
pp. 1998, $15.00; quantity discount available). The
full-length study can be obtained from the National
Policy Association, www.npa1.org.
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