We are obsessed and conflicted. Obsessed with Interest Based Bargaining (IBB) and conflicted about its current application in the realm of private sector labor-management relations and negotiations
Who wouldn't suppport a less confrontational approach to dealing with worker-boss issues and brainstorming to come up with creative WIN/WIN contracts? Well, perhaps someone who had reason to doubt the sincerity of the other side and their committment to IBB principles of mutual respect and willingness to work toward mutually beneficial solutions. That's who.
Apparently IBB found its first major application in the public sector where managers were eager to transform their relationship with workers into a labor-management partnership in order to make government "work better" and "cost less."
From there it was a short step to the transportation industry and workers covered by the Railway Labor Act (RLA). A primary purpose of the RLA was clearly stated to be the prevention of disruptions to the nation's commerce. It did this by creating a maze of formal procedures that the parties must traverse before being able to engage in self-help (eg. lockout or strike). Now it appears that the powers-that-be, finding this complicated process itself to be too disrupting and expensive, were eager to provide, through the DOT and the National Mediation Board (NMB), the training and facilitators to bring IBB to the rail-carrier bargaining table. (A table that should, according to IBB principles, be round.)
This was also a WIN/WIN solution for hard working, heavy lifting union leaders like those of UTU who clearly benefited by escaping the dirty work of actually having to fight for their membership. How much more pleasant it must be to sit with partners and friends, eating pizza and avoiding all those disturbing emotions that plagued and often derailed traditional confrontational bargaining.
Whether this approach to carving out contracts actually resulted in better agreements for working rails is debatable. UTU leaders would probably argue that things could be much worse. Others see reduced real wages, degradation of benefits, a little job security by means of doing other's work for a pittance, etc. An approach that might have made sense in the public sector, at least until government managers adopted the position that government is just another business, might not make any sense in the nasty railroad world.
In fact there are experts who recognize a real problem in applying IBB to situations where the negotiating parties' social worlds collide. See, for example, WHEN INTEREST BASED BARGAINING IS NOT ENOUGH, which briefly reviews two discussions of negotiating situations that are beyond the current IBB approach to resolve.
"What good is identifying interests if once they are identified, they are beyond one's ability to comprehend? How can parties whose motivation is based on completely different moral values negotiate the termination of hostilities? Two recent works, one readily available and the other relatively inaccessible, attempt to shed some light on the complex subject of seemingly intractable human conflict. Much deserving of attention are Moral Conflict: When Social Worlds Collide by W. Barnett Pearce and Stephen W. Littlejohn (Sage Publications, 1997), and When the Parties Bring Their Gods to the Table: Learning Lessons from Waco, a 1998 doctoral dissertation for George Mason University by Jayne S. Docherty.
Pearce and Littlejohn, both professors of speech and communications, find what they call 'moral conflict' in the culture wars between the Religious Right and the Secular Humanists, in the ongoing gun control and abortion debates, and within the many ethnic, racial, gender, religious, and sexual preference conflicts around the world. Even though Docherty is able to find worldview conflicts within more everyday conflicts such as when one divorcing spouse understands marriage as a contract and the other understands it as a life journey, she focused her doctoral study on a single conflict, the standoff between the Branch Davidians and the U.S. Government near Waco, Texas in 1993. Through careful analysis of the twelve thousand pages of negotiation transcripts and personal conversations with agents, she explains how standard interest-based processes of dispute resolution failed because the parties could not manage their worldview differences."
And
"What is most important to recognize is that not all conflict is amenable to the same set of dispute resolution tactics. Context matters a great deal, so negotiators and mediators perhaps need to become more familiar with different tools and different bases of knowledge for different situations."
Within the prevailing world view in the United States, labor and business have common interests. As the Cheap-Labor Conservative policies are allowed to develop to McKinley-esque proportions, more and more working people might conclude that their interests are markedly different from those of the bosses.
Perhaps not for high-level business union leaders, but for many of us laboring at the bottom of the pyramid, the opposing world views deriving admittedly from the class-based perspective of both workers AND managers are surely fundamental enough to interfere with an IBB approach to conflict resolution in the world of work. Indeed, the Wobblies (IWW) who were viewed by some as a troublesome bunch but by others as indefatigable toilers for the rights of all workers suggested in the preamble to their constitution:
"The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life."
Which in a longwinded way brings us to the news of the day. After only two meetings and expressing its unwillingness to discuss negotiating ground rules, the NCCC has already given up all hope of talking directly to the RLBC and invoked the next step under the RLA, that being Mediation. As reported by PR Newswire:
Railroads File for Mediation to Return Negotiations to Substance Rather Than Union 'Shape of Table' Tactics
"WASHINGTON, March 16 /PRNewswire/ -- The National Carriers' Conference Committee (NCCC) has filed for mediation after a Teamsters-led union coalition refused to bargain on issues of substance until a detailed set of needless ground rules are resolved."
and
"The union coalition had insisted on first negotiating a list of process-oriented ground rules even though such matters 'are nothing new and have been successfully managed informally by the parties in decades of past bargaining rounds,' the NCCC said in a letter accompanying the applications.'
Arguing their own position, the NCCC regrets a deviation from the "friendly" informality of the past and a return to a more structured, "process-oriented" approach that NCCC views as unecessary and even inappropriate. Is this just a petulant response to a group of rails who are trying to move negotiations back to a more confrontational methodology and who are thereby threatening to undo many years of IBB and labor-management "partnership" indoctrination of the unions by the carriers and government? Or is this a calculated step to move us all closer to the next member-rejected but ultimately imposed best-we-could-do WIN/WIN contract?
3:25:47 PM 
Google It!
|
