Bargaining Over How to Bargain in Labor‐Management Negotiations

Abstract

Training people in interest-based bargaining has become a big business, where literally thousands of seminar participants each year learn how to become better at finding win-win or mutual-gains solutions to conflict through principled negotiations (Fisher and Ury 1981; Susskind and Cruikshank 1987). Even in labor relations, where the institutions of negotiation are perhaps most deeply rooted and highly codified, many traditionalists are learning and experimenting with interest-based approaches to bargaining. The exper ience with interestbased bargaining thus far has been very powerful in revealing limitations of traditional approaches to labor negotiations. But the interest-based exper iments themselves have produced mixed results (see, for example, Susskind and Landry 1991; Friedman 1992; Hunter and McKersie 1992)) A close look at the interest-based experiments in labor relations reveals that adversarial institutional patterns have often been rejected in favor of more cob laborative, problem-solving techniques without a full appreciation of the underlying reasons for the establishment of the original institutional patterns. Some behaviors that are dysfunctional from an interest-based point of view (for example, channelling all dialogue through the chief negotiator) can serve an essential institutional purpose (such as helping leaders manage internal splits on a negotiating team). My aim in this article is to point toward a synthesis between the new, interest-based techniques and the traditional institutional practices. I shall focus on the training of labor negotiators since it is during training that interest-based bargaining principles are codified, communicated, learned and then put into practice. The field of labor relations is a fertile arena for comparison since thousands of new bargaining teams are elected (labor) or selected (management) every year and trained either by more experienced members of their bargaining teams, by their international union or parent corporation, by