Interest‐Based Negotiations in a Transformed Labor–Management Setting

Abstract

The authors introduce a group of essays that evolved from a March 2003 symposium on the path‐breaking new partnership and use of interest‐based negotiation (IBN) at Kaiser Permanente (KP), one of the largest integrated health care programs in the United States. They briefly trace the history of the IBN approach (both success stories and failures); the growth of this phenomenon; and its use in collective bargaining settings. The KP case, the focus of the symposium (which was jointly sponsored by MIT's Institute for Work and Employment Relations and Harvard's Program on Negotiation), is by far the largest instance of the use of IBN in U.S. labor relations history.