Labor-management Partnership Research Articles

Governance Processes, Labour-Management Partnership and Employee Voice in the Construction of Heathrow Terminal 5

The Major Projects Agreement (MPA) is a framework collective agreement designed to enhance performance outcomes in large mechanical and electrical engineering projects. It includes the trade union as a partner in strategic, organizational and employment decisions. The agreement was recently implemented in the construction of Heathrow Terminal 5 (T5). We look at factors in the corporate governance and industrial relations environment that led to the use of the MPA at T5, and assess its contribution to the completion of the construction project there. That the MPA has not been more widely adopted since the completion of T5 is indicative, we suggest, of wider constraints on labour-management partnerships in Britain

Union Representatives in Labour-Management Partnerships: Roles and Identities in Flux

This study examines the challenges met by union representatives (URs) who have to reconstruct their traditional role in the context of labour–management partnerships. They are innovators involved in the transition to renewed labour relations. Identity issues and role conflicts are examined through an in-depth analysis of the process involved in assimilating this new role in unionized organizations. The results suggest that URs subordinate the partner role to the interest representation role. Interviews suggest that this enhanced union legitimacy. Some blurring of traditional social categories such as those of employee or employer is possible to the extent that the relations between the actors are founded on interpersonal relations.

Role for a Labor-Management Partnership in Nursing Home Person-Centered Care

To investigate how a partnership between labor and management works to change the organization and focus of nursing home frontline work, supporting a transition toward person-centered care (PCC) in participating nursing homes. Using a participatory research approach, we conducted case studies of 2 nursing homes participating in a partnership between a labor union and a provider coalition. The study was designed to reveal whether and how the labor-management partnership supported PCC and to identify challenges to overcome in the future. The partnership provided training and follow-up support to member homes to implement PCC. Management and worker participants used the partnership as a learning collaborative to acquire PCC knowledge and to share implementation experience. Key elements of the implementation in each nursing home were translation of the larger labor-management partnership to each member nursing home, management innovations that developed and supported PCC, and conduct of union actors in each nursing home that supported PCC while maintaining traditional union protections. Frontline workers exhibited strong engagement in PCC practices. A partnership between labor and management can foster changes in the organization of frontline work aimed at improving nursing home residents' quality of life and care.

Partnership agreement adoption and survival in the British private and public sectors

This article assesses the adoption and survival of labour-management partnership agreements in Britain. In contrast to predictions that British employers will avoid partnership agreements, significantly more agreements have been signed than expected with 248 partnership agreements signed between 1990 and 2007. Partnership agreements covered almost ten percent of all British employees in 2007 and one-third of public sector employees. The majority of agreements are now in the public sector as part of government plans to reform the delivery of public services and in the devolved health services of Scotland and Wales as part of the potentially distinctive social democratic approach adopted by the devolved Governments. In contrast to predictions that, once signed, partnership agreements are unlikely to survive, four-fifths (80 percent) of all agreements survived to the close of 2007. Public sector agreements appear particularly robust.

Labour–Management Partnership: How to Make It Work?

Labour–Management Partnership: How to Make It Work?

Filming Politics: Communism and the Portrayal of the Working Class at the National Film Board of Canada, 1939–46 (review)

Reviewed by: Filming Politics: Communism and the Portrayal of the Working Class at the National Film Board of Canada, 1939–46 Alvin Finkel Filming Politics: Communism and the Portrayal of the Working Class at the National Film Board of Canada, 1939–46. Malek Khouri. Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2007. Pp. 282, $34.95 This book provides excellent capsule summaries of virtually every progressive film produced by the National Film Board in its early years. [End Page 264] For this, Malek Khouri deserves kudos. But he has far more serious intent. Khouri tries to demonstrate that these films embodied the doctrines of the Communist Party of Canada (cpc) during this period. Though he is writing from a left-wing perspective, Khouri ironically appears largely to substantiate the views of the McCarthyites who purged left-wingers from the nfb, claiming that they were Soviet puppets. It is important to note that Khouri does not claim that nfb filmmakers influenced by the cpc were party members. Indeed, ‘there are very few indications or evidence of direct organizational linkages between the Communist Party – or any Popular Front organizational affiliates for that matter – and specific workers and filmmakers of the Board during the early years of its establishment’ (81). Still, he finds the ‘undeniable signature’ of ideas derived from the Communist-led Popular Front of the thirties, which had collapsed when the Communists supported Stalin’s détente with Hitler in August 1939 but was quickly revived after Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. His evidence is unconvincing. Khouri’s mastery of Canadian politics and Communist politics in this period is weak. Take his account of Dorise Nielsen. He has her running for the Labour Progressive Party in 1940 (79), when indeed the party was only formed in 1943. He claims that she did not run openly as a Communist because the party was banned (114), when in fact she was a long-time Communist mole in the ccf, as Faith Johnson’s biography acknowledges. Romanticizing the cpc, Khouri regards the party as revolutionary in its aims throughout the period he is examining but determined to achieve socialism step by step and therefore present itself as a moderate force. He makes no reference to works by Norman Penner or others who suggest that Popular Front politics altered the cpc fundamentally, turning it into a party whose domestic policy was not very different from the social-democratic ccf. It was the party’s organic link with the Soviet Union, more than its links with Canadian workers, that distinguished it from other left-wing formations in Canada. For a time, as the war was ending, the Communists moved to the right of the ccf, calling for a broad political alliance of anti-Tory forces that would include the Liberals and convincing the Trades and Labour Congress of Canada to endorse the Liberals in the 1945 federal election. Khouri’s willingness to find revolutionary intentions in bland end-of-war movies that pressed for a labour-management partnership in industry makes it easy for him to conflate Communists and left-leaning liberal filmmakers. He mentions several movies that praise [End Page 265] management working in partnership with labour in factories and argues that these films offered the way forward to a world in which workers became more equal with management. In turn, in his view, these films reflected the Communist Party’s wartime praise for labour-management committees. But the Communist interest in the lmcs was in their effectiveness at increasing wartime production and prosecuting the war against fascism. In peacetime, after they were criticized by the Soviets for going too far in the effort to collaborate with ‘progressive’ elements of capitalism, they were anxious to reassert the class-struggle character of trade unions and to avoid entanglement with organizations like lmcs in which workers were subordinated to bosses. In general, Khouri finds far more that is revolutionary in nfb films than his own evidence suggests. He also finds far more that is revolutionary in cpc politics of this period than the literature on the cpc reveals. Barely mentioning the ccf at all, he does not deal with either its ideology or meteoric...

The potential and precariousness of partnership: the case of the Kaiser Permanente labor management partnership

In 1997, the Kaiser Foundation Health Care and Hospitals, the Permanente Medical Federation, and a coalition of unions signed a national agreement creating one of the most ambitious labor management partnerships in U.S. history, initially covering some 58,000 employees. Based on field research and archival data, this paper analyzes the first eight years of this partnership in light of three strategic challenges—initiating, governing, and sustaining partnership—and the organizational challenge of partnership in a highly decentralized organization.

The Potential and Precariousness of Partnership: The Case of the Kaiser Permanente Labor Management Partnership

In 1997, the Kaiser Foundation Health Care and Hospitals, the Permanente Medical Federation, and a coalition of unions signed a national agreement creating one of the most ambitious labor management partnerships in U.S. history, initially covering some 58,000 employees. Based on field research and archival data, this paper analyzes the first eight years of this partnership in light of three strategic challenges—initiating, governing, and sustaining partnership—and the organizational challenge of partnership in a highly decentralized organization.

Balancing Acts: Dynamics of a Union Coalition in a Labor Management Partnership

This paper analyzes the experience of a set of unions that formed a coalition to engage in coordinated bargaining and to build and sustain a labor management partnership with Kaiser Permanente, a large healthcare provider and insurer. We use qualitative and quantitative data, including member and leader surveys, to explore the experience of the coalition in confronting five key challenges identified through theory and prior research on such partnerships. We find that the coalition has been remarkably successful, under difficult circumstances, in achieving institutional growth for its member unions and in balancing traditional and new union roles and communicating with members. The unions have been less successful in increasing member involvement.

Bargaining Theory Meets Interest‐Based Negotiations: A Case Study1

This is a case study of the 2005 national contract negotiations between Kaiser Permanente and the Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions. Given the scale and complexity of these negotiations, their successful completion provides an exemplar for collective bargaining in this country. In 1997 Kaiser Permanente and the Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions formed a labor management partnership, and negotiations were structured around the principles of interest‐based negotiation (IBN). Drawing on direct observation of all parts of the bargaining process, interviews with individuals from Kaiser and the Coalition of Unions, and surveys we conducted after bargaining was completed, we conclude that the parties employed a mix of interest‐based and traditional negotiation processes across an array of integrative and distributive issues. We find that IBN techniques were used extensively and successfully to reach mutually satisfying agreements when the parties shared interests. When interests were in greater conflict, the parties resorted to more traditional, positional tactics to reach resolution. Strong intraorganizational conflicts limited the use of IBN and favored the use of more traditional positional bargaining. While a high level of trust enabled and supported the use of IBN, tensions that developed limited the use of IBN and required surfacing and release before either IBN or more traditional positional processes could proceed effectively. The use of IBN tools helped the parties apply the principles underlying the partnership in which these negotiations were embedded. We conclude that IBN served as a way of applying or operationalizing integrative bargaining and affected the process dynamics in ways the Walton and McKersie theory predicted. As such we see IBN as techniques that neither displace nor render obsolete other aspects of bargaining theory or practice but that show considerable promise for helping collective bargaining to address the complex issues and challenges found in contemporary employment relationships.

Service Contracting and Labor-Management Partnerships: Transforming the Public Sector

In response to the prospect of service contracting and the privatization initiatives in the City of Indianapolis, a unique partnership has evolved between labor and management that encourages both cooperation and competition between city departments and their represented employees with outside private contractors. A conceptual model was utilized to analyze the Indianapolis partnership with respect to five developmental stages of collaboration. Empirical data were collected from a questionnaire given to all employees within the Department of Public Works. These data were assessed using multivariate regression and logit analyses, and combined with insights drawn from interviews with labor and management. The results from the multivariate regression indicated that 88% of the variation in the perceived success of the Indianapolis partnership could be explained by the five stages of the conceptual model. Moreover, the regression results, when coupled with the results of the logit analyses, identified a number of critical antecedents for successful service contracting in the form of labor-management partnerships.

A Word (or Two) about Public Sector Collective Bargaining

Public Sector Collective Bargaining is a relatively recent phenomenon--its lifecycle can be traced to and indeed may be a lasting legacy of the baby boomers entering the sector workforce in record numbers. Outside of a few traditionally union-friendly or politically progressive jurisdictions, union activity among government employees was virtually unknown and unheard of in the 1950s. During the next two-plus decades, however, union membership rates saw explosive growth so that by 1979 about 38 percent of employees were either members of or represented by unions. Despite an occasional setback, sector unions managed to stay close to this rate for the next 27 years. Ironically, the ascendancy of sector unions almost mirrors the decline of private sector unions; at one time they represented more than one-third of America's workers; today they represent less than nine percent. At the initial stages of sector union organizing there was a robust discussion among practitioners, researchers, and others concerning the changes unionization might cause to the body politic over resource allocation, the determination of policy, the use of political pressure at the bargaining table and the role of the public in bargaining, plus the potential shift in power favoring unionized employees. Acceptance of collective bargaining in government has indeed resulted in changes both at the macro policy/administration level, and the micro human resource administration level. It is hoped that this special issue rekindles the inquiry and debate both from an academic as well as a practitioner perspective. In the five articles relating to this special issue on sector collective bargaining, a number of issues and perspectives are discussed. In lieu of strikes and lockouts, binding interest arbitration has become an accepted method of resolving bargaining impasses for safety employees. Authors David B. Lipsky and Harry C. Katz examine the use of this impasse resolution mechanism in negotiations between the rank and file police officers and management in New York City. Lipsky and Katz served as consultants to the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association (PBA), and as such, their scholarly approach is buttressed by firsthand experience. The authors examine the differences between the different forms of interest arbitration in terms of bargaining outcomes and also detail some of the high stakes political pressures surrounding police bargaining in New York City. As relations between labor unions and management in the sector matured, some participants sought to go beyond the traditional zero sum adversarial bargaining and to explore ways to cooperate so that both sides benefited from the process. Authors Barry Rubin and Richard Rubin detail a case study of the Indianapolis labor-management partnership, wherein the administration of Mayor Stephen Goldsmith entered into an arrangement with the union representing rank and file employees after first threatening to privatize most city functions. Rubin and Rubin first describe the underlying condition which made both sides realize that more was to be gained by entering into the partnership than by continuing the mutually hostile approach taken by both sides. …

What Did Partnerships Do? Evidence from the Federal Sector

In 1993, then-President Clinton issued a landmark executive order mandating labor-management partnerships in the federal service. The authors examine a unique set of data on the operations and effects of 60 partnerships that covered several hundred thousand federal employees. These data, plus evidence on the broader federal sector, show that partnerships provided a forum for collaborative communications and joint decision-making, improved the labor relations climate, reduced labor-management disputes, and modestly improved organizational performance. Analyses of survey results from partnership-council representatives show that perceptions of communications and decision-making were positively correlated with labor relations climate and organizational performance. The authors discuss the implications of their results for labor-management cooperation generally and labor relations in the federal sector specifically.

Globalization and the Logic of Participation: Unions and the Politics of Coalition Building

Global liberalization is driving a ‘logic of participation’, for firms and unions alike. Economic pressures drive managers to innovate across a range of possibilities, from outsourcing and union busting to work reorganization and labor-management partnership. Those same pressures, reflected largely through the strategic choices of employers, also force unions to innovate - from concession bargaining and cooperation to coalition building and international solidarity. Because employers are increasingly tempted by strategies that seek to weaken or marginalize unions, sustained participation for unions arguably requires a new period of activist mobilization. This article explores one significant component of renewed labor mobilization: union coalition building. Based on a case study of coalition efforts in the United States between the United Steelworkers and the Sierra Club from 1999-2004, concepts and causal linkages are suggested for broader analysis. Research findings presented here indicate the following causal processes at work: union strategies, defining moments and spillover combine to drive coalition building processes that include events, campaigns and institution building - ranging from local to national and global levels. Beyond this US-based case, a framework for cross-national comparative analysis is also suggested.

How Internal Stakeholders View Partnership

In 1993, the Clinton-Gore administration launched a comprehensive effort to reinvent the federal government. Labor-management partnership glued the various pieces of the reinvention blueprint together. The perceptions of two sets of pivotal stakeholders in the partnership effort mandated by Executive Order 12,871, partnership council representatives and the surrounding federal workforce, are examined. Council representatives viewed partnership as achieving some process effectiveness, which correlates with perceptions of the labor relations climate and partnership impacts. Although a sizable percentage of the federal workforce appeared largely unaware of partnership activities, many perceived a positive impact on labor-management relations. Significant differences existed between union and management council representatives. These findings have implications for the future of federal-sector labor-management cooperation, particularly in light of recent policy developments in the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense. Without a partnership mandate, such relations may revert to their more adversarial past.

Anglo-American corporate governance and the employment relationship: a case to answer?

The corporate governance environment in the UK and US is generally thought to be hostile to the emergence of cooperative employment relations of the kind exemplified by labour-management partnerships. We discuss case study evidence from the UK which suggests that, contrary to this widespread perception, enduring and proactive partnerships may develop, in conditions where management can convince shareholders of the long-term gains from this approach, and where other regulatory factors operate to extend the time-horizon for financial returns. We conclude that there is more scope than is commonly allowed for measures which could reconcile liquidity in capital markets with cooperation in labour relations.

Labour-management partnership in the non-union retail sector

Analysts and policy advocates have argued that a meaningful labour-management partnership can be established in the absence of trade unions. In this paper we have examined employee outcomes of partnership in a medium-sized non-union retail firm, regarded as one of the ‘best practice’ cases of non-union partnership by the Involvement and Participation Association (IPA) of the UK. We have also compared the employee outcomes from our case study firm with those from a representative sample of retail sector workers from unionized and non-union retail firms in the UK. Findings indicate that compared to employees in other retail-sector firms, workers in the ‘best practice’ partnership firm were significantly disadvantaged with respect to their influence over workplace and policy decisions with little evidence of ‘mutual gains’ as claimed by partnership advocates.

Negotiations and Change: From the Workplace to Society (review)

Reviewed by: Negotiations and Change: From the Workplace to Society Rob Hickey Negotiations and Change: From the Workplace to Society. Edited by Thomas A. Kochan and David B. Lipsky. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002. 353 pp. $35 hardback. Some forty years after the original publication of A Behavioral Theory of Negotiations by Walton and McKersie, Thomas Kochan and David Lipsky examine the current state of research, teaching, and theory of negotiations. The edited volume, Negotiations and Change: From the Workplace to Society, includes a diverse collection of chapters that explore the evolution and application of negotiations theory both in the workplace and broader civil society. While several authors provide new and interesting advances to the field, many chapters drift away from the strengths of Walton and McKersie's original work, replacing analysis of complex processes in negotiations with normative prescriptions for integrative bargaining. Indeed, in the concluding chapter, the authors for whom this volume is dedicated provide a powerful reminder to those who would prefer to see all labor-management negotiations pushed into the integrative box. Too often in the lexicon of those who teach negotiations, the ideal outcome is touted as "win-win." Such an image of the process is not faithful to the reality of most situations. Major conflicts of interests do exist, deadlocks do develop, and the parties are often prone to utilize coercive forms of power. . . . The point is that a more nuanced view of the process is necessary, and that the mixed-motive nature of the engagement holds the potential for breakdowns as well as breakthroughs. (306) Much has changed in the practice of bargaining, and in the way we teach, research and think about negotiations. An assessment of where the field has been, our current understanding of the negotiations process, and possible future directions is long overdue. Where the book avoids the simplistic traps that claim distributive bargaining is bad and integrative bargaining is good, the authors provide interesting insights and challenging new directions for the study of negotiations. However, the recurring normative tone that extols unions to abandon their bad old conflict-ridden ways, and encourages managers to weather the turbulence into the integrative Promised Land, detracts from an otherwise fine collection. The book is divided into five sections. In the first part, Kochan and Lipsky begin by summarizing the conceptual foundations of Walton and McKersie's book, and outlining the four sub-processes of negotiations presented in A Behavioral Theory of Negotiations. The second section explores [End Page 90] the process of workplace change and tacit negotiations. Janice Klein has a particularly interesting chapter on the changing role of front line supervisors. Part three takes a step back to look at the broader trends of transformations in labor-management relations. Beaumont and Hunter provide a refreshing dose of reality in their examination of labor-management partnerships in Britain, in the chapter, "Can Partnership Square the Circle?" Section four follows the practice and theory of negotiations outside of the traditional labor-management context, including environmental and public policy arenas. In the final section, Walton and McKersie provide their own assessment of where the study and practice of negotiations has come and where it may be headed. Largely missing from the volume, but again raised by Walton and McKersie in the final chapter, is the critical role that power plays in the process of negotiations. The interactions between labor and management, between environmentalists, industry and politicians, or other groups in society all involve disparities in power and differences of interest. These differences, the potential for conflict, and the process of resolution are what make the study of negotiations so rich and challenging. Power is critical, whether we are analyzing the negotiations process at the broader level of transformations in labor-management relations, or the more micro level of workplace change and team-based production methods. This is equally true in other segments of society. Polluting industries have little reason to explore integrative solutions with environmentalists unless there is the potential to cause companies economic harm through successful legal or regulatory action. Power is never absent from the process of negotiations. We should not try to relegate the role of power to the undesirable...

Kaiser Permanente: Using Interest‐Based Negotiations to Craft a New Collective Bargaining Agreement

Building on a new labor–management partnership, Kaiser Permanente and its nearly seventy thousand union employees negotiated a five‐year contract agreement in 2000 based on the principles of “interest‐based negotiations.” The people who made this remarkable achievement happen as well as the historic background of the case are described and analyzed. A key element to the success of this initiative was the back‐and‐forth work of many different groups, including joint labor–management committee, coalitions of unions, bargaining task groups focused on particular subject areas, and local and national leaders of the company and its unions. Using illustrative comments from actual participants in this complex, nearly year‐long negotiation process, the authors explore how the parties crafted their agreement.

Responsible restructuring: creative and profitable alternatives to layoffs

Restructuring is a hot topic right now -- companies need to figure out how to weather the current economic storm and still be well-positioned to take advantage of the next upswing. Using real-life illustrations of successful, Responsible Restructurings at companies such as Charles Schwab, Cisco, Motorola, and Intel, this book provides alternatives to downsizing. Wayne Cascio examines the specific practices these leading firms use instead of layoffs -- including retraining, labor-management partnership, and compensation linked to organizational performance. These practices demonstrate that these companies view their workers as assets to be developed rather than as costs to be cut. Cascio presents compelling evidence showing that businesses adopting these measures fare better than businesses in similar circumstances who choose downsizing.