Organizational Change in Union Settings: Labor-Management Partnerships: The Past and the Future

Summary

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Organizational change in union settings has never been easy. In spite of this, there is a rich history of union-management cooperation. Companies and unions have developed pragmatic solutions to significant problems affecting the workplace when traditional power strategies such as strikes, picketing, boycotts, and exercise of management rights were ineffective. The labor-management partnerships of the 1980s and 1990s were seen as highly innovative, progressive steps in the development of labor-management relations. Partnerships were originally created to address three issues: competition, the ineffectiveness of traditional labor relations to address difficult issues, and the need to engage the workforce in implementing innovative programs that without union support proved difficult. Many industries are only now experiencing the types of competitive challenges that created the first wave of collaboration. Union leaders will be required to balance their recognition of the needs of the business with internal union political dynamics.

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Organizational Change in Union Settings: Labor-Management Partnerships: The Past and the Future

In spite of this, there is a rich history of union-management cooperation. Companies and unions have developed pragmatic solutions to significant problems affecting the workplace when traditional power strategies such as strikes, picketing, boycotts, and exercise of management rights were ineffective (Schuster, 1984). Prior to the National Labor Relations Act, cooperation took the focus of voluntary recognition and arbitration of grievances. During World War II, labor and management worked together to expedite wartime production. In the 1950s and '60s, cooperative procedures to address employment dislocation stemming from automation were widespread in shipping, mining, and meatpacking. During the 1970s and early '80s, labormanagement committees, gainsharing, and joint quality of worklife efforts were widespread.

Labor-management cooperation hit its high water mark in the period from 1985 to 1995. Intense competition, combined with a notable shifting of power from labor to management, brought about a recognition of the need for change and a series of widely studied innovative experiments, from employee involvement to work redesign to innovative compensation systems and union involvement in key management decisions through partnerships. Widely publicized examples of cooperation occurred at Saturn, Nummi, Levi-Strauss, and Harley-Davidson.

In spite of such instances of cooperation, bystander or adversarial relationships between unions and management have been the norm. Bystander union-management relations are those in which the management directs the business and the union is free to criticize those decisions it does not like. In byst...

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