X. LABOR STUDIES/LABOR UNIONS, COLLECTIVE BARGAINING, DISPUTE RESOLUTION AND LABOR AND EMPLOYMENT LAW
REFEREED PAPERS

DISCUSSION

BRUCE NISSEN
Florida International University

      The papers in this session are extremely varied, with little to relate them thematically. I find them all to be worthwhile and interesting individually, and will address them in the order in which they were listed in the program.

      The paper by Roland Zullo, “Shaping Political Preference Through Workplace Mobilization: Unions and the 2000 Election,” studies one union local’s efforts to influence its members’ presidential voting behavior. He finds that phone calls and literature mailed to members’ homes are ineffective in influencing voting preferences (although telephone calls probably are useful in getting out the vote). Only workplace-level education and personal contact is able to decisively influence voting preferences.

      The research is well designed, and it reinforces what the AFL-CIO have already learned to emphasize: that face-to-face, personal workplace contact is key to effective work, political or otherwise. Further research might investigate the internal state of union locals. What keeps them from carrying out the needed grassroots outreach? This is part of a larger question: how can unions transform themselves internally to develop more membership engagement?

      Michael LeRoy’s “The NLRA’s ‘No-Man’s Land’ in Partial and Intermittent Strikes: Research and Policy Implications” is well written and nicely organized. It shows that partial and intermittent strikes can be quite effective; they shift some risks from unions and workers onto employers. The NLRB and federal courts have found them to be legal, but unprotected, activity. Yet, under the Railway Labor Act, they have been ruled legal and protected.

      Future research and analysis on this topic could focus on the limitations regarding effectiveness, particularly the occupational certification issue noted by the author. If these types of strikes are effective only in occupations where certification makes replacement difficult, they may have limited application. Answers to the author’s query as to how the NLRB and the courts can justify a policy curbing a peaceful economic weapon simply because it seems to succeed so often may be found in labor law history. All of labor’s most effective weapons, usually those relying on widespread or class solidarity, are either curbed or banned over time. The currently unfashionable perspective of class conflict would explain a lot.

      The paper by Paula Voos and Haejin Kim, “The Evolving Intellectual Core of Industrial Relations”, concerns a central question. Has the field of IR veered off into a path dangerously close to a strictly managerialist, HR perspective, as maintained by John Godard and John Delaney? The authors’ discussion is stimulating and interesting. They argue that IR scholars do not adopt a “unitarist” managerial perspective but rather hold to a pluralist interest perspective. In unitarism’s extreme version--that there is no conflict of interest in any way between employers and employees--this is clearly true. But critics of the managerialist tilt of modern IR scholarship do not deny that mainstream IR academics admit some mixed motives. They assert that the employee (or union) interest is not accorded equal weight but is seen through a managerial lens. This charge has considerably more merit, at least as applied to mainly leading IR academics.

      Voos and Kim do note a shift in emphasis and language in the past 20 years that reinforces Godard and Delaney’s critique: quotes from writings by Thomas Kochan in 1980 and 2000 both note mixed interests, but the emphasis shifts enormously from a straightforward statement of differing interests to a focus on how to manage “mutual gains.” Deference to a public policy discourse dominated by business language and interests is used to explain the shift. This is probably true, but it only further reinforces the point. If the conflictual nature of the employment relationship could be openly stated in 1980 but not in 2000, the dominance of the IR field by business interests is clear.

      Voos and Kim correctly note that IR scholarship cannot completely ignore management initiated workplace innovations and study only unions and collective bargaining. Of course this is true, but no one argues that it should. They also note that not all IR scholars have identical views on the importance of unions or of an independent collective voice for employees. This is quite correct; I suspect that the targets of Godard and Delaney’s critique were a subset of all IR academics, although they are often considered its “leading lights.”

      The final part of the paper raises the social and class dimensions of IR scholarship. Here the authors join the critique of recent IR scholarship. I found this part of the paper particularly useful and illuminating. Overall, this paper is very stimulating and excellently done, whatever quibbles one might have with particular points or arguments.

      Michael LeRoy and Peter Feuille’s “Private Justice and Public Policy: Whose Voice Prevails in Arbitration?” effectively contrasts “labor arbitration” (union based) with “employment arbitration” (non-union, employer imposed). The labor arbitration section merely confirms previous research and historical analysis. The employment arbitration portion of the paper shows that this is not a system of independent employee voice but merely an employer device to avoid more costly legal adjudication. The authors avoid the question of whether independent employee voice, as given by labor arbitration, is desirable or crucial to equitable labor relations. They conclude with the uncontroversial assertion that the courts mainly defer to arbitral voice under either system. A stronger conclusion, that employment arbitration fails to provide an equitable procedure, could have been made. In my view, this would have strengthened the paper.