CONFLICT MANAGEMENT The Psychology of conflict and conflict ...

358 FRIEDMAN, HUNTER, AND CHEN
The chief actors in American labor relations have continued to find it
difficult to capture the joint gains that Walton and McKersie (1965) suggested
would accrue to parties that were effective in integrative bargaining.
The Ury et al. (1988) framework suggested a common source for these
difficulties. Parties that are particularly successful in integrative bargaining
are those that are able to identify and focus on their underlying interests.
Such identification and focus enables the parties to achieve solutions
to specific issues that cost one party relatively little but yield significant
advantages to the other. Yet all four elements of conflict resolution under
the New Deal system are based on the parties’ power and the rights established
by the law, rather than on a focus on underlying interests. The
rights established by the New Deal framework are poorly matched to a
21st-century economy, and increasingly, the imbalance of power between
labor and management means that solutions acceptable to both parties are
harder to craft at the bargaining table. New approaches to labor–management
dispute resolution in the United States, in contrast, have the virtue of
drawing on conflict resolution strategies geared toward solving problems
based on the parties’ interests.
In the following sections, we will review existing research on the four
elements of conflict resolution in the labor relations system in the United
States, as well as new directions within each element. Because the practice
of labor relations is embedded within legal and political systems, and
business practices, that vary considerably across country boundaries, we
concentrate our discussion on the United States, drawing comparisons
with experiences in Canada and other countries occasionally where they
help us to understand American practices.
eleMent 1: orGanizinG
The first element of conflict in labor relations stems from attempts to
determine the extent and form of collective representation, most fundamentally,
whether or not a workplace should be unionized. Many American
workplaces offer forms of dispute resolution in nonunion settings,
but initiation of union representation in the United States requires a formal
organizing process. At the time of the passage of the National Labor
Relations Act, the introduction of this process represented a major change
in approach to conflict. “Recognition strikes,” in which workers walked
off their jobs with their main objectives being to force management to
deal with their union, had often been highly adversarial, ideologically
charged, and even violent. These bitter power struggles were replaced by
an election overseen by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), complete
with rules of conduct for the campaign, and an outcome determined
by a majority vote of workers in the relevant bargaining unit. The Wagner
Act channeled conflict over the legitimacy of union representation into
a democratic decision process; the 1947 Taft–Hartley amendments to the