CONFLICT MANAGEMENT The Psychology of conflict and conflict ...

360 FRIEDMAN, HUNTER, AND CHEN
the probability of a winning organizing campaign (Bronfenbrenner &
Juravich, 1998; Delaney, Jarley, & Fiorito, 1995; Nissen & Rosen, 1999).
This strategy includes having well-educated, young organizers meeting
directly with potential union members, often in community organizations
such as churches. It also includes new goals such as equal pay and
child care.
In contrast to the focus on organizing tactics, other scholars attribute the
decline of unions to overt company resistance (Farber, 1990; Kleiner, 2001;
Fiorito, 2003) in the form of union substitution and suppression (Kochan
& Katz, 1988; Wolman, 1936). Union substitution strategies include offering
good compensation and fairness to workers and employee involvement
programs (Kleiner, 2001). Whether or not these positive employment
practices are designed with union avoidance in mind, the practices do
have the effect of reducing worker dissatisfaction, thus weakening one
of the main reasons workers join unions (Kochan, 1980). Examples of the
union suppression strategy include firing of known union supporters,
captive audience speeches by supervisors, and failing to bargain seriously
over first contracts (Bronfenbrenner, 1997; Kleiner, 2001). Union suppression
tactics have consistently had detrimental effects on the process of
organizing and collective bargaining (Cohen & Hurd, 1998; Cooke, 1983;
Freeman & Kleiner, 1990; Freeman & Rogers, 1999).
In the past three decades, it has clearly become increasingly difficult
for unions to win organizing battles. One of the original purposes of the
Wagner Act was to promote collective bargaining as a preferred means for
resolving workplace conflict, granting workers the right to organize and
protecting this right with legal support for the organizing process. But the
law is now 70 years old, the provisions of the act that support the right to
organize are dated, and the penalties for management for breaking the
law are small (Budd, 2005). For example, while it is illegal to discharge
workers for engaging in union organizing activity, the associated penalty
is merely that the discharged employee receives reinstatement with full
back pay—with the back pay being reduced by any earnings enjoyed by
the employee in another job.
Current public policy and the relative balance of power between labor
and management suggest that collective bargaining is decreasingly likely
to be chosen as a vehicle for conflict resolution in the American workplace.
In short, the balance of power in this element of labor relations clearly
resides with management. Antiunion company campaigns are increasingly
sophisticated, and further, companies have shifted large amounts of
work to places where unions find it either difficult or impossible to organize
workers (Budd, 2005). The extent to which this constitutes a challenge
for U.S. labor relations lies somewhat in the eye of the beholder; management
lobbying, for example, has contributed to the defeat of attempts at
labor law reform that would make it easier for unions to organize workers.
Nevertheless, a number of new approaches aimed at altering the process
for resolving conflicts over organizing have emerged.