CONFLICT MANAGEMENT The Psychology of conflict and conflict ...

12. UNION-MANAGEMENT CONFLICT: HISTORICAL TRENDS AND NEW DIRECTIONS 377
Relatively few workers today see their workplace conflicts resolved via
the New Deal system. In part, this is a function of broader changes in
the environment: a new service-based economy, an increasingly diverse
workforce, and the advent of global competition. The New Deal system
has been slow to respond to the challenges posed by these changes. Not
surprisingly for a system whose main characteristics were established
70 years ago, its approach to conflict management has at times proven
a poor fit to modern circumstances. The decline in the number of workers
represented by unions is in part a function of this misfit: Management
resists unionization more heavily, and workers are less likely to join
unions that they do not think can be part of an effective approach to conflict
resolution.
Where unions retain a foothold, labor and management continue to
experiment with new ways of managing conflict. One common theme we
have identified among these experiments is that they strive to develop
interest-based approaches to dispute resolution. Some 40 years ago, Walton
and McKersie (1965) identified integrative bargaining as a key subprocess
in labor relations. Should there be a renewed interest in collective
bargaining, innovations that provide a more interests-based framework
for such bargaining may prove to be necessary to bring labor–management
relations into the 21st century.
Future Research Directions
We see research on labor union management conflict heading in new
directions over the next decades. Within the United States, the central
questions are whether the New Deal system will continue to dissipate
in importance and impact, and what institutions and practices might
emerge to replace it. One model that has emerged for employee representation
is employee network or support groups that form around particular
issues (Levine & Bishop, 1999) or, more commonly, particular
subsets of employees. Network groups for minority and female employees
have become widespread in major corporations (Friedman, 1996;
Hyde, 1993), although it appears that these groups are more often social
support groups than advocacy groups (Friedman & Craig, 2004). These
groups cannot bargain in the traditional sense—indeed, in the U.S. legal
context, it would be illegal to do so because they represent only a portion
of employees at any given company—but they do provide a way for
employees to express concerns about issues that affect their subgroup
of employees. Also, while traditional union–management relations focus
exclusively on nonexempt employees (employees who are, technically,
not “managers”), network groups have the potential to focus on managerial
employees’ interests and needs.
Future research is likely to be more meaningful to the extent it broadens
beyond traditional “union” entities. For example, groups such as Working