Excellence in Government

In 2009 President Obama signed an executive order, similar to one signed in 1993 by former President Clinton, establishing government-wide labor-management forums and promoting partnerships between federal employee groups and agency officials.

Supporters of Clinton-era labor-management partnerships say they fostered greater  cooperation between labor and management, recognized the importance of input from employees and their union representatives in agency decisions, created effective processes for engaging frontline employees, and facilitated faster resolution of contract disputes and grievances.

Detractors argue the process sometimes excluded middle managers from important discussions, required senior managers to relinquish too much power, created costs for attending partnership meetings that yielded limited results, required consensus-based bargaining tactics which understated critical differences, and failed to hold managers accountable for implementing partnerships.

Labor-management partnerships fared much better at some agencies than others. The most important contributor to successful labor-management partnerships was support from agency chief executives and union presidents.  Top executives must be prepared to do whatever it takes to ensure agency chief human capital officers and labor relations specialists understand that partnership is a legitimate approach to labor-management relations.  Union chiefs must foster similar acceptance among their contract negotiations staffs.

The successes and failures of various partnerships under Clinton’s executive order surfaced helpful implementation guideposts for agency executives and union officials.

Agree on the Mission. Labor and management officials must develop a shared understanding of what their partnership is trying to accomplish.  For example, they could define partnership broadly as using stakeholder involvement and cooperative problem solving to influence the agency’s direction and decisions affecting employees’ work environment.

Get it in Writing. Draft a formal partnership agreement that clearly defines manager accountabilities and employee responsibilities when decisions are made with employee input.  Regard the agreement as a “living document” subject to periodic adjustment to meet changing circumstances.  In multi layered agencies, such agreements describe in detail how labor-management forums and processes will work at various levels within divisions or functions, and how they will foster communication and coordination across these operating units. 

Use Consultants Sparingly. Agency employees often team up with outside consultants to provide their labor-management forums with start-up guidance and training.  After that, agency officials should rely on consultants primarily to develop in-house facilitators who can support ongoing partnership activities without external assistance.

 Provide Multiple Forums. Productive partnerships include regular, on-going and sometimes intense interactions in scheduled and structured labor-management forums.  They also create platforms for episodic, impromptu and informal exchanges of information and practices, including face-to-face interactions, virtual networks and task teams.

Develop an Input Process. Develop a common understanding of the input process leading up to management decisions—what the process entails, why it is in everyone’s respective interests, what results are expected, and what actions will occur after the process has concluded.  Agencies should provide managers, employees, union officials and other stakeholders with substantive information and involvement in workplace decisions before establishing policies or taking actions that affect the work environment.  Management officials should provide this information honestly, openly and early enough to secure direct, informed and credible input from these stakeholders.

Break the Consensus Barrier. Consensus is neither necessary nor attainable on every labor-management issue.  Adopt a “strive-for-consensus” approach.  Forum participants should make good-faith efforts to reach agreements each side can live with and publicly support.  But use other methods—such as voting or delegating to the forum chair—when consensus is jointly perceived to be unnecessary or unattainable.

Build Partnering Skills. Every participant in labor-management forums should receive training in interest-based problem solving, strive-for-consensus decision making and collaborative bargaining.  Agencies should foster these partnering skills through professional development programs and training for union stewards and agency managers.  Effective interpersonal communication and collaboration create positive agency-union partnerships and constructive agency-stakeholder relationships—both of which are vital to agency performance.

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A draft Presidential executive order on federal sector labor relations requires agency heads to establish labor-management forums within their organizations, and to bargain in those forums over workplace matters normally not subject to mandatory negotiation.  Newly negotiable matters would include the number and qualifications of employees assigned to work on projects and the technology and work methods involved in those projects.

Unions representing federal employees had been submitting proposals to the President urging this type of executive order.  There were technical differences among the unions on what the proposed executive order should look like.  The most serious disagreement centered on whether the executive order should require the use of consensual negotiation methods and, in particular, the consensual method known as interest-based bargaining.

It turns out that the draft Presidential executive order is silent on the negotiating tactics to be used in the required labor-management forums.  Thus, assuming the President issues the executive order in its current form, agency managers and their union counterparts will most likely use a variety of bargaining approaches in those forums, running the gamut from traditional position-based methods to non traditional interest-based methods, even including a mix of these approaches when and as a bargaining situation dictates.

Well-publicized accounts of one highly visible and vocal union leader’s opposition to the use of the interest-based bargaining (IBB) approach reveal a series of inaccurate characterizations of that method which deserve to be identified and corrected.  The following paragraphs offer clarifying information that can help agency managers and union officials, as well as other dispute resolution participants, to make informed choices about the bargaining process they will use when negotiating over federal  workplace matters.

Fiction. The interest based bargaining (IBB) approach requires the negotiating parties to make decisions by consensus.

Fact. The IBB approach does not require consensus decision making.  It encourages the negotiating parties to agree on what process they will use to make decisions.  They may agree to make decisions through a positional bargaining process, a consensual bargaining process, or a “strive for consensus” bargaining process.  In the latter case, the parties agree to make every reasonable effort to reach agreements that all the bargaining participants can live with and publicly support, and to use a mutually acceptable back-up procedure for making decisions when consensus on a particular issue is not readily attainable (e.g., refer it to another forum, table it for revisiting at a later time, etc.)

Fiction. The IBB approach encourages the negotiating participants to compromise. 

Fact. The IBB approach encourages participants not to compromise.  In fact, compromise is part of the traditional positional bargaining process in which each side gives up something they want in order to get something else they want more.  Compromise typically occurs in win-lose situations when there is a fixed pie to be divided up. The IBB approach encourages participants to try to convert win-lose situations to win-win situations by thinking up ways to enlarge the pie before attempting to claim a share of it.

Fiction. The IBB approach grossly exaggerates the common ground between labor and management by ignoring the fact that each side has different interests at stake during negotiations, and by forcing labor and management to pretend that they have more in common than they actually do. 

Fact. The IBB approach explicitly acknowledges that labor and management have different interests which are often in conflict.  It encourages each side to generate alternative solutions that can satisfy the other side’s interests as well as its own. 

Fiction. The IBB philosophy gets in the way of doing good solid labor-management business because it prohibits candid discussion, robust exchanges and tough negotiations.  Instead, it creates an artificially polite atmosphere in which the union cannot “trust management to be management” and management cannot “trust the union to be the union.” 

Fact. If trusting management and the union to “be themselves” means attacking individuals on the other side in an effort to discredit their proposals by discrediting them, then a competent IBB facilitator probably would get in the way of such behavior by actively trying to discourage it.  That said, the IBB approach does leave plenty of room for “tough” negotiating behavior.  It instructs each participant to attack the issue but not the person, press hard for their side’s interests, insist on objective criteria for evaluating alternatives, and yield only to principle and never to pressure.

Federal agency managers and public employee union officials must have an accurate understanding of the true differences between traditional and consensual bargaining methods if they are to make the most of the workplace improvement opportunities offered by the anticipated Presidential executive order.  Hopefully the foregoing clarifications will help to dispel some common misconceptions that could otherwise cloud that understanding.

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For example, in a partnership between an employing organization and the international union that represents a major segment of its workforce, the two institutional partners acting through their respective designees can develop a collaborative approach to issue identification; agree to share the risks involved in joint undertakings; formulate and apply confidence, trust and respect building behavioral ground rules; define their common and separate interests; learn to respect their legitimate and significant differences; improve communication and information sharing; integrate end-to-end empowerment with individual responsibility and institutional accountability; and maintain a cooperative problem-solving approach to conflict management.

Click here for more information on effective dispute resolution.