1999 Employment Dispute Resolution and Worker Rights in the Changing Workplace

Abstract

The ongoing restructuring and reorganization of work, labor relations, and society affects virtually every aspect of workplace operations from the boardroom to the shopfloor. None of these effects is potentially more important to workers than the impact on workplace dispute resolution. This research volume is motivated by a sense of uneasiness about the state of one of the core institutions of American collective bargaining, the grievance and arbitration system. On the one hand, there are widespread criticisms among scholarly observers (see, for instance, virtually any collective bargaining textbook) that the system's much-vaunted benefits-speed, informality, flexibility, openness, low cost-have eroded over time. More disturbing perhaps is the suggestion that the system is too adversarial, increasingly sclerotic, and ineffective at resolving conflict. Critics portray the once problem-solving system as ensnared by procedures that have institutionalized hostility and failed to provide adequate solutions, remedies, or deterrence. Some propose reforms that aim at reducing costs and promoting more consensual labor relations. These include proposals for employee counseling, rather than progressive discipline for errant employees; direct employee involvement in rule making and peer discipline systems, rather than management's reserved right to make and enforce reasonable rules; interest-based mediation approaches, rather than grievance arbitration; and expedited arbitration, rather than a multistep grievance procedure capped by rights arbitration . Other reforms seek to expand civil rights by extending due process guarantees into the workplace either by importing judicial standards and procedures into the private dispute resolution systems or by creating a specialized court system to adjudicate the growing volume of litigation over workplace andemployment rights.