Labor Relations Process

One of the most important things to keep in mind throughout this course is that labor relations is a process rather than a series of stand-alone events or factors. Each part of this process impacts all other parts. The process is impacted by both internal and external factors and pressures, such as the macroeconomy, sociopolitical environment, legal environment, and history. And likewise, these processes and how unions and employers engage in them have an impact on these external factors. When we think about the labor relations process itself, we can define three major phases: the strategic phase, the bargaining phase, and the day-to-day phase. Let’s look at each phase in more detail.

 

 

The Strategic Phase

This phase includes setting broad labor relations strategies and also includes the specific tactics around organizing drives.

In the strategic phase, employers determine their general labor relations strategies, their views towards unionization, and how they will address organizing drives or the potential for organizing drives.

For unions, they establish their goals, the type of union they will be, what workers they will look to represent/organize, how they will relate to other unions, and what tactics they will look to use in organizing drives. 

 

Collective Bargaining Phase

This phase only takes place if a union has organized the workers of an employer/facility. Here, the union, as representative of the employees, will negotiate with management to reach a collective bargaining agreement. This phase is impacted by all other phases, but as just one example, the way that management has decided to handle an organizing drive will impact the tone of collective bargaining. A knock-down, drag-out organizing drive would of course likely lead to a high level of animosity that would, of course, impact the bargaining.

 

Day-to-Day Management Phase

The final phase occurs after a contract, or collective bargaining agreement (CBA), is reached. We often refer to this as the day-to-day management phase. At this phase, the contract is enforced. There will often be different views of what contract clauses mean. As management operates from day to day, they may of course violate the CBA, or the union or members may believe management has violated the CBA. This will lead to disputes that are resolved through what is known as the grievance process. Again, we can think about how the tone and outcomes of the negotiating phase would impact this phase of the labor relations process.