Collective bargaining

This book originally appeared in 1951 as a response to a teaching need for a single volume on collective bargaining. It was a study of the history, nature, problems, and potential of collective bargaining, examining it as an institution in its own right and not merely as one activity of unions or as a procedure for determining wages and conditions of work. New research and new developments in the years since then have left the first edition dated. At the urging of friends, and at the particularly insistent prodding of Frank DeVyver, of Duke University, a revision has been undertaken, this time by two authors rather than one. The basic approach of the first edition remains substantially unchanged. Great stress is placed on the evolutionary nature of the bargaining process, the continuing changes in its procedures, and even its conception. This emphasis seems even more appropriate today, when so much dissatisfaction is being expressed with the anachronisms and purported failures of present collective bargaining institutions. A "crisis" in union-management rela tions is frequently forecast in professional as well as journalistic writings.

Arthur Goldberg, now Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court and then general counsel of the United Steelworkers and special counsel of the AFL-CIO, stimulated serious consideration of new approaches to old needs when he called for high-level discussions between representatives of organized labor and business on issues with which existing bargaining procedures could not adequately deal. The climate of experimentalism which he helped encourage may have been at least par tially responsible for some of the more recent developments in the steel meat-packing, and automobile industries. This second edition pays some what less attention than the first to the rationale and practice of union management cooperation programs (at least the variety which are so la beled) while recognizing the importance of some of the still unfolding programs in these industries. They are directly in the evolutionary trad tion, which is examined at some length in Chapters 1 and 2.

Policy with respect to the appropriate role of government in labor relations is also undergoing change. Attitudes toward public authority and responsibility on the strike and wage fronts have been subjected to critical review. If there is a large measure of inconclusiveness in the results, this too reflects a continued questioning of whether old problems, now tising in changed contexts, do not present the need for fresh solations yet to be devised

We have thus attempted to incorporate more the attitude of quest than conclusion in these pages, and moes the need for analysis as a basis for modifying policies that inevitably become chiclete than analysis to explain exisiting practices.

Finally, we wish to acknowledge our intellectual debe to the insumers ble scholars and researchers who have created many of the materials out of which these pages have been spun. Many lively minds have reflected on the issues of collective bargaining, to our benefit. We have enjoyed and profited from discussions and exchanges with our colleagues, not only in our home universities, but in the profession at large In acknowledgment of this debe, rather than as an