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Toward a New Grand Bargain:
Collaborative Approaches to Labor-Management Reform
in Massachusetts
Barry Bluestone, Thomas A. Kochan
In the face of continuing fiscal crisis, the governors of some states including Wisconsin, Ohio, and New Jersey have taken to attacking public sector unions using new legislation to undermine the collective bargaining rights of state and municipal employees. The reaction has been widespread protest and a growing rift between political leaders and civil servants. We believe this painful struggle can not only be avoided in Massachusetts, but that the continuing fiscal crisis facing the Commonwealth and its municipalities can provide the motivation for forging a fundamental change in public sector labor relations that not only could lead to more efficient and effective government service, but in the case our teachers’ unions, could play a critical role in improving public education and closing the achievement gap.
Up in the Air
Greg J. Bamber; Jody Hoffer Gittell; Thomas A. Kochan; Andrew von Nordenflycht
“And you thought the passengers were mad. Airline employees are fed up, too-with pay cuts, increased workloads and management's miserly ways, which leave workers to explain to often-enraged passengers why flying has become such a miserable experience.” —The New York Times, December 22, 2007
When both an industry's workers and its customers report high and rising frustration with the way they are being treated, something is fundamentally wrong. In response to these conditions, many of the world's airlines have made ever-deeper cuts in services and their workforces. Is it too much to expect airlines, or any other enterprise, to provide a fair return to investors, high-quality reliable service to their customers, and good jobs for their employees? Measured against these three expectations, the airline industry is failing. In the first five years of the twenty-first century alone, U.S. airlines lost a total of $30 billion while shedding 100,000 jobs, forcing the remaining workers to give up over $15 billion in wages and benefits. Combined with plummeting employee morale, shortages of air traffic controllers, and increased congestion and flight delays, a total collapse of the industry may be coming.
Is this state of affairs inevitable? Or is it possible to design a more sustainable, less volatile industry that better balances the objectives of customers, investors, employees, and the wider society? Does deregulation imply total abrogation of government's responsibility to oversee an industry showing the clear signs of deterioration and increasing risk of a pending crisis?
Greg J. Bamber, Jody Hoffer Gittell, Thomas A. Kochan, and Andrew von Nordenflycht explore such questions in a well-informed and engaging way, using a mix of quantitative evidence and qualitative studies of airlines from North America, Asia, Australia, and Europe. Up in the Air provides clear and realistic strategies for achieving a better, more equitable balance among the interests of customers, employees, and shareholders. Specifically, the authors recommend that firms learn from the innovations of companies like Southwest and Continental Airlines in order to build a positive workplace culture that fosters coordination and commitment to high-quality service, labor relations policies that avoid long drawn-out conflicts in negotiating new agreements, and business strategies that can sustain investor, employee, and customer support through the ups and downs of business cycles.
Read a review of Up in the Air (PDF)
Healing Together
Thomas A. Kochan; Adrienne E. Eaton; Robert B. McKersie; Paul S. Adler
Kaiser Permanente is the largest managed care organization in the country. It also happens to have the largest and most complex labor-management partnership ever created in the United States. This book tells the story of that partnership-how it started, how it grew, who made it happen, and the lessons to be learned from its successes and complications. With twenty-seven unions and an organization as complex as 8.6-million-member Kaiser Permanente, establishing the partnership was not a simple task and maintaining it has proven to be extraordinarily challenging.
Thomas A. Kochan, Adrienne E. Eaton, Robert B. McKersie, and Paul S. Adler are among a team of researchers who have been tracking the evolution of the partnership between Kaiser Permanente and the Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions ever since 2001. They review the history of health care labor relations and present a profile of Kaiser Permanente as it has developed over the years. They then delve into the partnership, discussing its achievements and struggles, including the negotiation of the most innovative collective bargaining agreements in the history of American labor relations. They conclude with an assessment of the Kaiser partnership's effect on the larger health care system and its implications for labor-management relations in other industries.
Dynamic Analysis in the Social Sciences
Emilio J. Castilla
November 1, 2007
The study of social dynamics using quantitative methodology is complex and calls for cutting-edge technical and methodological approaches in social science research. This book presents the existing statistical models and methods available for understanding social change over time. It provides step-by-step instructions for designing and conducting longitudinal research, with special focus on the longitudinal analysis of both quantitative outcomes (for the modeling of change in continuous variables) and qualitative outcomes (for the modeling of events occurring over time).
Readers will learn how to study change in variables over time and how to formulate and estimate multivariate longitudinal models to predict such change, mainly using cross-sectional, cross-time and event history analyses. This text also teaches how to design and implement a study using longitudinal data from the selection and collection of appropriate variables to the most effective ways to analyze and present data for publication in top social science journals.
The book accomplishes the following:
Emilio J. Castilla joined the MIT Sloan School faculty in July 2005, after being a faculty member in the Management Department at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. He is a member of the Institute for Work and Employment Research at MIT; and also a research Fellow at the Wharton Financial Institutions Center and at the Center for Human Resources at the Wharton School.
Endorsements:
“Does the field need yet another book on longitudinal analysis? Absolutely! Packed with practical advice and hands-on instruction, here is a book dedicated to teaching and communicating, not impressing and obfuscating. With flair and style, Castilla provides step-by-step instructions for conducting longitudinal analysis, expertly motivated with carefully selected research examples. At long last, that rarest of entities: the demystifying methods book.”
— David B. Grusky, Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for the Study of Poverty and Inequality, Stanford University
“Castilla's introduction to longitudinal analysis is the most accessible text in this field. It is exceptional that it takes the reader from the most elementary concepts to quite advanced applications, including how to understand, evaluate and write research papers.”
— Karl Ulrich Mayer, Professor and Chair, Sociology Department and Co-Director, Center for Research on Inequalities and the Life Course (CIQLE), Yale University
“Castilla has written an excellent, accessible, and highly useful book on longitudinal data analysis. He covers what these methods can do, the use of relevant software, how one should design studies, and provides insightful applications. I will use it in courses. An excellent contribution.”
— Trond Petersen, Professor and Chair, Department of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley
Restoring the American Dream: A Working Families' Agenda for America
Thomas A. Kochan
Available September 2005
Working in America
A Blueprint for the New Labor Market
Paul Osterman, Thomas A. Kochan, Richard M. Locke, and Michael J. Piore
The American labor market faces many deep-rooted problems, including persistence of a large low-wage sector, worsening inequality in earnings, employees’ lack of voice in the workplace, and the need of employers to maximize flexibility if they are to survive in an increasingly competitive market. The impetus for this book is the absence of a serious national debate about these issues.
The book represents nearly three years of deliberation by more than 250 people drawn from business, labor, community groups, academia, and government. It traces today’s labor-market policy and laws back to the New Deal and to a second wave of social regulation that began in the 1960s. Underlying the current system are assumptions about who is working, what workers do, and how much job security workers enjoy. Economic and social changes have rendered those assumptions invalid and have resulted in mismatches between labor institutions and efficient and equitable deployment of the work force, as well as between commitments to the labor market and family responsibilities. This book should launch a national dialogue on how to update our policies and institutions to catch up with the changes in the nature of work, in the work force, and in the economy.
Paul Osterman is Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning. Thomas A. Kochan is Professor at the MIT Sloan School. Richard M. Locke is Professor at the MIT Sloan School and in the Department of Political Science. Michael J. Piore is Professor in MIT’s Economics and Political Science Departments.
“Few books both analyze an issue and suggest solutions as succinctly and persuasively as this one. The issue is the serious mismatch between old institutions and regulations and the new realities of a transformed American labor market. The broad menu of suggested solutions focuses on making the institutional and regulatory framework work better for everyone, both workers and their families and the businesses that use their services.”
— Marina von Neumann Whitman, Professor of Business Administration and Public Policy, University of Michigan, and Independent Director of Alcoa, J. P. Morgan Chase, Procter and Gamble, and Unoca
“I remember a cartoon in which a personnel manager says to a prospective employee: ’We offer no security. But then we expect no loyalty.’ The authors think that this is more sad than funny. They ask important questions about how the labor market could make room for both security and loyalty for today’s mobile workers and fast-changing firms. And they offer innovative answers.”
— Robert M. Solow, Institute Professor of Economics, Emeritus, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Nobel Laureate in Economics (1987)
The MIT Press
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, Massachusetts 02142
Gathering Power: The future of progressive politics in America
Paul Osterman
Progressive politics is going nowhere at a national level. Democrats are struggling to craft the right message to beam from Washington, but fewer and fewer people are participating, or even listening. Politics as practices today turns people off.
But in contrast to traditional politics’ emphasis on sound bites and focus groups, Valley Interfaith and its sister organizations in the Southwest are teaching people how to do politics in the most unlikely place. In one of our country’s poorest and potentially least enfranchised regions, citizens are successfully making progress in school reform, improving public health, and raising local wages.
What the inside-the-beltway politicians don’t appreciate is that to revive politics and increase participation, people have to believe in their own skills and ability and trust that their voices will be heard. In Gathering Power, Paul Osterman points to the growing numbers if interfaith and interracial coalitions in which people are making political change happen firsthand, and that offer the best hope of reconnecting citizens to democracy.
Essential reading for anyone concerned about the trajectory of American politics, Gathering Power shows what has gone wrong and how to fix it. Osterman tells stories of campaigns and of the people whose political commitment has been renewed. He shows how to build politics from the ground up and to ultimately give new life to the progressive agenda at the national level. Gathering Power claims an important place for religion in progressive politics and offers a fresh, hopeful vision of how to strengthen our democracy.
Paul Osterman is professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with joint appointments in the Sloan School of Management and the department of urban studies and planning. He travels extensively throughout the country and abroad to speak to business groups, community organizations, and government and public policy organizations. He lives in the Boston area.
“Gathering Power is a very timely and important book, encouraging to those who yearn for more representative politics in America.”
— William Julius Wilson, author of When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor
“Osterman shows how grass-roots organizing can transform people’s perceptions of their own capabilities and build a political movement that politicians cannot ignore. This book has a great message; we should all listen.”
— Ann W. Richards, former governor of Texas
Beacon Press
25 Beacon Street
Boston, Massachusetts 02108-2892
Negotiations and Change from the Workplace to Society
Edited by Thomas A. Kochan and David. B. Lipsky
Major changes within and between organizations are now generally negotiated by the parties that have a stake in the consequences of the changes. This was not always so. In 1965, with A Behavioral Theory of Labor Negotiations, Richard Walton and Robert McKersie laid the analytical foundation for much of the innovation in the practice of negotiation that has occurred over the last thirty-seven years. Since that time, however, the field has undergone significant changes, and Walton and McKersie’s ideas have been applied to a wide variety of situations beyond labor negotiations.
Negotiations and Change represents the next generation of thinking. Experts on negotiations, management, and organizational behavior take stock of what has been learned since 1965. They extend and apply the concepts of Walton and McKersie and of other leaders in the study of negotiations to a broad range of business, professional, and personal concerns: workplace teams, conflict management systems, corporate governance, and environmental disputes. While building on those foundations, the essays demonstrate the continued robustness and relevance of Walton and McKersie’s behavioral theory by suggesting ways it could be used to improve the management of change. Returning to its roots, the volume concludes with retrospective by Richard Walton and Robert McKersie.
Thomas A. Kochan is the George M. Bunker Professor of Management at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. He is coeditor with Russell D. Lansbury and John Paul MacDuffie of After Lean Production and coauthor with Saul A. Rubinstein of Learning from Saturn, both from Cornell. David B. Lipsky is Professor in the School of Industrial and Labor Relations, and Director of the Institute on Conflict Resolution, at Cornell University. His previous books include Strikers and Subsidies: The Influence of Government Transfer Programs on Strike Activity.
“New forms of negotiation are being used creatively to solve problems involving the workplace, the environment, and corporate governance. Read all about it in this fine collection.”
— Harry Katz, Cornell University
An ILR Press Book
Cornell University Press
Ithaca & London
Learning from Saturn: A look at the boldest experiment in corporate governance and employee relations
Saul A. Rubinstein and Thomas A. Kochan
The last two decades of the twentieth century were a tumultuous time of innovation for business and labor. Perhaps the boldest and most far-reaching experiment in industry was the creation of the Saturn Corporation. Working together as partners, the UAW and General Motors built a new small car in Spring Hill, Tennessee, with American suppliers and American workers. Saturn’s locally designed manufacturing system featured self-directed teams and the integration of union representatives into management’s strategic and operational decision-making processes.
Saul A. Rubinstein and Thomas A. Kochan have followed the Saturn story since it’s beginning in 1983. Through surveys as well as hundreds of interviews with company managers, union representatives, and employees and with leaders of GM and the UAW, they trace the history of, and the lessons to be learned from, this “Different Kind of Company.”
The Saturn experiment embodied a new concept of labor-management relations, management, and organizational governance. Has it been a success or a failure? Is it relevant in the current industrial environment? What effect has it had on GM and the UAW? The authors resist overly simplistic conclusions; Saturn’s strengths and limitations must be fairly assessed before the company’s experience can provide lessons on the future of unions, labor-management relations, work organization, and corporate governance.
Saul A. Rubinstein is Assistant Professor in the School of Management and Labor Relations as Rutgers University. Thomas A. Kochan is the George M. Bunker Professor of Work and Employment Relations at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. His previous books include After Lean Production and The Transformation of American Industrial Relations, also from Cornell.
“For the past two decades there has been no experiment in labor-management relations more revolutionary, more path-breaking, and more critical than that forge by the UAW and General Motors at the Saturn plant in Tennessee. And there is no one who tells that story better than Saul Rubinstein and Tom Kochan. This superb book documents the trials and tribulations of this grand experiment, providing all of us with important insights not just about Saturn, but the emerging world of union-management partnerships in a global economy.”
— Barry Bluestone, Stearns Trustee Professor of Political Economy at Northeastern University and coauthor, Negotiating the Future: A labor perspective on American business
An ILR Press Book
Cornell University Press
© 2012 MIT SLOAN SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT