Robert B. McKersie

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.

A Field in Flux chronicles the extraordinary journey of industrial and labor relations expert Robert McKersie. One of the most important industrial relations scholars and leaders of our time, McKersie pioneered the study of labor negotiations, helping to formulate the concepts of distributive and integrative bargaining that have served as analytical tools for understanding the bargaining process more generally. The book provides a window into McKersie's life and work and its impact on the evolution of labor and industrial relations. Spanning six decades, the reader learns about the intersection of labor and the Civil Rights movement, the watershed moment of the Air Traffic Controller's Strike, his relationship with George Schultz, the shift from labor relations to human resource management, and McKersie's role in the seminal cases (Motorola, GM, Toyota) of the labor movement. A Field in Flux serves two important functions: it demonstrates how people have influenced past employment policies and practices when called to action in critical situations, and it seeks to instill confidence in those who will be called on to address the big challenges facing the future of work today and in the years to come. During a time when the basic values of industrial relations are being challenged and violated, McKersie argues that the profession must adapt to the changing world of work and not forget about the value placed on efficiency, equity, and inclusive employment policies and practices.

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Written from a participant/observer’s viewpoint, this is an engaging chronicle of the civil rights movement of Chicago as it unfolded during the crucial decade of the 1960s. The story line is chronological and follows the unfolding agenda of the Chicago civil rights movement, tracing in sequence the struggles over employment, education, minority business, and housing.

Strategic Negotiations makes a significant contribution to the literature on strategic choice (the explicit structuring by management and labor of business and bargaining strategies that use the economic and political environment as a framework to create bargaining power). The authors intentionally build upon previous work in A Behavioral Theory of Labor Negotiations, but this book also is a successful application of the three-tiered collective bargaining theory first developed in The Transformation of American Industrial Relations. Although scholars have identified strategic initiatives in the collective bargaining relationship, recent research has continued to emphasize economic explanations. This book provides an alternative framework of analysis.... [Strategic Negotiations] provides abundant evidence, both theoretical and empirical, that the traditional concerns of industrial relations researchers are still relevant.—Industrial and Labor Relations Review

Originally published in 1986, The Transformation of American Industrial Relations became an immediate classic, creating a new conceptual framework for understanding contemporary insutrial relations in the United States. In their introduction to the new edition, the authors assess the evolution of industrial relations and human resource practives, focusing particularly on the policy impoications of recent changes. They discuss the diverse forms of work restructuring in the American economy, the reasons why the diffusion of participatory work reorganization has been so modest, work practices among sophisticated nonunion employers, union membership declines, and public policy debates.

In this book, Walton and McKersie attempt to describe a comprehensive theory of labor negotiation. The authors abstract and analyze four sets of systems of activities which they believe account for much of the behavior found in labor negotiations. The first system of activities, termed "distributive bargaining," comprises competitive behaviors that are intended to influence the division of limited resources. The second system is made up of activities that increase the joint gain available to the negotiating parties, referred to as "integrative bargaining." They are problem-solving behaviors and other activities which identify, enlarge and act upon the common interests of the parties. The third system includes activities that influence the attitudes of the parties toward each other and affect the basic relationship bonds between the social units involved. This process is referred to as "attitudinal structuring." The fourth system of activities, which occurs as an integral aspect of the inter-party negotiations, comprises the behaviors of a negotiator that are meant to achieve consensus within one's own organizations. This fourth process is called "intra-organizational bargaining." Each sub process has its own set of instrumental acts or tactics. Therefore, each of the four model chapters is followed by a chapter on the tactics which implement the process. These chapters translate the model into tactical assignments and include an abundance of supporting illustrations from actual negotiations. This study should be of interest to several audiences, including students and teachers of industrial relations, social scientists interested in the general field of conflict resolution, as well as practitioners of collective bargaining and other individuals directly involved in international negotiations. The overall theoretical framework has been derived by a mixture of inductive and deductive reasoning. Extensive fieldwork and several dozen printed case studies have provided the bulk of the empirical data. In terms of meaning, the study has three touchstones: the field of collective bargaining; the field of conflict resolutions; and the underlying disciplines of economics, psychology, and sociology.