My foe my friend: Skilling up labor negotiators

The basics of principled negotiation have been taught for many decades, with the first little edition of Getting to Yes published in 1981, yet as any observer of labor-management negotiations can easily conclude, those successful approaches are frequently--even typically--missing from the conduct of collective bargaining, which is often just practiced as straightforward adversarial processes.

Research into that phenomenon includes the finding that: 

"union negotiators are cautious about integrative negotiation, which could be due to a lack of belief in interested-based negotiation per se, as well as the fear of being taken advantage of by the management (adversarial relationship) or concern about how this negotiation approach might be perceived by constituents" (Mann, Warsitzka, Hüffmeier & Trötschel, 2024, p. 445).

The barriers to better practice, then, might involve more than cursory exposure to principled negotiation for those who engage in labor-management negotiations; rank and file should learn the basics and be exposed to both empirical findings of improved outcomes as well as a few salient case narratives.

Integrating the knowledge of the empirical research into relative success of nonviolent vs violent uprisings has taken years, but increasingly activists at more mass levels are aware. Presumably, the same could happen with rank and file, reducing the anxiety labor negotiators might have about the perceptions held by union members. When that knowledge become generalized, some less destructive and more transformative outcomes might be more common.

References

Mann, M., Warsitzka, M., Hüffmeier, J., & Trötschel, R. (2024). United we stand: a principle-based negotiation training for collective bargaining. International Journal of Conflict Management (Emerald), 35(2), 427–452. https://doi-org.proxy.lib.pdx.edu/10.1108/IJCMA-05-2023-0088