USE OF THE COLLABORATIVE COLLECTIVE BARGAINING PROCESS IN LABOR NEGOTIATIONS

To speak of collective bargaining as a collaborative process seems a contradiction. Since 1935 when collective bargaining was institutional‐ized in the Wagner Act, the process has assumed that the disputing par‐ties are enemies, competing for scarce resources with different objec‐tives. This article explains the implementation of a new theory of col‐lective bargaining which encourages truthfulness, candor, and the acknowledgement of shared goals and avoids the negative and self‐defeating power plays of the adversarial collective bargaining process. As a result of this process, grievances in the observed company declined from 40 per year under previous contracts, to 2 in 18 months under the current contract; anger and hostility have been nearly eliminated; and there is a real spirit of cooperation present in the plant.