Originally from Dispute Resolution Journal

Many management-labor disputes involve participants who not only perceive the other side to be in opposition to them on a set of issues, but actively ascribe the other party with malicious intent.

Most labor-management disputes still involve coercive and hard-nosed bargaining and communication tactics, despite the acknowledged cost of such measures. If unions are to regain a measure of the effectiveness they enjoyed in the 1940s through the 1960s, attempts to influence the course of negotiations must shift to a more localized and media-shunning strategy.

This article will take on two themes: first, the attempt by participants in a labor-management dispute to use the media as an influence lever, and second, a discussion of how current union negotiation efforts and tactics are out of phase with current needs and conditions. Pulling these themes together, I suggest a different combination of tactics and approaches by union and management alike, and especially call for the adoption of a more localized and “value-creating” framework for negotiation.

Research Method

To explore the question of media use by the parties to a labor-management dispute, my research focused on the public media accounts and advertisements used by both Local 8888 of the United Steelworkers of America (USWA) and Newport News Shipbuilding (NNS, the Shipyard, or the Yard) in their 1999 dispute. That strike lasted from April 5 to July 27 and was mentioned in more than 100 articles in the local paper, the Daily Press.

Following an open coding approach,1 each of these articles and most of the printed advertisements used by both parties were screened and significant “strips”2 of information were identified and labeled.

Strips were isolated and labeled based on the tone of the reporting in the passage in question, the importance of its contents to describing the outcome and strategies used by both parties, or a combination of both. These passages were transcribed and commentary and evaluation added as an extension to the open coding of the data. This evaluative commentary included reflections on both the conflict resolution strategies of the participants and on the rhetorical strategies employed by the participants and by the media itself.

The 1999 strike involved more than 7,800 of the 9,200 hourly-wage production and maintenance workers at the Shipyard. While this represented a significant percentage of the hourly work staff, many thousands more of the nearly 18,000 Yard employees—supervisors, administrators, outside contractors and Navy personnel—remained on the job. The work stoppage delayed numerous contract jobs at NNS—the world’s only super-carrier production facility—but did little to actually delay payments on completed and outstanding contracts during the time frame of the strike. Despite the strike, NNS actually posted its largest profit in years during the second quarter of 1999, $34.7 million,3 following the announcement of which was a quick resumption of negotiations as striker morale dropped.