Originally from: AAA Handbook on Labor Arbitration - 2nd Edition

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CHAPTER 18

HOW UNIONS CAN IMPROVE THEIR SUCCESS RATE IN LABOR ARBITRATION

I. Introduction
I attended my first arbitration hearing in 1981. I chair the grievance and arbitration committee at the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) Local 97 and have held that position since 1998. My responsibilities as chair of this committee involve, among other things, screening grievances, selecting the arbitrator and preparing witnesses for the hearing. Over the last two decades, I have also served as Local 97’s representative in many grievance arbitrations and as its arbitrator on tripartite arbitration panels. I have also testified as a witness at arbitration hearings. Needless to say, I am quite familiar with labor arbitration at this particular union. As a result of this experience, I hypothesized that unions win less than 40% of the discipline cases. To determine whether this hypothesis is correct, I researched Local 97’s performance in labor arbitrations over a 10-year period (from 1994-2004) using the union records in Syracuse. In addition, I researched union win/loss statistics for a 10-year period (from 1993-2002) using the statistics compiled by Internet Web site Arbsearch.com.1 I did not use Arbsearch.com’s