Book Description

When a number of employers organize to engage in joint negotiations with a union, their principal task is to develop policies and positions which are, in a sense, the greatest common denominators of the needs of the individual concerns. No one policy will normally be ideally adapted to the needs of any one company. Group acceptance must be secured. A considerable part of the study made by Garrett and Tripp relates to the resulting problems. Those sections in their report dealing with the process of employer organization, the methods of handling selected subjects in negotiations, and the rise of conflicting interests among the employers are all valuable additions to industrial relations literature. In addition to the sections just referred to, the study includes analyses of two aspects of the management problem in joint dealing that should be mentioned particularly because they are pioneering contributions. Reference is to the treatment of two questions: (1) What are the objectives of management organization for multi-employer bargaining? (2) What controls may be desirable to assure reasonably uniform administration of group collective bargaining agreements? In grappling with these questions management is likely to cope with the most complex problems which confront it in the practice of multi-employer bargaining.