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Lecture Notes

In addition to the assumptions we just mentioned on the previous slide, some additional assumptions that stand at the heart of the study of collective bargaining, first is a conflict is inherent between labor and management; we talked about that on the previous slide, but it's not pathological, that it can be contained, it can be managed, it can be addressed, and that's going to be a big focus in this course when we talk about collective bargaining, the process by which management and labor come together to try and overcome their differences or the inherent conflict between them. The second point on this slide which connects the things I just said on the previous slide is that conflict comes from differing interests, economic and social between labor and management. This isn't a kind of personal conflict, this isn't conflict that's necessarily ideological, but it's based on differences in economic and social interests, and given that those interests are likely to persist, so will the conflict between labor and management, and this is something we can talk about in our live session. Finally, for this slide, industrial relation scholars and practitioners believe that society, the broader society, the broader public has a legitimate interest in labor management conflict in the workplace, that there's an interest in regulating or governing the way in which those disputes get settled; hence, our labor laws, our national labor laws, our state level labor laws for the public sector and hence the interest that society at large has in how conflict gets managed within the labor management relationship.