Labor-Management Riddle Carries No Simple Solution

With tense labor situations developing in several Orange County school districts, and with the employees of Bullock ‘ s and I. Magnin, Ralphs and Lucky Stores wondering whether their jobs will survive the companies’ proposed acquisitions by other firms, The Times asked Mei Bickner, a professor of labor relations and a professional labor arbitrator, to discuss employee-employer relations.

Bickner, an instructor at Cal State Fullerton since 1974 and a professor there since 1978, also belongs to the National Academy of Arbitrators and several other labor arbitration organizations. She said she handles about 50 cases a year, mainly involving disputes over disciplinary actions taken by management. But she also serves occasionally as an arbitrator in contract talks. An arbitrator is invited in by both parties in a dispute and is given the authority to make a binding ruling, unlike a labor mediator, whose job is to try to get both sides to voluntarily agree.

She is one of only about six arbitrators in Orange County, but because the county labor scene is calmer than in many other areas, her work takes her all over the country. Of her last three cases, she said, two were in Florida and one was in the Virgin Islands, “the best case I’ve had, in terms of location.”

Bickner, a native of Indonesia, came to the United States in 1958 to study sociology at UCLA. She earned her bachelor’s degree there in 1962 and went on in the university’s graduate school of management to earn an MBA and a doctorate in industrial relations with an emphasis on labor-management relations.

She taught in UC Irvine’s graduate school of management from 1968 until accepting her post at Cal State Fullerton.

Times staff writer John O’Dell interviewed Bickner at her Newport Beach home shortly before she left on a trip to Florida.

Q: What happens in a business that is merged into a bigger company? What are the fears and insecurities of employees when suddenly there is a new boss?

A: I would imagine there would be quite a few because of the uncertainty of the situation. For that matter, anyone who is faced with an uncertain future gets a little nervous and a little anxious about what might happen to them. I remember talking to a number of employees whose companies were being rumored to be taken over, and they expressed a lot of anxiety and fears about what to do. And to some extent, a lot of the day-to-day business gets put on hold while people wait to see what might happen.

Q: Are the employees’ fears generally fears about job security?

A: Well, the fear could be, will I be fired. Or, if I don’t get fired or laid off, what will the new policies of the new employer be. For example, if you’re engaged in some project, is the new employer going to support this project or is it going to be shelved. And your job may not be as enjoyable as it was before. Or, if you were somebody’s protege, you might worry about whether your mentor will disappear.

Q: Can management in situations like this do anything to help allay those fears?

A: It seems to me that there is really a very limited amount that management of a company that is about to be taken over can do. In my experience, except for perhaps the very top ranks--the CEO and people around him or her--the rest of the organization really doesn’t have any information. Sometimes even the CEO doesn’t. And it would be a little unfair or imprudent to allay employees’ fears when there’s a very good probability that their worst fears may be realized. So it seems to me that management is situated between a rock and a hard place about what to do, what is best for the employees. And I would not have the wisdom to give them any advice on what would be best.

Q: Moving from mergers to labor negotiations and labor relations, why do labor-management impasses occur?

A: You really can’t answer that generically. But let me suggest a few reasons why people may not be able to come to an agreement. One may be that some employers consider this a challenge. I see this particularly in new bargaining relationships where the parties do not have a mature relationship, they do not really understand the process well and everything that the union demands or asks is considered an affront to management prerogatives. Another situation might be that one side simply wishes to precipitate a strike and, as soon as the strike is called, to make permanent replacements of the strikers with non-union personnel. It’s basically a union-busting tactic, and that has been used many times. Sometimes there is not agreement because of a seemingly innocuous thing--maybe the union international representative in the last negotiation was humiliated in front of his committee, so he’ll make sure that this next time the company representative is going to be equally humiliated to pay for it. Some of these situations have nothing to do with economics, nothing to do with rational processes.

Q: What, in your opinion, are the key things that an employee is looking for from an employer?

A: In addition to a competitive wage, I think that, more than anything else, employees would like to be treated fairly. They would like to feel like their ideas are heard and that their employers take into consideration what they would like. It’s so inexpensive in terms of effort on the part of the employer to acknowledge a job well done by an employee that I’m surprised that many managers and many supervisors don’t do it more often. But it’s not a common thing to get acknowledgement from a boss or a supervisor.

Q: What about job security?

A: I think that in the last 10 years or so, employees have become more conscious of job security issues. As we have a continuing graying of the labor force, the job security issue will probably become more, rather than less, important.

Q: What are the major job security-related issues?

A: Well, employees like to think that if they’ve been there awhile and have proven that they are a valuable resource to the employer, that the employer won’t be quick to dismiss them the minute an economic downturn occurs. Or, in the case of mergers, most employers give consideration primarily to protecting the jobs of those in the top managerial ranks and think very little of the rank-and-file employees--at least that’s what I see in many merger conditions. Some of those rank-and-file workers have been there 20 years. But if it turns out to be not in the interest of the merged entity to keep them, those employees probably are going to be let go with very little severance pay in comparison to the 20 years of commitment and blood, sweat and tears that have been put into the job.

Q: On the other side of the equation, what do employers expect from employees?

A: I imagine they expect some level of competence, some ability and, in some instances, initiative. Interest in the customer if there is a customer relation. I don’t know if you’ve been shopping lately, but I have been, and it seems to me that the trend toward using untrained young employees, who really have not a very good concept of what customer service really means, is increasing.

Q: How about things like loyalty and simply being on time and putting in a full day’s work for a full day’s pay? Are those still things that employers expect routinely from their employees?

A: Yes. I consider it so basic that I didn’t mention it. But you’re right. Some employees perhaps don’t fulfill that part of the bargain very well. As an arbitrator, I do see quite a few attendance problems. In fact, I think absenteeism is one of the top reasons for disciplinary actions that go to arbitration.

Q: But who’s got the best deal in the labor-management equation?

A: If you’re talking about the individual employee, I would say the individual employee is probably better off now than he was 10 years ago in terms of the way the employer treats the individual employee. I think employers, as I’ve said, have become more sophisticated and more sensitive. Not across the board, mind you--you’ll always find exceptions--but generally. So if you pin me against the wall on that particular issue, I think the individual employee is probably dealing with a more enlightened employer today than before.

Q: Do you have any thoughts on why Orange County is not heavily unionized? Are employers here just so enlightened, and wages and working conditions so great, that there’s never been a need for labor to organize?

A: First of all, we don’t have heavy industry here, so the kind of employees we have are predominantly, from what I can see, white-collar employees, and they may be less acceptable to unionization than, say, the average blue-collar worker. Secondly, we’re in a service industry mode here in Orange County, and unions for some reason that I cannot understand have had real trouble unionizing the service sector. And third, I think what you just said is very appropriate. I think the employers in Orange County are perhaps more sophisticated than the average employer in the United States.

Q: I’ve heard it said that there are also some fringe benefits to an area like this--the climate, the recreational opportunities--that tend to offset some of the job-oriented things that become more important if you’re working in a steel mill in Pennsylvania.

A: Absolutely. When we recruit faculty at Cal State Fullerton, we always sell them the weather, the beach, the mountains.

Q: As an arbitrator, you most often deal with disciplinary actions. Why do situations occur that lead to these head-to-head confrontations?

A: My experience has been that most of the cases I hear are there because they were difficult issues to decide. They were not clear-cut, open-and-shut cases. If they were, they probably would have been settled. A large majority of the arbitrations that are heard involve discipline cases, and that could be anything from attendance to substance abuse to insubordination. It’s usually the employer who takes an action and the employee who feels that he has been treated unfairly in that action.

Q: Is there any data that exists that indicates how often an arbitration is decided in management’s favor versus in an employee’s favor?

A: I know of at least one where somebody did a tally that showed the employer wins more times than the union. And that’s the nature of the beast, particularly since 1983, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a union which refused to take a termination case to grievance was liable for the employee’s back wages from the date the arbitration should have been held until the court case was decided. That was a period of several years, and unions since that decision have been very reluctant to reject any grievance with any merit at all. Sometimes they have taken grievances to arbitrations which, in their heart of hearts, they probably would not have, but they were afraid of a suit against them for failure to fairly represent an employee.

Q: One of the things that seems to have precipitated a lot of employee unrest is workers’ feeling that management is increasing profits while decreasing wages and benefits. Is that kind of action by an employer ever justified?

A: Employers in the United States--in my opinion--have tended to a large extent to minimize the contributions of their employees because we haven’t figured out a human accounting system yet. You can’t put down in dollars and cents what an employee’s commitment and loyalty to an employer means in terms of productivity and dollars saved. . . . .

Q: An example, please?

A: Some employers have gone for wage concessions in the short run--things like two-tier wage structures--without a second thought as to what impact that would have on morale and what impact morale has on productivity and long-term profits. I don’t think that kind of behavior is in an employer’s own self-interest. The short-term savings that come from eliminating more senior workers and maybe getting new workers who are paid a lot less is going to be erased in the long run because of employee dissatisfaction, low morale and lack of commitment. It’s a lesson that American employers have not learned, and I don’t understand why they haven’t. . . .

Q: Is this because management isn’t aware of what it is doing in these cases?

A: These things are done by the same managers who read all of these books on the search for excellence, books that tell them that one of the major keys to having an effective work team is to have that work team feel that management cares. We have companies trying to implement these positive programs with their management employees while they’re doing very destructive things with the rank-and-file employees. They don’t see the paradox in those actions at all. I find that very interesting from a scholar’s point of view, that what they’re trying to do with their managerial employees doesn’t translate into an action to take with the rank and file, like somehow the rank-and-file workers are a different breed of people. And they don’t see the long-term effects on their company of the lower morale, the decrease in commitment, decrease in loyalty, the lack of caring by employees. If you were a rank-and-file worker and you knew that management wouldn’t think twice about laying you off or, since you’re now a little too expensive, trying its darndest to get rid of you so it can hire cheaper workers--I don’t think you would feel a lot of commitment to that company. And the thing of it is--I’m not moralizing. I want you to understand that I’m not moralizing, I’m not saying this is wrong, I’m talking strictly in terms of profitability--language that the average American employer understands. I feel that some of this behavior is not in the employers’ own self-interest.

Q: We’ve talked about some of the things that cause confrontations. What are some of the things that could be done to avoid some of these situations?

A: A couple of things that parties in a mature relationships do that has helped is talking continuously with other, not just during negotiations, so that both sides are aware of issues and problems long before they get together at the table. That’s one way to do it. I think you’re seeing more and more instances of labor-management cooperation, although in some situations management is only willing to cooperate with labor when the company is in trouble and not when it is doing very well. I think the American labor movement in general is a very pragmatic one, compared with the British or other labor unions in other industrialized countries. I think American labor and labor leaders have always been fairly pragmatic as a whole, so that when they see that an employer is in financial difficulties or is suffering from specific problems, they have been willing to make concessions. What they have also learned is that they have to somehow protect themselves so those savings that they give the employer don’t fly away. . . .

Q: Are there things that employees tend to expect of management that in fact are not realistic?

A: It depends on how you define the word “unrealistic.” There are a lot of things that employees expect that are unrealistic (but) are not unreasonable. For example, getting acknowledgement for work well done or getting to share in profits or savings by the company are not things that are unreasonable to expect. But they are, in lots of instances, unrealistic for the employee to expect.