LOS ANGELES TIMES INTERVIEW : John Wells : Nation’s Chief Mediator Remains Suffused in Neutrality

Unlike some peacemakers, such as former President Jimmy Carter, John Calhoun Wells can be infuriatingly secretive and neutral about his role as the nation’s chief mediator between labor and management. He takes his neutrality so seriously that he had no substantive comments about the baseball strike--though he might have become a media star by making almost any observation after he became involved in efforts to settle it. But that is Wells’ official role in life these days: remaining neutral despite his own private and often firmly held opinions.

The soft-spoken Kentuckian was named by President Bill Clinton as director of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service on Nov. 15, 1993. Ever since, he has been in the middle of some of the nation’s ugliest and longest labor disputes. Yet, neither side regards him as an enemy--not even in the baseball strike or the strike by the United Auto Workers against Caterpillar Inc., though they had many chances to pry into his private feelings since they have occupied much of his time.

His agency was created by Congress in 1947 to promote labor peace, but Wells and about 200 other federal mediators do their mediation behind the scenes, sometimes serving only to relay changing positions of disputants so angry with each other they refuse to meet face to face. Wells and his mediators can go further, making suggestions for settling issues to break deadlocked talks. But Wells and his staff are powerless to do more than talk peace. They cannot do even that unless both sides want them at the table.

Wells did get both sides in the baseball strike to talk to one another, but their differences are so profound that, so far at least, neither Clinton nor Congress have been able to get them to agree on a new contract. Congressional action to take away baseball’s exemption from antitrust laws is pending, a step that just might force a settlement. But such a move is beyond Wells’ legal power or even his inclination.

Despite his often profound frustration caused by seemingly irreconcilable differences between labor and management, Wells remains an ardent supporter of collective bargaining. However, he wants to change it dramatically. He supports Clinton’s campaign for minimizing the adversarial system of labor relations and replacing it with cooperation by giving workers a significant voice in the way companies operate.

Wells has long been deeply involved in labor relations. A onetime union member and also an employer, he handled labor legislation for U.S. Sen. Wendell H. Ford (D-Ky.) and was chief labor adviser to two Kentucky Democratic governors, John Y. Brown Jr. and Martha Layne Collins. He and his wife, the former Charissa Ann Christopher, live in Reston, Va.

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Question: Do our labor laws need to be changed to improve relations between workers and employers?

Answer: Our laws were written a generation or more ago, and they enshrine an adversarial relationship which is in sharp contrast to the needs and demands of today’s competitive world. Now we need to have workers and managers collaborating, and we need far greater worker participation in making decisions in the workplace.

A year ago, President Clinton issued a little-noticed but dramatic executive order mandating a new form of labor-management relations throughout the executive branch. He ordered government managers, employees and their unions to serve as partners--not as adversaries--to make government service work better. We will be--but we are off to a good start--getting partnerships between the government and its employees and their unions. It marks an exciting change, and it is also a common-sense move.

Q: Give me an example.

A: Remember, we are just getting started, but we in the federal government are on the cutting edge of a new form of labor relations for much of the entire country--new, at least, for the United States. Other countries--like Japan and Germany and other European countries--have been doing it for years, and it works there. We are finding the good and bad of their system, finding their mistakes and are charting our own course.

Now, for an example: Look at Hoover Dam. Government workers and managers there for decades had endless arguments over everything from work rules to grievances against managers filed by workers. At Hoover, they had a greater number of grievances and arbitration cases than in any other bargaining unit in the entire Bureau of Reclamation. Now they have the smallest number. They did it with new leaders on both sides, who finally said, “Hey, let’s try to act like adults. Let’s try to work together, stop fighting over every issue and do things to help each other.” And they did.

With the help of our mediation service, a true partnership was formed. Union representatives went on teams once made up only of managers. The new partners worked together to solve problems cooperatively, not as adversaries. Today, there are few, if any, grievances and no charges of unfair labor practices. We are doing the same at other locations around the country.

Q: There are about 3 million federal government workers, about 80% represented by unions, and it took an executive order from the President to get the ball rolling toward cooperation. But what about the private sector, where unions represent only 11% of workers and there is no centralized top-level executive to give an order to get cooperation? Is worker participation in the decision-making process moving ahead in the private sector?

A: Yes, but much more slowly. The collaborative process has not been rooted in many corporate and union cultures. But important sectors of the economy began facing the real prospect of going out of business because of inefficiency and adversarial relations between workers and managers. So there was a great proliferation of all sorts of collaborative efforts in many industries--in steel, textiles, auto and electronics. That threat promoted the idea of collaboration. Where it has been tried, it has helped workers--giving them a new sense of self-respect--and it also increases productivity and efficiency.

It has been slowed by the fear of change. We humans are fearful of change, and fear loss in the power equation. There is resistance by lower-level supervision, because they have worked a long time to gain positions of power, and they see these power-sharing schemes as ways by which they lose power.

Union leaders once felt the same way, and workers were troubled about becoming pawns of management. That is all changing as we try new ways to work together as collaborators--not enemies.

Q: What do you see as the result of this collaboration? Are we going to have an industrial democracy as well as a political democracy?

A: I don’t know the answer. If I’m a shareholder of a firm, chances are I don’t want one of my superintendents or supervisors or hourly workers making strategic decisions. I’d want the board of directors making them. On the other hand, in the workplace itself, where the work itself is performed, I would rather have those workers and supervisors making the decisions than the CEO and the directors, because workers often understand the workplace better.

There are significant institutional differences between organized labor and management. Unions came into being to protect and promote the interests of workers. Management is hired to increase shareholder values. Having recognized these differences, there is common ground on which both can work together.

Q: Don’t you think the workers, and technical advisers they can hire, are smart enough to understand the finances of the company so they can be decision-makers with managers?

A: I think they should--and could--understand. And there is no reason why they could not be involved in providing input. But executives are held responsible for the strategic decisions, and if they make the wrong ones, they get fired. My experience has been that most middle-level managers and hourly workers don’t want to put themselves in that jeopardy. I don’t think labor-management cooperation means either party surrenders their authority or responsibility. It means people coming together, sharing ideas, their points of view, and try to make better decisions. It is a give-and-take process. You can’t expect a manager to abdicate his or her responsibility to make management decisions any more than you can expect the union to abdicate its responsibility to make decisions they believe are correct for the workers.

Q: I don’t get the impression you want workers participating jointly at every level of the decision-making process--from where to sweep the trash to where to open a new plant--as they are doing, to a large degree, at GM’s Saturn plant and at the GM’s joint venture plant with Toyota in Fremont. How far do you think decision-sharing should go?

A: I am fully supportive of what’s going on at Saturn and in Fremont. But once people have the authority in decision-making, then they have accountability, too. They have to be willing to pay the price of wrong decisions. I have not found many unions that want to put their members at risk with the sort of decision-making power you suggest. But the question of how far down shared decisions should go has to be left to the companies--management and workers figuring out whether to stop at the shop-floor level or in the executive board room.

Q: Since the majority of companies in the private sector are non-union, are unions important to achieve true worker-management cooperation?

A: Where there is a union present in a company, unions are important and even essential. Their participation is crucial. But when there is no union, there can still be labor-management cooperation. It has worked in several situations, like Motorola. But it seems to work best when unions take part. I believe a union provides a comfort level to employees, so they are more willing to try innovative ideas. With a union to help, workers are more willing to experiment and take risks they may fear when they get into a close collaborative relationship with management.

Q: Some union members and leaders see labor-management collaboration as a desertion of workers--a union “sell-out” to management. I know you don’t think that is legitimate, but how do most unions feel?

A: Some unions may still believe that--but it is incorrect to say unions generally believe it. The AFL-CIO has come forth with their white paper on the evolution of work, which articulates a new vision of union-management partnership that would have been heresy for unions a few years ago. The old idea that the company is, by its nature, an enemy of workers and unions is being replaced by collaboration between labor and management who urgently need each other in our highly competitive world.

Q: Are we revolutionizing the relations between workers and employers and developing a new way of doing business?

A: I think that is a probability, because the traditional hierarchal management style of corporate America is changing. It is based on . . . the military--with those in command giving the orders. That system is dying.

I think the unrelenting worldwide competition we face requires increased performance by everyone, and you don’t get that when people don’t trust each other and are hostile to one another. That is why we need to change, but it may be more evolutionary than revolutionary. We are not a radical society. We’re basically a conservative society. That means changes come incrementally.

Q: Then where does worker ownership of companies come in? That is more than just workers cooperating with management and having input in final decisions.

A: Co-ownership is one arena of worker participation that is growing and is power sharing at the highest level. It is happening at an accelerating rate. The most recent example is at United Airlines, with the pilots and machinists. I stand in admiration of that. The employees own 55% of that corporation, and that invests them not only with greater power and authority but also with greater responsibility to make the enterprise succeed. It provides a more mature level of relationship between labor and management. I would like to see more of that as we evolve our labor relations in the future.*