Adam Baxter Company: Traditional Union Systems

Adam Baxter Company employed a traditional union system of employee engagement for its operations. In traditional union systems, companies assumes that unions will only be responsible for establishing a standard rate across the industry and will not be involved in any corporate strategic decisions. Since the company had good pay scale, benefit packages, and bonus structure for their employees, their relationship, prior to 1978, with the Local 190 union was really good. The dynamics of this relationship changed radically in 1978 when company had few issues and had to cut costs to survive in the industry. This is where the challenges for traditional union systems came into picture for them. The article ‘Why the labor Management Scene Is Contentious’ by Robert McKERSIE explains many of the challenges …show more content…
Richard Shell ‘Three schools of Bargaining Ethics’ explains how individuals align to different bargaining ethics schools; “It’s the game” Poker School; “Do the right thing even if it hurts” Idealistic School; “What goes around, comes around” Pragmatist School. While we believe that people behave differently in different negotiation situations, we agree with author’s argument that one should aim as high as he could and should be consistent with his/her held inner beliefs. We were more aligned with the more realistic school of bargaining ethics – Pragmatist School for this particular negotiation. Similar to Poker school of thought, deception was an important weapon of our negotiation process, however we didn’t use misleading statements or lies whenever we had practical alternative. Whenever we had some doubt about the points union put forward or at some tricky situation, we employed techniques like avoid answering those questions, declaring the question out of bounds, or taking a break to discuss among ourselves. We believe, this helped us to not answering union’s questions by lying or misleading them and give them a proper planned answers in later