What Does the Boss Think?

    Through all this back and forth about the future of the labor movement, you have to wonder what employers are thinking about the debate. Well, I've gotten my hands on a briefing paper put together by Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, a leading management law firm that advises its clients how to avoid unions. Check it out.

Comments

[Bill Pearson]

Interesting to see Peter Hurtgen is back with that law firm in LA. It was just a year ago i introduced him at the IFEBP June conference in Lake Tahoe. He was a speaker addressing issues of labor and management working together. It seems to me he had just come from being the lead mediator in the Southern CA grocery strike.

Given his history, it would be like asking Sweeney to run Federal Mediation and Conciliation Services (FMCS). Wait, he can't, he's too busy saving organized labor.

And if anything, reading their briefing paper, sounds like they see this as an opportunity for more business. Maybe a split is just what the boys need to get off their butts and make something happen. OOps, there i go again, being too caustic.

[benton]

The problem with this, of course, is that, no matter what happens, memos from management consultants to clients and perspective clients will focus on why this means that we need, well, more management consultants. A divide labor movement would mean one set of threats that would cause you to hire them, but a unified labor movement, well that's scary to, provided you don't have the right management consultant.

The real information here is in terms of the nuance of how they see their services growing under each scenario.

[Guillermo Perez]

I don't see a lot of nuance. They're just trolling for business. I don't think these guys have any more of a clue about what to expect than anybody else. I certainly don't mean them any good will, but I hope like hell that business is good.

[Josh H. Pille]

I also remember (from back in late 2004, when the NUP was still trying to move its program within the federation) a quote from the 10/1/04 HR Magazine, Michael Lotito (partner in the union-busting firm Jackson Lewis and former Chairman of the Society for Human Resource Management) said that if the NUP proposals were to go through, "it would be much more difficult for companies to preserve union-free status."

Maybe you're right and these guys -- regardless of whatever's actually going on -- will, in an attempt to drum up business, claim that organizing will pick up. But I think that the NUP/CtW program genuinely makes these guys nervous.

[Josh H. Pille]

And here's another one. In yesterday's Chicago Tribune is an entire article on how gleeful the union busters are at the moment:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/chi-0506250283jun26,1,1504733.story?coll=chi-business-hed