Martin C. Euwema - Mediation in Collective Labor Conflicts

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Conflict is an inevitable part of working life in all its relations. Conflicts appear between individual colleagues, as well as between teams, departments, or between professional units. Of old, conflicts in the relation between employers and employees have received extensive attention and are at the basis of what is called industrial relations or labor relations. Particularly, with the rise of large-scale industrialization in the nineteenth century, conflict between capital and labor has been a central theme, and according to many is of a fundamental nature. Others argue that not conflict, however, cooperation is at the core of industrial relations. Employers and employees negotiate freely an agreement, meeting each others interests. Negotiations can be made between individual workers and the employer (the so-called i-deals) and between collectives of workers (collective labor agreements). The negotiations can, however, get stuck and the conflicts of interest between employer and employeesor their representativescan escalate. Power relations, more than mutual interests, might determine the conflict dynamics, resulting in deadlock, strikes, or layoffs. The tough negotiations, for example, in the case of Ryanair for several years, illustrate this. Strikes at different locations are countered by transferring airplanes and flights to other European countries. Collective conflicts also can occur when parties do not feel the agreement which is made, is kept. Such conflicts of rights (the perceived violation of one parties rights) have also received considerable attention, and many cases are brought to the labor courts, or to alternative forms of dispute resolution, such as mediation, arbitration, or conciliation. Here we are at the central topic of this volume. In academic literature mediation, or other forms of third-party intervention in collective labor conflicts have received surprisingly little attention. Surprising, for at least two reasons. First, the societal impact of escalating collective labor conflicts is large, with often serious collateral damage for others than the primary parties. Second, the field of mediation and third-party intervention is developing rapidly in many domains, and receives more and more also academic attention. Mediation in collective labor conflicts, however, has been neglected mostly and has many different features compared to mediation in other domains, such as divorce mediation or mediation in individual labor conflicts. Mediation in collective labor conflict has a long and also institutionalized tradition. In most societies, the terminology is different, and is referred to this process as conciliation in labor disputes, as a relative informal process of facilitated negotiation. Alternatively, most societies have long traditions in forms of mediation/arbitration, where a committee of wise persons organizes a hearing, investigates the case, and comes with recommendations to the conflicting parties on the content of the case. Such recommendations can, however not need to be, be binding for the parties. A large variety of third-party regulations and practices have emerged all around the globe. The ILO has done a great job in providing information on many such arrangements.