Dispute Resolution in Multiple Fields
Along with his service in government, Dunlop practiced dispute resolution in a variety of other areas, pioneering innovative multi-party agreements in a variety of areas. In agriculture, he intervened in an 8-year-old dispute between the Campbell Soup Company, the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC, an AFL-CIO affiliate that organized farm workers in the Midwest) and tomato growers in Michigan and Ohio regarding conditions of work among the migrant workers who worked for growers supplying Campbell’s with tomatoes. Since agricultural workers are exempted from the NLRA, private sector employers are not obligated to recognize unions. In addition, the farm workers were treated as independent contractors to the individual growers supplying Campbell Soup. Growers contended that the prices received for their tomatoes precluded increases in wages or provision of better housing conditions in labor camps.
In 1986, Campbell Soup approached Dunlop to assist them in settling the dispute. Dunlop brought together the parties and fashioned an agreement ending the corporate campaign in exchange for union representation among tomato growers, including a mechanism for union recognition and dispute resolution through a Commission chaired by Dunlop and an equal number of representatives of labor and growers. The agreement also provided growers higher prices in exchange for agreement to bargaining with the union. As a result, the agreement created a private system of union recognition, collective bargaining and dispute resolution accepted by the parties. The agreement soon expanded to include pickle growers and the food processors Vlasic and Dean Foods and has been renewed consistently to the present. In 2003, an agreement between FLOC and the North Carolina Growers Association extending the Dunlop Agricultural Commission model was signed providing the only collective bargaining agreement covering guest workers from Mexico.
In 1979, Dunlop and Harvard University colleague Frederick H. Abernathy (Gordon McKay Research Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Abbott and James Lawrence Research Professor of Engineering), a professor of fluid mechanics, were commissioned by the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union to undertake a summer study of the competitiveness of the men’s suit industry. The study focused on the need to encourage research and development on the creation (and later the adoption) of technology in the textile and clothing sector. Eventually Dunlop’s and Abernathy’s efforts led to the creation of the Tailored Clothing and Technology Corporation 2, a government-business-labor organization, funded cooperatively the three parties. 2 initially funded development of new technologies for the industry. It later turned to a broader focus on encouraging the use of existing technology among clothing manufacturers and textile producers.2 is discussed in the Commentary of Dunlop, Industrial Relations Systems, Revised Edition (Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 1993), pp. 36-37. In 1989, 2 changed its name to the Textile and Clothing Technology Corporation to reflect its expanded mission. The group, now based in Raleigh, North Carolina, remains active in this area.
A final area of innovative dispute resolution arose in Dunlop’s home state of Massachusetts. Following a growing number of disputes and walkouts among police and firefighters in the 1970s, Dunlop mediated an agreement between police and firefighter local unions, an association of municipal governments, and state legislators on legislation to create a tri-partite (labor, public management, with an impartial third party chair, nominated by the two sides and appointed by the Governor) dispute resolution body to handle collective bargaining problems in the sector. The legislation was passed in 1977 creating the Joint Labor Management Committee (JLMC). The vast majority of the more than 1500 disputes handled by the JLMC in its history were done through mediation rather than the final step which imposed a settlement on the municipal executive where the dispute occurred (but not on the legislative body, such as city council or town meeting that appropriates funds).
Read more about this topic: John Thomas Dunlop
Famous quotes containing the words dispute, resolution, multiple and/or fields:
“Your next-door neighbour ... is not a man; he is an environment. He is the barking of a dog; he is the noise of a pianola; he is a dispute about a party wall; he is drains that are worse than yours, or roses that are better than yours.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)
“A great many will find fault in the resolution that the negro shall be free and equal, because our equal not every human being can be; but free every human being has a right to be. He can only be equal in his rights.”
—Mrs. Chalkstone, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 2, ch. 16, by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage (1882)
“... the generation of the 20’s was truly secular in that it still knew its theology and its varieties of religious experience. We are post-secular, inventing new faiths, without any sense of organizing truths. The truths we accept are so multiple that honesty becomes little more than a strategy by which you manage your tendencies toward duplicity.”
—Ann Douglas (b. 1942)
“The landscape was clothed in a mild and quiet light, in which the woods and fences checkered and partitioned it with new regularity, and rough and uneven fields stretched away with lawn-like smoothness to the horizon, and the clouds, finely distinct and picturesque, seemed a fit drapery to hang over fairyland. The world seemed decked for some holiday or prouder pageantry ... like a green lane into a country maze, at the season when fruit-trees are in blossom.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)