Negotiation – breathing life into the employment relationship

Main tasks  Highlight the role negotiation plays in employment relations  Outline the main negotiating processes and differences between them  Consider the changing balance between the different processes Summary It is negotiation that gives effect to the employment relationship. Negotiation involves far more than the management-trade union bargaining over wages and conditions with which it is popularly associated, however. In a phrase, the work organisation is 'a system of negotiated order'. Negotiation is a collection of processes that individuals as well as groups use to define and redefine the terms of their interdependence with other parties – it is especially important where this interdependency is characterised by uncertainty and incompleteness as in the case of the employment relationship. Following Walton and McKersie, these processes embrace not just 'fixed sum' and 'variable sum situations' ('distributive' and 'integrative' bargaining), but also influencing relationships, changing attitudes and shaping preferences ('attitudinal structuring'). A fourth process ('intra-organisational' bargaining) reflects the vertical as well as horizontal relationship involved in the employment relationship – the fact that the parties typically involve more than one individual and have to reach some accommodation among themselves about how Negotiation – breathing life into the employment relationship 149 they are going to deal with the other groups. In recent years, reflecting the economic and political changes discussed in the previous chapter, the emphasis in management-trade union relations appears to be shifting from 'distributive' to 'integrative bargaining' or, to use the terms that have become more common, 'mutual gains bargaining, 'partnership' and 'social partnership'. There is also a lot more 'attitudinal structuring' taking place as management simultaneously seeks to persuade employees to work harder and accept greater responsibilities for many of the benefits traditionally associated with the employment relationship such as careers and pensions. Additionally, the EU's social dimension is drawing attention to developments such as framework agreements, coordinated bargaining, benchmarking, and the 'open method of coordination', all of which are designed to overcome the 'collective action' problems inherent in multi-level governance situations.