I just finished an old book written in 1971 by Irving Stone entitled The Passions of the Mind. I picked it up at my local library’s annual book sale for twenty cents. It is a book about Sigmund Freud.
I knew nothing about Freud other than the term “Freudian Slip” and that he had something to do with psychoanalysis. I never took any classes in psychology and none on psychoanalysis. I knew nothing about “book-learned” psychology, even though we are all amateur psychologists, of a sort, because we are constantly trying to figure out why our spouses or partners do something or why our children act the way they do.
As a lawyer when I began working in labor law back in the 1970s as an Air Force JAG, I thought that labor relations were solely about the law. Did management or the union violate the Executive Order on Federal Labor Relations and then later the Federal Service Labor Management Relations Statute (Statute) by committing an unfair labor practice? Were the union’s proposals negotiable under the Statute? But after a while I came to understand that what happened in labor relations was often about the relationship of the participants. Did they trust each other? Did they respect each other?
As I matured as a labor lawyer, I came to realize that being a lawyer required an ability not just to know the law but also to be able to understand people. I found that often the problems labor and management were having were not just about misunderstanding or lacking knowledge of the law or disagreeing about what the law meant but were about people dealing with people.
I was not trained to perform psychoanalysis or even to engage in rudimentary psychological therapy. However, if I was going to solve the problems existing in some labor and management relationships, I realized I needed to have approaches that did not solely rely on enforcement of the law. In a sense, you needed to be able to do labor relations therapy.
Working in a Regional Office of the Office of General Counsel of the Federal Labor Relations Authority in the 1980s, I was able to convince the General Counsel, at the time, to give me an opportunity to try an innovative approach to dealing with what was a large caseload of unfair labor practice charges. Some facilities would have a backlog of fifty to even two hundred unfair labor practice charges.
My approach was a big departure from the normal approach of investigating each case, deciding the case, and then investigating the next one until you had finished them all. Instead of case by case, I scheduled an intervention in the parties’ relationship.
My basic thesis was that if an individual facility had that an excessive number of cases, there was something else going on other than a tremendous outbreak of lawbreaking. There was something underlying the union’s filing of that many charges. Doing one case at a time would not uncover what was the underlying issue and would not necessarily lead to an improvement in how labor and management acted.
The very first session was done in St. Louis at an Army facility. Both labor and management had to agree to participate. There had to be an equal number of management participants and union participants.
There were certain ground rules that all participants had to agree to: What was said in the room stays in the room – this was intended to put the participants at ease that if they said something that the other side did not like, it would not end up in the union newsletter or the subject of some sort of management action or communication.
The second ground rule was that all participants would speak and act in a civil manner towards each other – no name-calling or snide remarks; nothing in the meeting would be used as the basis for further charges of actions against any participants as long as the participant did not engage in flagrant misconduct.
The participants in the intervention were grouped in a circle with no desks or tables between them and any other participant. The facilitator, who was me, would then ask each participant questions. Other participants could respond to what was said and add additional comments.
The purpose of the questions was to find out what was really going on in the relationship. The discussion could become heated and strident. The facilitator’s role was to keep the discussion on track so the parties could examine the relationship and try to figure out what were the outstanding relationship issues. The intent was to get the participants talking to each other and not past each other. To the extent possible, it was an opportunity to drop baggage from the past and start anew.
Once there had been a full discussion at the meeting, the participants went on to the next phase, which dealt with what happens next. This was the forget, forgive, or fix phase.
The question was could the participants forget something that had taken place now that they had a better understanding of the facts and motivations of the individuals involved?
This usually only occurred when either side now had a better understanding of what took place and realized things were not as they thought them to be. This commonly was the case when both sides stopped talking to each other.
The next would be if something could not be forgotten, could the other side or more usually an individual be forgiven for things they did now that there was a better understanding of what had taken place?
The last was what needed to be fixed. Fixing things involved concrete agreements concerning burning issues between the parties. There were a wide range of things that could be fixed, from resolving one hundred ULPs to fixing a unilateral change by coming to an agreement. The fixing portion could take late into the night to be completed.
After this initial intervention, I went on to perform many more at facilities around the country. The lasting effect of these interventions varied. Some interventions where the parties made significant changes to their relationship for the better, there were long-lasting effects. Others did not survive the next change in administration, management, or union leadership.
A similar process was used when creating partnerships or forums. It was difficult to start a labor management collaborative relationship when there was still baggage from the past. The parties needed to deal with their history and decide to what extent they could work through it and start a new collaborative approach to labor relations.
