Educator and Author William N. Cooke to be Featured on Close Up Radio

WILLIAMSTON, MICHIGAN, UNITED STATES, August 19, 2024 /EINPresswire.com/ — Unabated and unforgiving global competition continues to take its toll on companies and their employees—forcing organizations to rethink their workplace strategies to achieve sustainable competitive advantage. Professor and author William Cooke wants to help companies and their unions build partnerships that optimize long term success for both their organizations and employees. With over 40 years of experience as an educator, consulting with more than 35 different organizations, Professor Cooke recently co-published Negotiating High Performance-Focused Partnerships: The Five Stages of Effective Labor Management Negotiations.

“There’s been quite a bit of noise over the last year or so with big negotiations in Hollywood and the auto industry, UPS, and others. And there’s more organizing activity going on now than we’ve seen in years. The Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service requires all organized companies and their unions to notify them of upcoming negotiations. And what we have in the US is anywhere between about 17,000 and 18,000 negotiations a year, year after year.

“Negotiating High Performance-Focused Partnerships, written with John Butler and Thomas Posey, outlines how companies and unions can survive this economy with increasing non-union competition. In a nutshell, it’s about how to negotiate and build partnerships that yield mutual gains, in the form of high performance while sharing those gains with employees when it comes to wages, benefits, and the like,” explains Professor Cooke.

Negotiating High Performance-Focused Partnerships outlines five stages of effective labor-management negotiations, visualized as a funnel that narrows with each next stage. Stage One is all about strategy, with a focus on aligning HR and labor relations strategies with business strategies. This alignment emphasizes the three requirements of achieving high performance-focused workplace systems; efficiency, flexibility, and HR policies designed to optimize employee commitment to high performance.

Stage Two focuses on preparation and planning that includes the extensive preparation work required in identifying and assessing the state of the company’s competitiveness, local profiles of performance, corporate investment plans for the future of locations, the primary pre-negotiation issues concerning unions, the sources of relative power influencing negotiations and implications of prisoner dilemmas.

Stage Three is about the opening context of negotiations that addresses preparing management teams for bargaining, including team dynamics at the bargaining table, as well as union team behavior and dynamics at the table arising out of the democratic and political nature of unions.

Stage Four focuses on the back-and-forth dynamics of bargaining, with an emphasis on using interest-based bargaining to find constructive compromises. Also emphasized is how best to address union concerns and resistance to partnering with management, traditional union resistance tactics at the bargaining table, and “inside union resistance campaigns” designed to disrupt operations.

Stage Five is the closing stage of negotiations as the parties pivot to bargaining over economic packages of wages, benefits, and big-ticket items. Here, the focus is on how best to make incremental improvements over three to five moves; and how trade offs among items in economic packages are best handled. Also addressed is how best to bring unions back to the bargaining table and end impasses when unions go out on strike.

Professor Cooke explains, “Over the last decade, in addition to improved wages and benefits, employment security has become of paramount importance to unions and their members. Why? Due of a lack of competitiveness and consequent loss of jobs. By way of example, the focus in negotiations to minimize displacement is likely to address outsourcing work. Although management is not tied down to seek cost-effective outside bids to subcontract out products or services, the parties agree that any such bids would be given to a team of supervisors and union members – say for 45 days – to develop a cost-effective counterbid. If we can match, or by golly, even beat this bid, the promise is the work stays here. This approach shows employees that management is concerned about their employment—employees also have an opportunity to help save their work. And it also demonstrates that management will do what is reasonable to stay competitive and keep the company healthy. Success is about that kind of dialogue. And that’s a notion of a kind of a win-win mutual gain solution to a mutual problem.”

Close Up Radio will feature William N. Cooke in an interview with Jim Masters on Wednesday, August 21st at 1 p.m. EST

Listen to the show on BlogTalkRadio

If you have any questions for our guest, please call (347) 996-3389

Negotiating High Performance-Focused Partnerships is available on Amazon

For more information about Professor Cooke, please email [email protected]

Lou Ceparano
Close Up Television & Radio
+1 631-850-3314
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