For members of faculty unions, contract negotiations are likely to revolve around salaries, academic freedom, benefits, and even ownership of intellectual property. With so much at stake, it’s easy for talks at the bargaining table to turn a little ugly. Now, though, the conversation often turns up online as well—and the results don’t make for peaceful agreements.
Over the last 20 years, Edward F. Hartfield, executive director of the National Center for Dispute Settlement, has been involved in academic-contract negotiations as a third-party mediator, trainer, or facilitator at institutions that include the University of Toledo, the University of Michigan, and Northeast Wisconsin Technical College. He talked with The Chronicle about how the Internet and labor talks can butt heads.
Q. How has technology changed the face of contract negotiations?
A. Technology almost always results in better dissemination of information. You can make sure that people are getting the word about meetings and other important information. But it’s ironic that while technology helps us to communicate to large groups of people faster and easier than before, it also gives individuals the opportunity to create problems for others by communicating things that are designed to undermine negotiations.
Q. What kind of problems?
A. Back in the day, a mediator like myself would get both sides to agree to ground rules, get them to agree not to negotiate in the press. If they were going to make statements to the media, they’d make them jointly so no one would be surprised. But now, even when parties make those agreements, they find themselves confronting all kinds of new communication challenges—like what I call rogue Web sites.
Q. What’s a rogue Web site?
A. It’s a Web site that is unauthorized by the labor organization, and what goes up there is really out of its control. For example, if there are members of a labor organization who are very unhappy with the leadership or unhappy with something they believe is going on at the bargaining table, they might decide to publish on the Web some attacks on the leadership or against the college and university administration. The things that they say, however fabricated, are out there, and they cause damage.
Q. How bad can the attacks get?
A. I can remember a Web site from about four years ago that must have been fed by an individual who was at the table. It was armed with just enough substantial information mixed with a lot of hyperbole and things taken out of context. It got the membership really angry and resulted in them rejecting an offer. The negotiations went on for a long period of time.
Once a [labor] organization president electronically attached a picture of a college president to a Nazi Gestapo officer and put it out for the academic community to see. In that particular case, the individual’s own colleagues were outraged that the organization president resorted to that kind of tactic.
Q. Is it wrong to simply give updates from the bargaining table?
A. If there’s a guy who, during the last coffee break, took his iPhone into the men’s room and sent a statement to one of his colleagues who’s running a Web site, that can make people really wary of what they say at the table. If someone’s at the table leaking information, that’s not going to encourage communication. That’s going to shut it down.
Q. What do you do if you suspect that there has been a leak?
A. You’ve got to say, “OK, whose Web site is this? Was anybody at the table involved in this? Is the information portrayed on the Web site such that the only way the individual could have obtained it was through a leak somewhere?” We have to have really difficult conversations to remind people that if you’re not committed to the ground rules, then you need to understand that what’s good for one side is good for the other.
Q. Do you see smartphones or laptops taking people’s attention away from the issues at hand during negotiations?
A. Yes. One day at a large university, a historic moment was occurring: The chief financial officer of the university, for the first time ever, has come to the bargaining table, and he is going through the faculty budget line by line. The faculty team is completely paying attention, because the faculty association president has talked to his team ahead of time about the importance of the moment, and they’re ready with questions. But right next to the chief financial officer, the director of budget and finance is on his BlackBerry—in the middle of the presentation. That made the chief financial officer very angry. Well-meaning people are feeling so pressed for time that right in the middle of negotiations, they’re responding to e-mails and texts while other people are talking. People on both sides of the table are doing that.
Q. Are there practices you would recommend to avoid many of these new problems?
A. I think we can’t let technology get in the way of us practicing better communication skills. The best practice is still to carefully listen to one another, carefully talk to one another, and be sensitive to the kinds of words that you’re using. We just have to return to the fundamentals of good communication.
