Faced with the necessity of negotiating a labor agreement, many company officials and labor leaders have frequently found themselves unprepared and uninformed. During the years I instructed management and labor representatives, I often found that many of them viewed collective bargaining with apprehension because of their lack of basic knowledge of the subject. My effort to provide them with the necessary information was the foundation of this book.
Although I fully realize that no two situations will ever be exactly alike in collective bargaining, I have found that a knowledge of certain fundamentals will be helpful in all negotiations, not only in industry, but also in other employer-employee set-ups, whether they be in non-manufacturing business, in government, or in quasigovernment organizations. These fundamentals make up the first four chapters of the book and cover the areas of collective bargaining, the attitudes usually present, the objectives of labor agreements, and the selection of and suggestions to the negotiators. The second section (Chapters V and VI) covers the actual bargaining sessions, including the physical set-up, the preparations and the procedure followed, and the labor agreement and its variations.
The third section (Chapters VII to XIV) considers the labor agreement in terms of the individual provision. Each of the provisions in the eight major sections is discussed and a series of considerations are listed.
The final section of the book furnishes the reference material and the sources of information available for the reader so that this book may serve as a practical and complete manual on collective bargaining.
The book was written from an impartial viewpoint with the thought of providing a source of information on the entire subject of collective bargaining. It is hoped that it will stimulate the . . .