Final Offer Interest Arbitration in Wisconsin - Legislative History, Participant Attitudes, Future Trends

• NCJ Number: 95428
• Journal: Marquette Law Review Volume: 64 Issue: 3 Dated: (Spring 1981) Pages: 455-501
• Author(s): W H Clune
• Date Published: 1981
• Length: 51 pages
• Sale Source: National Institute of Justice/; NCJRS Photocopy Services
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America

Annotation

This analysis of Wisconsin's 1978 law giving nonuniformed municipal employees a limited right to strike and instituting a system of final-offer interest arbitration examines the attitudes of labor and management toward the new statute and future trends in labor-management relations.

Abstract

In final-offer interest arbitration, once the parties have bargained and mediated to an impasse, they make their final best offers to an arbitrator, who then must choose the entire contract offered by one side or the other as the binding contract between the parties. Questionnaires completed by 73 labor persons and 108 management negotiators and persons after a year's experience with the new law showed that labor feels the system is fair while management does not. Labor parties believe more strongly that the system is fair compared to other persons sampled; whereas, management negotiators had the greatest dislike for the new law. Open-ended comments from the questionnaires revealed these main complaints about the law: Both sides criticized the procedures enacted by the bill, its arbitrator bias, and the comparability standard which requires the arbitrator to consider area norms and norms within a line of employment when making a decision. Only management leveled the criticism that the new legislation shifted power, giving labor too much power, taking away local control, or destroying the incentives for organized labor to engage in collective bargaining. A separate study conducted by the Wisconsin Center for Public Policy discovered few differences in economic outcomes between negotiations which do not use the mediation-arbitration process and those that do. Thus, the polarization of attitudes between labor and management suggests that both may be behaving irrationally. Objectively, the new law has not been economically advantageous to labor and has not further polarized labor and management. Three developments may affect attitudes toward final-offer arbitration in the future: the law's 'sunset' clause, effective in October 1981; the outcome of a constitutional challenge now in the courts; and fundamental shifts in the strategies of labor and management. Tables and 152 footnotes are supplied.