Review the NLRB Unfair Labor Practice (ULP) process. What is the value of this process? How does it compare to processes in non-union environments?

140 Part II. The Strategic Level of Labor Relations many firms even after a union wins a representation election. One study finds that when employers oppose unions to the point that employees file an unfair labor practice charge, unions have only about a 10 percent likelihood of navigating through the process and achieving a first collective bargaining agreement. (Remember that the NLRA only requires that managers bargain in good faith; it does not require that a first contract actually be signed.) Management does not always wait until an organizing election to try to convince its employees that unions are unnecessary. Managers can institute sophisticated personnel practices that function as a substitute, at least in part, for union representation. One of the chief objectives of the human resource industrial relations pattern (described in Chapter 5) is avoiding union representation. One key way such personnel practices differ from the practices managers use to discourage employees from forming a union is the fact that they are permanent. Management may have several reasons for adopting these personnel practices, including the fact that such practices can contribute to the firm's petformance and adaptability. Internal Union Affairs and Actions Unions may bear some of the bhime for their organizing difficulties and for the decline in membership in recent decades. One argament is that American unions have suffered from corruption and that they have been slow to adapt to changing times. Analysts also point to the poor publicity generated by the charges of corruption that historically plagued the Teamsters union or the unions representing workers who work at ports unloading ships as one reason for the low opinion of unions in the minds of much of the public. Others have argued that unions have done poorly in representation elections because they have not devoted enough resources to organizing. Some critics have argued that labor no longer approaches the task of organizing new workers with the enthusiasm and conmitment that chancterized che organizing drives of the 1930s: An analysis of trends in union election activity shows that muon organizing now produces only a fiaction of the number of new union members needed just to offect the number of workers who leave unions when they leave the habor force