You are responsible for putting forward a bargaining proposal to the rest of the executive leadership team

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Question:

You are responsible for putting forward a bargaining proposal to the rest of the executive leadership team that meets the board of directors' mandate to reduce costs while maintaining an understanding of employee needs and potential market realities. You know this will be difficult to do, given the current relationship with the union, but you want to form a bargaining proposal that will be win-win and acceptable without a large amount of disagreement.

Your bargaining proposal should include:

A management strategy document will contain the following components. Each sub-bullet point below provides suggested content for each component. Your focus should be largely on strategy and how all of the components below align to the organization's vision, mission, values, and objectives. While specifics of items like wages, compensation, benefits, arbitration and grievance procedures, market demand, and retirement packages are not given to you directly, research each of these items to come up with a proposal that is fair:

The composition of the management negotiating team that you are leading and the rationale for each position, including your own:

The size of the team
The departments/areas that will be represented
The roles and responsibilities of each person on the negotiating team and their power of approval for negotiating points

Management's objectives - hint, each of these can be in bullet point, and may be taken from other collective bargaining documents found in your research - citations must be provided:
- In a paragraph or two, summarize the mandate from the president/board of directors (outlined in the scenario above) and risks and opportunities you see resulting from this mandate
- Review of existing policies, practices and highlight items of interest
- Data to support the objectives - choose any or all of the following that you can easily find information for:
  1. Compensation per employee including overtime worked - assume a wage that is 1.3 - 1.7 times higher than provincial, regional or global average - choose a reasonable number of employees for the industry you have chosen - i.e. don't choose 10 employees for a globally competitive tractor manufacturing company;
  2. Paid holidays - use provincial statutory holiday requirements to determine time lost vs. costs;
  3. Vacation pay - each employee would receive a provincial minimum of 10 vacation days per year - but normally, collective bargaining agreements provide for more - create a table outlining scales of vacation days and choose the number of your employees that fall into each level of the grid;
  4. Leaves;
  5. Allowances - meal allowance, education allowance, clothing allowance, safety equipment allowance, etc.;
  6. Accident/incident rates (if possible);
  7. Group benefits costs;
  8. Internal environment demographics on current workforce in your organization - provide your best estimate on items such as age of your workers, how long with the company, how many are close to retirement;
  9. External environment demographics - such as similar competitors' workforces, labour shortages or surpluses, itinerant workers, temporary foreign workers, etc. can be included here;
  10. Training funding.
Costing - based on your calculations above, provide current costs
- Provide the cost of each item above that would be in the collective agreement;
- Provide the total (average) cost per employee;
- Estimate the cost or savings of proposed changes - you will use this in your final bargaining position;
- Organizational information on current or anticipated changes to business conditions, policies, processes, etc.

Union campaign and strategy. Review and summarize the union's campaign (based on the outlined information in the scenario). Similar to the management strategy, include the following information:

Determine the union bargaining committee - who and how many would be involved (provide rationale);
1. Size of the team
2. Union members that would be represented
3. The interests of each group
4. Summarize union demands and objectives - hint: each of these can be bullet point and taken from the pre-assignment scenario above);
5. Make an opinion of how the union will negotiate based on your initial executive proposal;
6. Examine the financial strength of the union - assume they have collected enough money from 9 years (three consecutive collective agreements) to fund their members if there is a lockout/strike;
7. Describe any problems that may exist within the union;
8. Explore bargaining history with other locals;
9. Identify common grievance issues that may have arisen from the current collective agreement (again, this can be from research of various companies if the information is readily available);
10. Review and summarize grievance processes and arbitration awards.

Bargaining position analysis. Review the areas listed below that can occur based on compromise / no compromise positions:

A strike/lockout plan;
1. Identify the possible outcomes of a strike/lockout from a risk management perspective;
2. Draft an action plan outlining roles and responsibilities of committee members and other management personnel;
3. Consider the use of replacement workers and how this aligns with the organization's values and objectives;
4. Dispute resolution opportunities/procedures;
  - Identify what can be done to resolve issues informally;
5. A draft bargaining notice and schedule
6. form a formal notice to the union;

Negotiation development - create three potential proposals that could mix and match (i.e. wage increases, increases to vacation, stronger language around contracting out, retirement benefits) and provide compromise for each side that you believe take each sides' needs and wants into account.

Remember you represent organizational managements' interests but you want to also explore strategies that will improve union-management relations and justify these decisions to your directors.
Also justify each proposal based on management and union stances as well as market potential listed in the pre-assignment scenario.