Labor Agreements: Description

This chapter presents a set of worksheets for estimating the costs of a new labor contract, and a worksheet for setting goals and evaluating the performance of a bargaining team.

The contract cost worksheets follow a simple design: Given current contract costs, demands for the new contract are entered into the spreadsheet. The model calculates (item by item) the costs of the new contract, compares those costs to current costs, and calculates the increased costs due to the contract.

The bargaining team performance worksheet also follows a simple design: Likely issues for negotiation are divided into economic and non-economic items, and are evaluated separately. For each item, a range of possible positions is developed, and an initial position is chosen by the bargaining team. At the end of negotiations, the achieved results are tallied and a "score" is assigned based on the earlier determination of the desirability of various positions.

That these models are "simple" does not diminish their usefulness. More complex models might be constructed, but given the uncertainty of the process and the importance of flexibility in negotiating, the increased power would be lost to the uncertainty inherent in the data. Further, a more powerful model would lull the user into a fallacy of "misplaced precision"--presuming that "1.0005768" is more accurate than "1," when the units of measurement are themselves only approximate.

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