Interest-based Bargaining: A Users Guide

"Interest-Based Bargaining: A User's Guide" provides a detailed account of why it makes sense to negotiate on the basis of interests rather than positions. It provides a detailed set of guidelines for negotiators who wish to develop a cooperative, problem solving approach to their bargaining. It draws on the experiences of using interest-based approaches in the USA and Ireland. Interest-based bargaining is an approach to collective bargaining that is focused on understanding the interests of parties and on building solutions around these. It uses problem-solving tools such as brainstorming, flip charting and consensus decision-making. This book will be of particular value to management and union representatives who are already working in a cooperative way and who wish to deepen that cooperation.

About the Author :
John O'Dowd is a consultant and facilitator specializing in industrial and employee relations. Much of his work lies in helping employers and trade unions to work together to develop better industrial relations and to develop effective ways of handling change together in the workplace. Through John O'Dowd Consultants Ltd (www.johnodowd.com) he provides a range of consulting, training, facilitation and mediation services to employers and trade unions. His website is www.johnodowd.com. He brings to his work a deep practical and theoretical understanding of industrial relations and organisational change. From 1997 to 1999 he was Joint Director of the National Centre for Partnership, based in the Department of the Taoiseach. In that role he was responsible for the promotion and facilitation of partnership in a range of organizations across the public sector, including health boards, local authorities, commercial state companies, universities, government departments and others. He developed the first standardised training materials for newly formed partnership groups in the public sector. He published Employee Partnership in Ireland (Oak Tree Press) in 1998. He was Assistant General Secretary of the Association of Secondary Teachers Ireland from 1980 to 1988. He was General Secretary, Civil and Public Service Union from 1988 to 1997. During that period the union became prominent around the issue of low pay for clerical civil servants. During that time he was also a member of the Executive Council of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions and took part in the negotiation of national programmes. He was a government appointee to the Strategic Management Initiative National Coordinating Committee, which was charged with monitoring the implementation of strategic changes across the civil service. He was also chair of the Irish Productivity Centre, a consulting firm jointly owned by the Irish Business and Employers' Confederation and the Irish Congress of Trade Unions. He is a graduate of University College Dublin (UCD). He has a BA in English and French, a Higher Diploma in Education, and holds an MBA from the Open Business School. His is currently an Associate Fellow of the Michael Smurfit Graduate School of Business, UCD, where he is researching a doctorate on workplace partnership in the private sector. He teaches negotiation skills to MBS students in UCD. Jerome T. Barrett (www.adrplus.org/jbar.htm) began his mediation career in the early 1960s as a Minnesota State labour conciliator in St. Paul, following several years with the National Labour Relations Board in Detroit. He continued his mediation career with the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service (FMCS) in Washington, D.C., Chicago, and Milwaukee. By the late 1960s, as campus and community violence gained everyone's attention, he published several articles explaining how civil rights and antiwar disputants could use the labour-management model to resolve their disputes peacefully. In 1969, after five years as a federal mediator, he joined the newly created National Centre for Dispute Settlement to mediate civil rights, campus, and community disputes. As union organising of public employees increased in the early 1970s, Barrett joined the Department of Labour to head a new office providing advice to state and local governments and their unions on establishing procedures for resolving disputes. During that period, he wrote extensively about that rapidly developing field. In 1973, he returned to FMCS to head the newly created Office of Technical Assistance to manage mediator training, preventive mediation, and the start of FMCS work outside the labour-management field. In the early 1980s, he left FMCS to teach labour relations at Northern Kentucky University and complete his doctoral degree in human resource development with a dissertation on the history of joint labour-management training with a focus on FMCS and its predecessor, the U.S. Conciliation Service. While teaching, Barrett began an arbitration practice and did overseas consulting on labour relations and ADR. He would eventually work in twenty-four countries. His other education includes a B.A. from the College of St. Thomas and an M.A. from the University of Minnesota. In the mid-1980s, he returned to the Department of Labour's Bureau of Labour Management and Cooperative Programmes, where he developed the Partners in Change programme for FMCS to assist labour and management in enhancing their cooperative efforts. He also created an interest-based bargaining program called P.A.S.T. and an accompanying training programme, which he has since used hundreds of times. He introduced FMCS mediators to interest-based bargaining (IBB) with his P.A.S.T. training model, helping to start what is now an extensive FMCS programme. Since leaving the government in 1988, Barrett has written, arbitrated, trained, and facilitated. He has written two books on IBB and produced an IBB video with the University of Wisconsin. In 2004, he wrote A History of Alternative Dispute Resolution: the story of a political, cultural, and social movement, which was published by Jossey Bass. He served as historian of the Society of Professionals in Dispute Resolution and FMCS. For the past three years, he has written an ADR history column for the ACResolution quarterly magazine. For the past seven years, he has been an elected school board member in Falls Church, Virginia, where he lives with his wife, Rose. They have five sons and five grandchildren.