Handling labor relations, sometimes called labor-management relations or union-management relations, is often an extremely thorny task. Collective bargaining is the process of negotiation through which representatives of a company's management and those of its unions determine wages and working conditions for the employees. Issues usually covered in such negotiations are wages and salaries, including fringe benefits; industrial relations (that is, rules and regulations .governing the relationship between management and labor); and the settlement of disputes or grievances.
Although one would expect a company to resist unionization of its facilities, one would expect every employee to desire unionization, because the union is the only vehicle labor has for negotiating on an equal basis with management. Nevertheless, worker participation in unions has declined drastically in the United States. In 1986 only about 17% of the labor force in the United States was unionized, compared to 48% in the United Kingdom. And public opinion surveys rank organized labor at the bottom of the trustworthiness scale.
In many other countries the situation is similar, leading some observers to declare the union's sovereignty at bay, as they did that of the nation-state. These observers assert that the sheer size and economic power of the MNCs allows them to cooperate globally among themselves so as to nullify any international cooperative efforts among unions, such as sympathy strikes. According to this view, the MNCs' ability to source globally via subcontracting and other contractual agreements has undermined international cooperation among unions to the point where unions are international in name only. 1 It is the view of this book, however, that unions, like the nation-state, will survive. No MNC, no matter how big and powerful, can prevent its workers around the globe from unionizing. But by the same token, no union, no matter how large and powerful, can dictate its policies globally.
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