Employment Dispute Resolution and Worker Rights in the Changing Workplace

Book excerpt: Have the speed, informality, and low cost of the grievance and arbitration system deteriorated? Has the system become too adversarial? Has it lost its problem-solving character? This book examines the nature and degree of change in workplace dispute resolution in the context of ongoing changes in work and in labor relations.The volume begins with an editors' introduction that provides context and offers a political perspective on the current state of dispute resolution in the workplace. The chapters that follow contain critiques of the existing legal framework surrounding mandatory arbitration in the nonunion sector and a review of the empirical literature on nonunion dispute resolution. Employment Dispute Resolution and Worker Rights in the Changing Workplace includes sections on grievance mediation, the status of the grievance procedure in workplaces with extensive worker and/or union participation in decision making, and high-performance workplaces. The study concludes with trends in dispute resolution in the public sector and with the alternative dispute resolution system commonly practiced in the unionized construction industry.