The Potential and Precariousness of Partnership: The Case of the Kaiser Permanente Labor Management Partnership

In 1997, the Kaiser Foundation Health Care and Hospitals, the Permanente Medical Federation, and a coalition of unions signed a national agreement creating one of the most ambitious labor management partnerships in U.S. history, initially covering some 58,000 employees. Based on field research and archival data, this paper analyzes the first eight years of this partnership in light of three strategic challenges—initiating, governing, and sustaining partnership—and the organizational challenge of partnership in a highly decentralized organization.     

Balancing Acts: Dynamics of a Union Coalition in a Labor Management Partnership

This paper analyzes the experience of a set of unions that formed a coalition to engage in coordinated bargaining and to build and sustain a labor management partnership with Kaiser Permanente, a large healthcare provider and insurer. We use qualitative and quantitative data, including member and leader surveys, to explore the experience of the coalition in confronting five key challenges identified through theory and prior research on such partnerships. We find that the coalition has been remarkably successful, under difficult circumstances, in achieving institutional growth for its member unions and in balancing traditional and new union roles and communicating with members. The unions have been less successful in increasing member involvement.     

Bargaining Theory Meets Interest‐Based Negotiations: A Case Study1

This is a case study of the 2005 national contract negotiations between Kaiser Permanente and the Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions. Given the scale and complexity of these negotiations, their successful completion provides an exemplar for collective bargaining in this country. In 1997 Kaiser Permanente and the Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions formed a labor management partnership, and negotiations were structured around the principles of interest‐based negotiation (IBN). Drawing on direct observation of all parts of the bargaining process, interviews with individuals from Kaiser and the Coalition of Unions, and surveys we conducted after bargaining was completed, we conclude that the parties employed a mix of interest‐based and traditional negotiation processes across an array of integrative and distributive issues. We find that IBN techniques were used extensively and successfully to reach mutually satisfying agreements when the parties shared interests. When interests were in greater conflict, the parties resorted to more traditional, positional tactics to reach resolution. Strong intraorganizational conflicts limited the use of IBN and favored the use of more traditional positional bargaining. While a high level of trust enabled and supported the use of IBN, tensions that developed limited the use of IBN and required surfacing and release before either IBN or more traditional positional processes could proceed effectively. The use of IBN tools helped the parties apply the principles underlying the partnership in which these negotiations were embedded. We conclude that IBN served as a way of applying or operationalizing integrative bargaining and affected the process dynamics in ways the Walton and McKersie theory predicted. As such we see IBN as techniques that neither displace nor render obsolete other aspects of bargaining theory or practice but that show considerable promise for helping collective bargaining to address the complex issues and challenges found in contemporary employment relationships.