Final-Offer Arbitration and Salaries of Police and Firefighters

[Excerpt] Did final-offer arbitration have a discernible impact on the salaries of police and firefighters in Massachusetts during the 3-year trial period which ended June 30, 1977? To analyze this question, we collected information on the maximum salary paid to police patrolmen, police sergeants, firefighters, and fire lieutenants for a large sample of Massachusetts municipalities. We integrated these data with police and fire impasse experiences and added several economic and environmental characteristics for each Massachusetts municipality. Then we performed several tests of the economic impact of final-offer arbitration

Conceptual Foundations: Walton and McKersie\u27s Subprocesses of Negotiations

[Excerpt] Walton and McKersie\u27s 1965 book, A Behavioral Theory of Labor Negotiations, provides much of the conceptual underpinnings of what grew into the modern-day teaching of negotiations in business, public policy, law, and other professional schools. We therefore believe that it is useful to outline the basic concepts and ideas introduced by these authors. We do so, however, with a word of caution. There is no substitute for the original. Every student should have the pleasure of struggling (as we did the first time it was assigned to us as students) with the tongue twisters like attitudinal structuring and the many other new terms and theoretical ideas introduced in the book

Final-Offer Arbitration and Public-Safety Employees: The Massachusetts Experience

[Excerpt] We conclude that, in terms of its impact on the bargaining process, final-offer arbitration has had a mixed record in Massachusetts. On the one hand, the law must probably be given some credit for preventing police and firefighter strikes; in addition, the rate of arbitration usage was remarkably low compared to experience in other states. On the other hand, the law probably led to more impasses in police and fire bargaining (although the experience in the commonwealth was still favorable compared to other states) and reduced the effectiveness of the mediation stage of the impasse procedures. Perhaps most important, the law failed to gain acceptance with municipal employers in the commonwealth

Moving the Ball Forward in Consumer and Employment Dispute Resolution: What Can Planning, Talking, Listening and Breaking Bread Together Accomplish?

Article Extract: Mandatory pre-dispute arbitration has been a divisive issue for many years, particularly since the Supreme Court began enforcing the arbitration clauses that businesses and employers impose on consumers and employees, respectively, in contracts of adhesion. In 2009, the Dispute Resolution Section’s Council proposed to weigh in on this issue through the vehicle of an ABA House of Delegates resolution. The compromise position developed by the Section, expressing support for pre-dispute mandatory arbitration clauses provided they offer a meaningful opt-out, generated such a firestorm of opposition from both pro-arbitration and anti-arbitration advocates that the Council ultimately chose to abstain from expressing any position at all

A letter concerning Leonetti's paper `Continuous Projections onto Ideal Convergent Sequences'

Leonetti proved that whenever $\mathcal I$ is an ideal on $\mathbb N$ such that there exists an~uncountable family of sets that are not in $\mathcal I$ with the property that the intersection of any two distinct members of that family is in $\mathcal I$, then the space $c_{0,\mathcal I}$ of sequences in $\ell_\infty$ that converge to 0 along $\mathcal I$ is not complemented. We provide a shorter proof of a more general fact that the quotient space $\ell_\infty / c_{0,\mathcal I}$ does not even embed into $\ell_\infty$

Collective Bargaining and the Quality of Work: The Views of Local Union Activists

[Excerpt] The purpose of the present study was to assess the views of local union officers and activists on these matters. Specifically, the study was designed to answer the following questions: Do local union leaders and members see so-called quality of work issues as equal in importance to the more traditional issues of collective bargaining? Do they tend to agree or disagree on these ratings of importance? Do they see quality of work issues as more integrative; that is, as those on which the goals of management and the union are pretty much the same? Is the collective bargaining process perceived to be (a) effectively responding to the goals which are rated as being most important; (b) more effective on issues on which there is general agreement regarding their importance than on those where larger individual differences exist; and (c) more effective on issues that are perceived to be more distributive than integrative? Do these individuals feel that quality of work issues should be handled through bargaining, or do they feel the need for new approaches to union-management relations? In particular, are there issues which are viewed as important, but as not being handled effectively through collective bargaining, and, thus, as holding strong potential for joint programs of organizational change

The Influence of Skin Commensals on the Therapeutic Outcomes of Surgically-Debrided Diabetic Foot Infections

In diabetic foot infections (DFI), the clinically virulence of skin commensals are generally presumed to be of low virulence. In this single-center study, we divided the wound isolates into two groups: skin commensals (coagulase-negative staphylococci, micrococci, corynebacteria, cutibacteria); and, pyogenic pathogens, and followed the patients for ≥ 6 months. In 1,018 DFI episodes (392 [39%] with osteomyelitis), we identified skin commensals as the sole culture isolates (without accompanying pyogenic pathogens) in 54 cases (5%). After treatment (antibiotic therapy [median of 20 days], hyperbaric oxygen in 98 cases [10%]), 251 episodes (25%) were clinical failures. Group comparisons between those growing only skin commensals and controls found no difference in clinical failure (17% vs 24 %, p=0.23) or microbiological recurrence (11% vs 17 %, p=0.23). The skin commensals were mostly treated with non-beta-lactam oral antibiotics. In multivariate logistic regression analysis, isolation of only skin commensals was not associated with failure (odds ratio 0.4, 95% confidence interval 0.1-3.8). Clinicians might wish to consider these isolates as potential pathogens when selecting a targeted antibiotic regimen, which may equally base on oral non-beta-lactam antibiotic agents susceptible to the corresponding skin pathogens