Introduction to a Symposium on the Kaiser Permanente Labor Management Partnership

I ndustrial relations researchers have historically been diligent in analyzing the most important and visible cases of labor management innovation of their time. Examples of such analyses include studies of labor management cooperation in the 1920s (Harbison and Coleman 1951; Slichter 1941), the TVA (Selznick 1984), the west coast mechanization and modernization agreement (Hartman 1969), the Armour Automation Commission (Shultz and Weber 1966), NUMMI (Adler 1993), and Saturn (Rubinstein and Kochan 2001). These cases were never presented as representative of collective bargaining or industrial relations developments of their time but as images of what was possible to achieve when necessity and leadership combined to respond to a critical problem or challenge of the day. These leading cases thus stretched the thinking of researchers, practitioners, and policy makers about what collective bargaining might be capable of doing if given the opportunity and necessary support. It is in this tradition that we present three papers describing and analyzing a decade of experience under the Kaiser Permanente Labor Management Partnership. In 1997 Kaiser Permanente, the nation’s largest private integrated health insurance and health care delivery organization, and a coalition of ten national and thirty local unions signed an agreement to create a labor management partnership. Over the past decade it has grown to become the largest, and as will be described in the papers in this symposium, the most ambitious labor management partnership in the history of U.S. labor relations. Since 2000 our research team has studied the partnership through interviews, surveys, case studies of specific projects, and participant observation of national contract negotiations. The papers presented in this symposium report on three aspects of our research that capture critical challenges and opportunities facing labor, management, and government policy makers today. The first paper focuses on the partnership as an exercise in organizational change and governance,