Posted on: Friday, March 28, 2003

Arbitration, properly nuanced, could work

Based on history, it is no wonder the Hawai'i Government Employees Association (HGEA) is pushing for arbitration rights for six of its public worker units that now have the right to strike.

Time and again, arbitration has ended up tilting in the direction of the unions over management. For that reason, the Legislature recently moved to end mandatory arbitration and restore the right to strike for most public worker units.

This push by the HGEA would reverse the trend.

Union supporters argue that if there are flaws in the binding arbitration system, it is largely the doing of management negotiators who fail to understand the dynamics of the process.

For instance, they say, if management stands firm at zero percent raises in a new contract and the union pushes for 5 percent, the arbitrator is almost certainly going to find a midway point that favors the union.

The trick, they argue, is to find a position going into arbitration that narrows the choices between management and labor.

But management negotiators say binding arbitration is flawed because it is a disincentive for serious bargaining, leaving too many issues to the arbitrator to sort out.

And they contend that many issues key to labor-management relations cannot be broken down into the dollars-and-cents, black-and-white analysis that seems to be demanded by arbitration.

Surely no one wants the disruptions and bad feelings that result from a public worker strike. That is a strong motivating factor in support of binding arbitration.

What's required for this idea to go forward is to get much more sophisticated in what goes into, and what comes out of, the binding arbitration process.

One important change that has already occurred is to require the arbitrator to consider the state's ability to pay in making awards. And by ability to pay, we mean the state's overall ability to handle pay raises in the face of other spending needs — not just a determination that, at the moment, there is money, somewhere.

If the law clearly requires a nuanced and sophisticated review of both management and labor conditions, then arbitration can and should work.