A Labor-Management Partnership

Abstract

After many years of difficult relations and counterproductive arbitrations, San Francisco's major hotels and their union, Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Local 2, embarked in 1994 on a new partnership-oriented approach. Under a document called a "living contract," the two parties created a mechanism for making work-rule changes by mutual agreement during the term of the contract. The living contract called for labor and management to constitute study teams that would examine the issues underlying problems that would otherwise have resulted in disputes between the hotels and the union. The study teams proposed solutions that would be mutually beneficial for both parties-and avoided expensive, often pointless arbitration. As an example, the study teams solved a particularly nettlesome problem by redesigning the work rules governing hotels' restaurants to be competitive with nonunion operations. One impetus for the living contract was the success of those nonunion hotels, which meant a loss of business for union hotels and, ultimately, a loss of jobs for the union members. The first five-year living contract was so successful that HERE Local 2 and the hotels renewed it in 1999.