Joint Labor/Management Initiatives

Joint Labor/Management Initiatives

In today's increasingly competitive and unpredictable global marketplace, every organization must seek to achieve competitive sustainability for the benefit of the enterprise, its workforce, and the broader community.

Central to achieving competitive sustainability are high-performance workplaces, one's developed deep within organizations that fully tap the innovative capacity and commitment of labor and management.

MSU's Joint Labor/Management Initiatives faculty offers the expertise and experience essential to bringing labor and management together to transform operations into resilient high-performance workplaces.

 

What Joint Labor/Management Initiatives Offers:

  • A unique ability to engage managers and union leaders in strategic planning for mutual gains
  • In-depth expertise in high-performance workplace systems and organizational change in unionized organizations
  • Adept skills in facilitating interest-based problem-solving in designing high-performance work processes
  • A contemporary, balanced framework for structuring and facilitating the negotiation of labor-management agreements
  • Rich experience and insights into developing trust-based capacity in unionized organizations

 

Record of Success:

  • Pressed to reduce cost-per-pound of product to remain competitive, a food manufacturer and its union was assisted by JLMI to redesign work; resulting in significant reductions in cost-per-pound, increased capacity, capital investment, and employment security.
  • Facing closure of its distribution center due to costly inefficiencies in its work processes and supply chain, JLMI facilitated a joint union-management continuous improvement initiative; resulting in streamlined operations, elimination of substantial waste, improved customer satisfaction, and significant cost savings.
  • Seeking to establish a system-wide high-performance work team system throughout its operations, JLMI worked with managers and multiple union leaders of a large auto assembly complex; resulting in a jointly agreed upon framework and implementation plan to deploy the new work team system in each facility.
  • Struggling to successfully implement a merger among hospitals, JLMI facilitated a restructuring process involving hospital executives, physicians, nursing managers and three unions; resulting in a successful restructuring and organizational changes that aligned utilization and capacity, substantially reducing inefficiencies and costs, and achieving high patient satisfaction.

 

Faculty:

The JLMI faculty team hold advanced graduate degrees in labor relations, adult education, and organizational development. Each team member has at least 20 years of experience working in unionized organizations.