Labor Arbitration
Labor Arbitration
In the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, Congress declared that arbitration was the “desirable method for settlement of grievance disputes arising over the application or interpretation of an existing collective bargaining agreement” (see National Labor Relations Act). Building from that policy, the Supreme Court has created presumptions favoring a broad judicial interpretation of arbitral authority, and has severely limited the judiciary’s role in reviewing arbitrators’ awards.
Today the overwhelming majority of private-sector collective bargaining agreements provide for grievance arbitration, including cases of employee discipline and discharge. Such agreements typically leave to union discretion the choice of which claims to take to arbitration, but the union is subject to a legally enforceable “duty of fair representation.” In recent years grievance arbitration has also been widely accepted in the public sector. Increasingly, too, compulsory arbitration to establish the terms of a new collective agreement has been used in the public sector.
Arbitrators generally are chosen because they are acceptable to both management and labor. Most are lawyers, economists, educators, or specialists in industrial relations. Some collective bargaining agreements provide for selection of arbitrators according to the procedures of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, the American Arbitration Association, or a state or municipal public-sector labor agency. (1)
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