{"id":359,"date":"2009-12-01T16:51:45","date_gmt":"2009-12-01T20:51:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/businessconflictmanagement.com\/blog\/?p=359"},"modified":"2009-12-01T16:51:45","modified_gmt":"2009-12-01T20:51:45","slug":"symposium-on-employee-dispute-resolution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.businessconflictmanagement.com\/blog\/2009\/12\/symposium-on-employee-dispute-resolution\/","title":{"rendered":"Symposium on Employee Dispute Resolution"},"content":{"rendered":"

The firm of Ogletree Deakins <\/a>and St. Louis University <\/a>recently held an all-day Employee Dispute Resolution Symposium <\/a>at the University’s very beautiful Busch Student Center<\/a>.\u00a0 The proceedings were well-attended and it was a privilege for me to be invited to present the opening remarks.<\/p>\n

The comments of the\u00a0various speakers, many from in-house corporate programs and some from outside attorneys, suggested that the “center” has shifted over the past few years, and that comprehensive conflict management programs that seriously address employee concerns rather than gearing up for employment arbitration are very much the norm these days.<\/p>\n

In 2001, when CPR Institute published my book How Companies Manage Employment Disputes<\/a>, it was news that some forward-looking companies concentrated their efforts on problem identification, peer review, open door policies, mediation, and other problem-solving efforts rather than on alternatives to litigation.\u00a0 Companies like Johnson & Johnson, Halliburton and Shell were considered pioneers because they encouraged employee participation in non-adjudicatory processes aimed at addressing and correcting employee concerns.\u00a0<\/p>\n

This was a time when the paradigm was to shift employment claims away from court and into arbitration.\u00a0 Those of us attorneys who were active in the area were looking at the progeny of Gilmer<\/a>, and parsing the various Circuit City<\/a> and Hooters<\/a> cases to find out how to frame an arbitration program that would survive judicial challenge.\u00a0 This was also around the time that the AAA’s\u00a0Due Process Protocol<\/a> was promulgated.\u00a0 The emphasis was on how to arbitrate employment claims, and survive judicial scrutiny in doing so, not how to manage workplace problems.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, under the leadership of Chairman Jay Waks<\/a>, the CPR Employment Committee<\/a> kept chugging away at the far end of the spectrum.\u00a0 A few years later, CPR published a companion volume, Resource Book for Managing Employment Disputes<\/a>, on the ground that certain techniques of employment dispute management were not well understood and needed to be explained at greater length.\u00a0 In that book, various practitioners within enterprises discussed aspects of their programs in detail: Jeanne Mathews of GE explained tiered prgram design; Mary Rowe of MIT and Wilbur Hicks of Shell described how institutional Ombuds offices worked; Donna Malin of Johnson & Johnson wrote about Open Door programs; Nancy Vanderlip of IT&T explained how Peer Review Boards worked; and so on.<\/p>\n

Judging from the St Louis Symposium, all this is now well established and in the mainstream of practice.<\/p>\n

In the first panel, Tracy Poole of Johnson & Johnson, Brad Greene of Gexpro and Trip Gregory of Palmetto Health offered three contrasting stepped programs, some culminating in arbitration and some not, but all aimed at resolving employee disputes early.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Lance Witcher<\/a> of Ogletree Deakins took note of some pending federal legislation <\/a>and a recent Missouri intermediate appellate opinion <\/a>to suggest that\u00a0employment arbitration might be “riding a wave” of hostility.\u00a0 His advice to systems designers was a model of conservative precaution, emphasizing mutuality, neutrality, no unreasonable limitations on discovery or remedies, no additional filing fees, no abbreviated limitations periods — a handy and concise collection of eminently useful tips.<\/p>\n

Richard Ross, formerly head of the employment program at Anheuser Busch, discussed a variety of aspects of this company’s splendid program, but his conclusions were essential.\u00a0 As a practical matter, some court somewhere will disallow some aspect of any program, he said.\u00a0 Don’t devote your resources to fighting that.\u00a0 Use your resources instead to earn the trust of your employees and to provide incentives for them to use the program.\u00a0 So many problems will be fixed\u00a0when people use the program that you will want to capture those savings, not spend on the tiny proportion of challenges to it.<\/p>\n

More reports were given by Chevon Fuller of Boeing, Melanie Lewis of Coca-Cola Enterprises and Melissa Ingalsbie of Darden Restaurants.\u00a0 A special note was made by Jeremy Williams of Darden, who recounted\u00a0that he realized that the company’s dispute resolution program did not accurately reflect the ethnicity and race of the population of 16,000 employees the program was meant to serve.\u00a0 He stated unequivocally that the company was proactively seeking to ensure more diversity in its ADR efforts<\/a>.\u00a0 This is a topic on which I have worked for years, and unfortunately it remains as urgent now <\/a>as it was several years ago<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The Symposium was co-sponsored by AAIM Management Association <\/a>and the Association of Corporate Counsel-St. Louis<\/a>.\u00a0 All of the organizers should be very pleased with their work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A recent Symposium at St. Louis University convened many of the leading administrators and designers of employment dispute programs, and demonstrated that the state of the art has greatly advanced even in the past five years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,21,24],"tags":[22,23],"class_list":["post-359","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-conflict-resolution","category-employment","category-systems-design","tag-employment","tag-systems-design"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.businessconflictmanagement.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/359","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.businessconflictmanagement.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.businessconflictmanagement.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.businessconflictmanagement.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.businessconflictmanagement.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=359"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.businessconflictmanagement.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/359\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.businessconflictmanagement.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=359"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.businessconflictmanagement.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=359"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.businessconflictmanagement.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=359"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}