Negotiating the future

by Barry Bluestone

It is no secret that corporate America is in trouble - as are labor unions - and a principal reason is our archaic system of labor-management relations that excludes labor from participating in, and sharing responsibility for, the growth and profitability of the enterprises for which they work. In a book sure to arouse controversy in both management and labor circles, the coauthor of the widely acclaimed The Deindustrialization of America and The Great U-Turn joins forces with his father, who has spent a lifetime as a union official, to propose a new Enterprise Compact under which labor becomes co-responsible with management for all strategic business decisions - pricing, investment, plant location, and more. The book describes innovative labor-management experiments, including the UAW-GM Saturn automobile project, to show that Enterprise Compacts are not impractical utopias, but promising means for making firms more efficient and profitable, improving employment security and the quali