Collective Bargaining
Another portion of our practice is representing management in collective bargaining negotiations. We have a national practice representing individual employers and multi-employer groups in bargaining. We represent hotels, casinos, and office building owners; wine and spirits distributors; records distributors; airlines; food service companies; and sports and entertainment companies.
Our approach is to deal professionally and respectfully with unions whenever possible to achieve management’s goals. We believe that confrontations and litigation with unions are often counterproductive to management's objectives and that building a long-term, professional, trust-based relationship with a union is quite often more effective in accomplishing management's goals. Therefore, in cities and industries where unions are strong, we believe that management generally obtains more cost-effective and flexible labor contracts, as well as higher morale and productivity, by working constructively with unions rather than by confrontational tactics. We believe engaging unions to reason with management to solve mutual problems facing the business is usually more productive than brinkmanship. In some cities and industries, of course, this approach is not viable and we advise clients to follow more traditional, confrontational approaches. Stuart Korshak, Rick Kracoff and Bill Glynn are in charge of our collective bargaining practice (see Biographies).