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Interest-Based Bargaining September 2002 One of the unique services Local 535 trainer Seth Schapiro offers is training and facilitation to set-up and run interest-based bargaining. The City of Berkeley was one of the first employers to utilize this technique. Under this approach, the union and management bring to the table a list of issue statements, with an explanation of why each issue is important. The group brainstorms, looking at the issue from different perspectives, and then attempts a straw design of the solution. From the straw design, they go through several stages, making the design more and more concrete until they resolve the issue. “It’s a consensus-building process,” explains Local 535 field staff Anes Lewis Partridge. “It works well for non-monetary issues. You can discuss the issue from management’s and the union’s perspective and come to a common solution. Then whatever the outcome, there is some buy-in,”she added. ![]() Berkeley Chapter Vice President Sharon Buckner has been in negotiations using IBB twice. “It is a better process to negotiate a contract, because you get the interest as well as the solutions from a joint effort.” For example, in the last contract the city was involved in a project for which they needed to bring in temporary employees outside of civil service. “We went through the history and the interest,” Buckner reports. “The union understood that it was imperative to have temporary employees, but only for a designated amount of time. We agreed to this plan but stipulated that if the employment was for longer than a specified time period, the employees would get permanent positions." One of the reasons for the success of the IBB approach is that Schapiro trained both management and the union together on the process, so they would start with a common understanding. Then he facilitated the procedure to make it work.
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