Labor Secretary Robert Reich has been urging labor and management to stop acting like blood enemies and join forces for the good of the company and the economy.
It's a sound piece of advice, one that seems to work well in Japan and other nations with high-quality products and services.The problem in this country is that American labor law tends to promote adversarial relationships between workers and managers, making it difficult for the rank and file to commune with their bosses except in a collective bargaining confrontation.
Much of the law was written in the 1930s, when companies and unions often were at each other's throats and the National Labor Relations Board was created to mediate disputes and keep the peace.
Now we have a situation in which companies are trying to compete for customers here and abroad by setting up committees of workers and managers to improve the quality of their products and services. Give the worker on the assembly line a voice in plant policy and she will do a better job, reformers contend.
Trouble is, a strict interpretation of the National Labor Relations Act sometimes prevents companies from dealing directly with workers - either because they might be trying to keep out unions or because they might be trying to bypass unions already there.
Two recent cases illustrate the point and raise questions about what a company can or cannot do to draw workers into decisionmaking.
In a 1992 case involving Electromation, an electrical parts company in Elkhart, Ind., the NLRB ruled the company had set up "sham unions" in the form of action committees to discuss such topics as smoking and absenteeism. The ruling didn't outlaw all talks between workers and managers, but it failed to specify what talks might be legal.
This year the board ordered the Du Pont Co. to get rid of safety committees and a fitness committee at its Deepwater, N.J., plant because the committees were dominated by management and dealt with issues that should have been left to the chemical workers union.
Brainstorming and suggestion boxes were acceptable, said the ruling, but such topics as incentives and awards were union concerns.
Whether the Clinton administration can clear away some of this regulatory debris remains to be seen. As a first step, the president has created a Commission on the Future of Worker/Management Relations, headed by John Dunlop, a Harvard economist who served as secretary of labor in the Ford administration.
Rules or no rules, it makes little sense to operate companies or government agencies as though the workers are an alien force and must be approached through intermediaries who speak their language.
In a competitive economy, the fate of the worker is tied to the fate of the company. To cling to the old tradition of us-against-them is a luxury companies and unions no longer can afford.