John Thomas Dunlop - Dispute Resolution in Multiple Fields

Dispute Resolution in Multiple Fields

Along with his service in government, Dunlop practiced dispute resolution in a variety of other areas, pioneering innovative multi-party agreements in a variety of areas. In agriculture, he intervened in an 8-year-old dispute between the Campbell Soup Company, the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC, an AFL-CIO affiliate that organized farm workers in the Midwest) and tomato growers in Michigan and Ohio regarding conditions of work among the migrant workers who worked for growers supplying Campbell’s with tomatoes. Since agricultural workers are exempted from the NLRA, private sector employers are not obligated to recognize unions. In addition, the farm workers were treated as independent contractors to the individual growers supplying Campbell Soup. Growers contended that the prices received for their tomatoes precluded increases in wages or provision of better housing conditions in labor camps.

In 1986, Campbell Soup approached Dunlop to assist them in settling the dispute. Dunlop brought together the parties and fashioned an agreement ending the corporate campaign in exchange for union representation among tomato growers, including a mechanism for union recognition and dispute resolution through a Commission chaired by Dunlop and an equal number of representatives of labor and growers. The agreement also provided growers higher prices in exchange for agreement to bargaining with the union. As a result, the agreement created a private system of union recognition, collective bargaining and dispute resolution accepted by the parties. The agreement soon expanded to include pickle growers and the food processors Vlasic and Dean Foods and has been renewed consistently to the present. In 2003, an agreement between FLOC and the North Carolina Growers Association extending the Dunlop Agricultural Commission model was signed providing the only collective bargaining agreement covering guest workers from Mexico.

In 1979, Dunlop and Harvard University colleague Frederick H. Abernathy (Gordon McKay Research Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Abbott and James Lawrence Research Professor of Engineering), a professor of fluid mechanics, were commissioned by the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union to undertake a summer study of the competitiveness of the men’s suit industry. The study focused on the need to encourage research and development on the creation (and later the adoption) of technology in the textile and clothing sector. Eventually Dunlop’s and Abernathy’s efforts led to the creation of the Tailored Clothing and Technology Corporation 2, a government-business-labor organization, funded cooperatively the three parties. 2 initially funded development of new technologies for the industry. It later turned to a broader focus on encouraging the use of existing technology among clothing manufacturers and textile producers.2 is discussed in the Commentary of Dunlop, Industrial Relations Systems, Revised Edition (Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 1993), pp. 36-37. In 1989, 2 changed its name to the Textile and Clothing Technology Corporation to reflect its expanded mission. The group, now based in Raleigh, North Carolina, remains active in this area.

A final area of innovative dispute resolution arose in Dunlop’s home state of Massachusetts. Following a growing number of disputes and walkouts among police and firefighters in the 1970s, Dunlop mediated an agreement between police and firefighter local unions, an association of municipal governments, and state legislators on legislation to create a tri-partite (labor, public management, with an impartial third party chair, nominated by the two sides and appointed by the Governor) dispute resolution body to handle collective bargaining problems in the sector. The legislation was passed in 1977 creating the Joint Labor Management Committee (JLMC). The vast majority of the more than 1500 disputes handled by the JLMC in its history were done through mediation rather than the final step which imposed a settlement on the municipal executive where the dispute occurred (but not on the legislative body, such as city council or town meeting that appropriates funds).