Labor Management Relations Act
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| In 1947, Congress passed the Labor Management Relations Act (LMRA), also known as the Taft-Hartley Act, which amended the National Labor Relations Act primarily to impose certain restrictions on the activities of labor unions. The LMRA also imposed upon employers and labor unions a "mutual obligation . . . to meet at reasonable times and confer in good faith with respect to wages, hours, and other terms and conditions of employment, or the negotiation of an agreement or any question arising thereunder." This obligation is known as the "duty to bargain."
The LMRA also established the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service (FMCS), which is an independent federal agency whose purpose is to provide mediation and related services to labor unions and employers who are involved in a labor dispute. The main service provided by the FMCS is mediation. If requested by parties to a labor dispute, the FMCS will provide free mediation. Mediators take a completely neutral stance in the dispute and take no role in the decisionmaking process. A mediator's role is simply to facilitate a dialogue between the parties.
The FMCS also provides fee-based arbitration services. In contrast to a mediator, an arbitrator or a panel of arbitrators serves as a surrogate judge and the parties agree to abide by the decision of the arbitrator or arbitrators in the case after hearing all of the evidence and coming to an understanding of the parties relative positions. The FMCS will only provide arbitrators at the request of the parties to the labor dispute.
Even if there is no dispute between the parties to a collective bargaining agreement, the LMRA requires the FMCS to be notified 60 days prior to the expiration of an existing collective bargaining agreement or of a proposed termination or modification of a collective bargaining agreement.
In addition to providing mediation and arbitration services, the FMCS also provides grants for programs designed to improve labor-management relations. Copyright 2010 LexisNexis, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. |