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Just phone your strikes in here

by Gary Furlong

Recently, I was asked by The Network to contact CBC Radio, as they were looking for a mediator or dispute resolution "expert" for the Ontario Today phone-in show. The topic was to be the issue of labour strikes and how useful they are, since everyone was anticipating not only a september teacher's strike in the high schools, but also the looming threat at a pilot's strike at Air Canada.

When I phoned the host of the show, Gerald Graham (Gerald was filling in for the regular host, Dave Stevens), he told me that the question they were going to the public with was this: "Have strikes outlived their usefulness as a way to resolve labour disputes?" The subtext to this was really the question, "Are strikes good?"

Gerald and I had an interesting discussion about this issue and how he wanted to present it to callers, which raised an even more significant question for me, namely, "Are radio call-in shows good places to discuss the value and effectiveness of dispute resolution processes?"

To the (CBC's and Gerald's credit, their goal was to create a balanced forum to talk about strikes and dispute resolution. To that end, rather than have a partisan guest (such as a labour leader or a government minister) who would advocate one point of view and antagonize others, they invited a neutral to address the issue on the show.

The show itself highlighted one of those Blinding Flashes of the Obvious (BFO's) that seem to crop up frequently in my life: the callers to the show were focused on and driven by values issues more than anything else. They saw labour management issues primarily from a values point of view, and therefore saw no end to the use of strikes in labour management.

Caller after caller, for example, described current labour problems with statements like, "Clearly, management's job is to maximize shareholder profit at the expense of the workers," and "You can't reason with a government like the Harris government." It was clear that most callers were calling to express their own values, and to express dismay that the other party had values that were clearly less "good" than their own.

For me, this BFO served to remind me that, as practitioners, the most important aspect of our work is often to help parties deal with these deep values issues; if the deep values issues didn't exist, they simply wouldn't need the help of a third party like ourselves. Since values are the foundation upon which most of our lives rest, it's no surprise that values underlie many disputes, especially the ones that end up needing more formal dispute resolution interventions.

To get back to my other question, "Are radio call-in shows good places to discuss the value and effectiveness of dispute resolution processes?", my jury is still out.

In most cases, the callers were less interested in exchanging ideas than on having their say in a large public venue (a loftier version of the soapbox in Hyde Park). Indeed, the call-in seemed to be biased toward getting as many people on the air as possible, rather than sticking with an interesting or important idea and developing it. (That said, the host did at times pick up on larger themes and ideas, and spend a few moments exploring them during the show.) While more than once more people got a chance to have their say (and frequently repeat what had already been said), it became clear that little real dialogue on the issue would take place.

A day after the radio show, I was thrilled to find out that the whole experience was extremely successful by one classic mediator standard: in the volume of phone calls and e-mails that came in after the show, the host and I had apparently managed to equally upset people on all sides of the issue. And thus it was deemed a success.

Gary T. Furlong is a mediator, trainer and consultant in dispute resolution. Gary has mediated extensively in labour relations matters, and conducts research with the Queen's Industrial Relations Centre.