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Ways of resolving labor impasses and how these stand towards the National Labor Relations Act are discussed. These are private sector impasse resolution, interest arbitration, and the more-market model, and they take various stands towards the legality of strikes and of replacement employees.

The authors studied labor union policies concerning avoiding the National Labor Relations Board, obtaining first contracts, and servicing members or organizing to obtain new members. The results of their study indicate that modification of policies could result in positive benefits.

Issues concerning the proposed Teamwork for Employees and Management (TEAM) Act are discussed. New Zealand's experience suggests that if the US replaces the National Labor Relations Act with a system of labor-management cooperation with the TEAM Act, it will not achieve the goals advocates of participatory management seek and might even harm training, competitiveness and productivity.

The year 1997's labor law developments in privatization can be divided between National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and court cases and efforts at legislative reform. NLRB decisions show public sector unions' worry that privatization saves money by lowering salaries and reducing benefits and that this is often achieved by deunionizing. If privatization occurs largely to deunionize, a union's demand for continued recognition during privatization may make it a less attractive option. Privatization is sure to have negative impacts on public employees' jobs and on public services.

The National Labor Relations Act collective bargaining doctrine of implementation has been over-applied since the mid-1980s, resulting in an erosion of the balance of power between labor and management. The doctrine, allowing employers' unilateral implementation of their final offers where bona fide extended impasses have occurred, has become the rule rather than an exception. Legislative action addressing the resolution of impasses is necessary to halt employers' bad faith bargaining allowed under this doctrine.

The employer in the US Supreme Court case NLRB v. Town & Country Electric, Inc and Ameristaff Personnel Contractors, Inc was inadequately prepared to argue the case and failed to adopt a reasonable strategy, leading to a loss. The issue of the case involve a union employee working for a non-union company while receiving funds from the union for organizing the non-union company. Instead of focusing on the employee's divided loyalties, the employer's brief reiterated facts and credibility questions and avoided all the difficult issues.

New Zealand's Employment Contracts Act 1991 (ECA) has brought sudden change to the labor market in New Zealand by allowing employees to negotiate directly with employers, and the challenges that New Zealand unions have faced may be instructive for US unions. ECA enactment has resulted in sharp declines in union membership and has increased unemployment. The free market principles of the ECA have shifted bargaining power into the hands of the largest party, which is usually the employer. Some unions have weathered the ECA through effective organizing and representation.

Finding ways for the NLRB to function as it is supposed to under the National Labor Relations Act would do more for industrial relations than reforming labor law. Employers know they can probably get away with violating labor law since the NLRB is not doing its job effectively. The NLRB would improve if it focused more on quality of investigations than on meeting time targets, made greater use of its subpoena power, fashioned new remedies for unfair labor practices rather than using boilerplate complaints and put more field office supervisors into investigatory work.

The NLRA was enacted to promote collective bargaining. Judicial and NLRB interpretations that allow an employer to implement its final offer after reaching an impasse with union negotiators subvert the purpose of labor law and allow employers to use collective bargaining to deunionize.

Discusses a work environment without unions in New Zealand. Concern in the United States about the decline of unions; NZ's Employment Contracts Act (ECA); ECA view of the interests of employer and employee as naturally unitary and beneficial to both; View of unions as source of labor-management conflicts; Decline in union membership and density due to ECA; ECA attitude toward unionism.