A strike last week by some 29,000 teachers in Chicago pushed long-simmering tensions over deeply divisive school improvement ideas--including changes in teacher evaluation and the takeover or closure of underperforming schools--into the national spotlight. A framework for a tentative agreement emerged last Friday, and the union's house of…

This paper provides a case study of the effect of labor relations on product quality. We consider whether a long, contentious strike and the hiring of replacement workers at Bridgestone/Firestone's Decatur, Illinois, plant in the mid-1990s contributed to the production of defective tires. Using several independent data sources and looking before…

The present study was conceived as a means of gathering basic data on current pre- and post-retirement activities in Metropolitan Chicago. Further, the research was designed to reflect the attitude of the area's business and industrial community toward such programming. Planned in mid-1969, the study was begun officially with the distribution in…

This glossary is designed for practitioners who have no special preparation in public sector labor relations but who must know its vocabulary because of their growing involvement in the field. For those practitioners whose jurisdictions lie within the six midwestern states of Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, and Wisconsin, the names…

This monograph provides comparative data to assist community colleges in analyzing, planning, and negotiating collective bargaining agreements within the context of a comprehensive Contract Item Analysis (CIA) model. In the monograph, the CIA model is applied to agreements reached in the Illinois Community College System (ICCS), although it…

Although Illinois has not enacted a comprehensive bargaining statute, school districts have been using the collective bargaining process to determine teacher salaries, benefits, and conditions of employment for more than a decade. Nevertheless, since the 1977-78 school year, Illinois public schools have experienced 139 teacher strikes. The purpose…

Conclusions about public school labor relations advanced in this report are based on analysis of data from a two-phase study. The first phase consisted of case studies conducted during entire collective bargaining cycles in eight school districts--four in Illinois and four in California. The second phase of the research expanded the work into 65…