Hello, this is Cameron Hutchinson, CEO, and founder of Hutchinson Group. Good to have you back for another one of our videos. Today, I'd like to talk a little bit about some key points as to how to negotiate win-win competitive labor contracts. Like most things in life, there's a lot more art to science to this, but I'm going to share with you a few things that have helped myself and my group over the years. So the first thing I would say is make sure you review your current contract if you have one. So if it's not a first agreement, go through it carefully. Kind of get a feel for where you've had problems, what's worked well, what needs to be changed. And one of the ways to do this, I found very effective is to get together with your line supervisors, give them a chance to give you some input as to the things that they run into day to day that create problems in terms of productivity, performance and flexibility.
These inputs are usually very, very valuable. So it kind of starts with listening and understanding your current agreement. The other thing to do would be to, in your respective industry, get a sense of what industry best practices are. A lot of labor agreements are 10, 20, even 30 years old. The world has seen a lot of changes, competitors have made a lot of changes. So do a little bit of research and find out what you feel like are best practices. You want to make sure that you remain competitive. Another thing to do is to think about or anticipate what are the union's concerns? Is it strictly wages? Have you had grievances over work practices or things of that nature? So anticipate their concerns and then develop some sort of proposals that you could be prepared to address things with. Or if you know you're not going to be able to address the union's concerns, develop an important rationale.
Now to that point, when you develop your final proposals, two things. One is it's very important to have a strong rationale as to why you want to make changes or introduce something into the agreement. Typically, the party that has the best reasoning or rationale for a change prevails. If one party says, we just don't want it. That's not much of a reason. So be prepared to sort of in detail go through the reasons why a respective change is good for the company and hopefully good for the union and for the employees together. So very, very important. The other thing you want to do at that point is once you've had all your proposals and you develop rationale, you need to sort of prioritize which ones are sort of have to haves. Because typically in a bargaining, you're only going to be able to make so many changes, otherwise it becomes somewhat overwhelming, right?
So prioritize it. Come up with what are my top five things I have to have? And then the next step would be, what are the things that we like to have? Then there could be some long shot provisions there. So those are just some quick tips that we found helpful over the years. Now, once you do get into bargaining and you do get a contract, I'd say the other thing would be help the union out in terms of communication. Once, if you have a tentative agreement with the negotiating committee, you do have to get the broader group of employees together to ratify the contract. And while the union may have spent 3, 4, 5 weeks with you and has a really good understanding as to the issues, when the union presents the contract to the membership, they do it in maybe 45 minutes to an hour. So the communication has to be really crisp and really to the point.
And so I'm not taking the bat out of the hands of the union in terms of their ability to communicate it, but I've always found that if you can give the union some communication materials or find a way to present it, it would make their job easier. And one way I've always liked to do that is when I pushed across our company's last best of final offer, do it with communication materials that they could pick up and they can share with their membership. The very last point here, and I think is a really important one, is once you do have a new contract, it's ratified. Take some time to bring your supervisors in, all your line supervisors and educate them as to, here's the old contract, here are the new contract provisions. Many, many times, supervisors are not unaware of what's been negotiated. And so if we don't put the new rules or practices to effect, it really negates our ability to implement those type of improvements.
So take some time, walk them through answer questions so that they can communicate with their stewards and they can communicate with employees as to what's happening. Many times when I was a young supervisor, you'd have union stewards or officials come up and say, you can't do this. It's not in the contract. You can't do this. It's not in the contract. And because I was not really familiar with the contract, I would say, oh, okay, I didn't know that. And I would go ahead and acquiesce to their position. But had I taken some time to research and really understand the contract, I would've been able to say, no, you're wrong. It's not in the contract. There's no way that I should be inhibited from doing this. So anyway, that's a great way to end up the process. So there's several ideas that I found useful. If you have any questions or you'd like to talk more about how to negotiate and get a new contract ratified, whether it's renewal or a more first agreement, our contact information can be found on our webpage at www.hutchgrouporhutchgrp.com. Please feel free to give us a call or an email and we'll be happy to chat with you on it for a free consultation. So with that said, I hope everybody's doing well and we'll look forward talking to you next time. Bye.
