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Collective Bargaining with Sloan Professor Tom Kochan

Are the current efforts by some governors to eliminate or curtail collective bargaining an attack on workers' rights or fiscal necessity? One of the Institute's key thinkers and a national expert in this area, Professor Thomas A. Kochan of the MIT Sloan School (bio below), offered his thoughts and answered questions submitted by the worldwide MIT alumni community on March 21, 2011. Watch the video then join the debate with other alumni.

Thomas Kochan is the George Maverick Bunker Professor of Management at MIT's Sloan School of Management, professor in MIT's Engineering Systems Division, and codirector of both the MIT Workplace Center and the Institute for Work and Employment Research.

In 1973, he received his Ph.D. in industrial relations from the University of Wisconsin and has since served as a third-party mediator, fact finder, and arbitrator and as a consultant to a variety of government and private-sector organizations and labor-management groups—he helped Boston resolve its standoff with the firefighters' union last year, for example.

He has researched a variety of topics related to industrial relations and human resource management in the public and private sector, and he’s written, cowritten, and edited numerous books and journal articles. His most recent books include Healing Together (ILR Press, 2009), about Kaiser Permanente's complex labor-management partnership, and Restoring the American Dream: A Working Families’ Agenda for America (MIT Press, 2005).