WITH FEARS of another devastating grocery strike on the rise in Los Angeles, questions naturally arise. Why aren't both sides more willing to negotiate and find a satisfactory solution? What could possibly bring them to agreement?
People everywhere approach conflicts with an adversarial mind-set, intending to win and make the other side lose. And people everywhere have to learn the hard lesson that in interdependent relationships, as in this case between employees and management at Albertsons, Ralphs and Vons, destructive conflicts almost invariably end in both sides losing. "An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind," as Mahatma Gandhi once observed.
Certainly, you can win battles, but that does not mean you can win wars, as the United States is learning in Iraq. Arguably, the grocery chains got a "better" deal last time around, in 2004, but it was at the cost of a bitter five-month strike, an estimated $2 billion in revenue and a serious long-term loss of market share. And the agreement, because it was unsatisfying to the other side -- the members of the United Food and Commercial Workers union -- only set the stage for another costly strike.
Asking who is winning in this conflict is a useless question. Either both sides "win," in that an agreement meets their essential interests, or neither does.
I once helped mediate a bitter strike at a Kentucky coal mine. Wildcat walkouts, bomb threats, jailings, layoffs of a third of the workforce, and still the union and management would not even sit down together for fear of appearing weak. Gradually, however, patient third-party outreach and creative problem-solving brought about an agreement and a sustained improvement in the relationship between labor and management.
I have seen the same process happen on a societal scale, for instance, in Northern Ireland. The conflict there was widely regarded as intractable, but, as of this month, fierce adversaries Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness are for the first time working together in government. Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland, blacks and whites in South Africa -- all have learned that you cannot win by defeating the other, only by sitting down together at the table to seek a larger prize.
