The “cat fight” does go on in Peoria, as you stated in your March 5 editorial. Concession bargaining has, as you wrote, been a standard bargaining technique used by the major unions, including the United Auto Workers.
But alleged patterns were not limited to use as a “hammer” only with other companies in the same industry, as your editorial stated, and that was at least part of the problem Caterpillar faced in 1991.
Unless my memory is playing very serious tricks on me, the “pattern” the UAW was attempting to force on Cat was a settlement it had just reached with John Deere in the farm implement industry–and that industry has very little to do with Cat and its international competitors.
Thus, pattern bargaining went the way of other bad-faith bargaining techniques at least in part because of global competition, as you have stated. But the real impetus was not provided by unions that had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the late 20th Century. For that we must thank the managements of this country that had to accept strikes and, sometimes, severe economic loss in order finally to bring a modicum of common sense to the collective bargaining table.
