My last posting described two historical mediators in the public sector. Recent events have brought another mediator to our attention.

The event was the largest strike of 2022 and the largest in U.S. higher education history. Graduate student teaching assistants unions began in the late 1960s at public universities. The overriding issue is whether graduate assistants are primarily students whose teaching and research is part of the academic training or whether they are employees with the right to form unions and bargain collectively.

Late last year 48,000 United Auto Workers unionized graduate student employees at the University of California 10 campuses went out on strike. With an average annual base salary of $24,000 the students were asking for $54,000 plus enhanced benefits including child care subsidies, longer family leave, free public transit, greater job security, and enhanced health care for dependents.

University officials called for mediation but the unions responded with a call for round-the-clock bargaining rather than mediation. University negotiators announced that they would make no new proposals in negotiations unless mediation was agreed to. Later the UC President and union officials agreed to invite Sacramento mayor and former state Senate leader Darrell Steinberg to help to mediate their agreement.

Steinberg met with both sides, listened carefully, and then shuttled offers and counteroffers between the two sides in Sacramento City Hall. In an interview Steinberg did not deny reports that he was ready to walk out without an agreement. He said in the interview, “You get to a point where the parties dig in a little harder, and you have to say, ‘I’m now going to insist that you consider these options—this is it.” Steinberg brought the parties to agreement ending the 40-day walkout.

Mediators know these tools as deadline pressure and WATNA – Worse Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement, that is, what are the consequences of not settling.

Every discipline has its role models and some colorful and effective ones for mediators came from the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service.

Following the creation of the Department of Labor, Congress approved the creation of the U.S. Conciliation Service in 1917, which was later renamed the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service in 1947, the oldest continuing mediation institution in the United States. From its creation, the FMCS provided mediators when labor and management requested assistance. Over the years FMCS mediators refined the process and its model of mediation became the dominant example in the United States.

The first director of the FMCS was Cyrus Ching, a 6 foot 7, pipe smoking Canadian and former labor relations director of the U.S. Rubber Corporation. Ching had a reputation for telling stories and taking long silent breaks to attend to his pipe. Ching said in those breaks he learned things negotiators had not intended to say.

Other distinguished FMCS directors include Bill Usery, appointed director in 1973 after having negotiated contracts with aerospace industries for the International Association of Machinists. His office at the FMCS had a shower stall, a refrigerator (to ice martinis), and a cigar humidor. His mediations are legendary: the first collective bargaining agreement among seven unions in the newly created, semiautonomous U.S. Postal Service; the National Football League pre-season strike; and the 13-month walkout of mine workers in Harlan County, Kentucky. When an extended session between railroad workers and management deadlocked and the parties refused even to talk with each other any further, Usery left the room to have a cigar. He returned wearing a button from the car rental company Avis which read “We Try Harder.”  The parties saw the humor, laughed, and reached a settlement. His reputation, his commitment, the tension release from his unexpected humor—all those and many more factors contributed to his style.

One can learn the mediation process, but mediation is also an art. These historic mediators were masters of the art of the process.