CONVENOR Conflict Management

Description

While many distinguished institutions are represented among those who have been part of this discussion, the result is in no sense an official product of any of them. It is simply an attempt to describe what we think happens and what you as either a researcher or practitioner might want to watch out for. This document is a relatively informal one, and is in no sense intended to forestall the development of more formal protocols when and if national scholarly and practitioner organizations wish to do so — quite the contrary.

Eileen B. Hoffman: FMCS is a major provider of dispute resolution. In the beginning, when the Department of Labor was founded, we were the U.S. Conciliation Service, doing labor mediation, and we had a roster of arbitrators. So we had private citizens on a roster of arbitrators, but fully paid and staffed mediators. (We called them conciliators then.) When we became independent of the Labor Department in 1947, we inherited that same idea of full-time federal employees providing mediation and a roster of private citizens doing arbitration.

As for the first, as a private practitioner, I am quite concerned that agencies seem to think because someone is already on the government's payroll that there is no cost in using their services as a neutral. In fact, Congress appropriated funds to pay that person to perform specific duties that are, I gather by definition given the drift of this discussion, independent of serving as a neutral in the particular dispute. The costs include not only that person's salary, but also their office space, secretary, vacation time, retirement and medical programs, and so on.

While it is never wise to expect too much from a short encounter, our past experience in Theory to Practice "moveable feasts" on other topics has demonstrated that the right group can often get farther in a few hours than one might think. Although a full set of "protocols" was too ambitious a goal for so short a dialogue, a tentative list of "Do’s and Don’ts" for practitioners abroad seemed within reach. This paper describes that tentative list, as created by the 17 people who participated in the discussion.

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