The recent strike against United Parcel Service conducted by the Teamsters was seen as both disruptive and successful. It was disruptive to the national shipping patterns and so to business in general, yet the public supported the strikers over the company by a wide margin. This might have changed had the strike continued any longer than it did, but the Teamsters, as led by president Ron Carey, managed to make good use of public sentiment to pressure UPS to settle the strike. From the first, the Teamsters had the high ground given the nature of the dispute and the fact that the public was also concerned about the issue of part-time work and the way companies were using part-time workers to avoid paying full price for full-time employees in the same jobs.
The differences between the two sides at the beginning of the bargaining situation were clear and showed that each had different interests. The Teamsters were able to frame the strike in terms of money and fairness, and the fact that UPS was a rich and powerful company allowed the Teamsters to depict themselves as the underdog. Different theorists describe this sort of situation in different terms. Lewicki, Litterer, Minton, and Saunders (1994) refer to distributive bargaining as a competitive, or win-lose, bargaining approach:
In a distributive bargaining situation, the goals of one party are usually in fundamental and direct conflict with the goals of the other party. Resources are fixed and limited, and each party wants to maximize his share of the resources (Lewicki, Litterer, Minton, & Saunders, 1994, 48).
Fisher, Ury, and Patton (1991) discuss negotiating as a matter of hard bargaining. They divide negotiation into soft and hard negotiation, stating that the soft negotiator wants to avoid personal conflict and so makes concessions readily in order to reach agreement. The authors state that the soft negotiator wants an amicable resolution and so often ends up fe...