Director's Update

Harry C. Katz is the Director of the Scheinman Institute and the Jack Sheinkman Professor of Collective Bargaining.

While the pandemic has shaken our lives to the core, we at the Scheinman Institute resolutely have stepped up the services we provide to professionals and our students. One way we have adjusted is by shifting our teaching to virtual delivery via zoom classes, webinars, and synchronous workshops.

I complement our faculty and staff for meeting this challenge head on. Yet, providing good teaching is only a part of our mission. As our field predicts, workplace pressures have led to new forms of conflict as employees demand adequate safety protections and a voice in how organizations are restructuring and in some cases shrinking.

While the inevitably of workplace conflict is not new, the shift to virtual workplaces has posed new issues such as how collective bargaining, mediation, and arbitration can continue to operate effectively and fairly. Working with members of our advisory board and with lead practitioners, we have led discussion of how implicit (or explicit) biases arise and ways those biases can be addressed in virtual engagements. Through those discussions and other new programs our faculty are confronting critical challenges raised by the Black Lives Matters movement as well as by the pandemic.

This issue of our e-newsletter marks a transition in the editorial oversight and content focus of the e-newsletter. We are pleased to welcome David Tse and Scarlett Kaufusi as new student editors working under the guidance of Bill Talmadge. They are broadening and deepening the content of the newsletter to include more information about the professional development and research activities of the Institute in addition to our continuing coverage of student activities.

The Institute’s website also is in the midst of a transformation and upgrade. You will see greater coordination in the overage provided in the newsletter and in the content of our website, in part accomplished through a regularly updated blog appearing on our website. As always, we welcome your feedback and advice about our activities and our communications. Stay safe. – Harry