Manager of Labor and Employment Relations, PSE&G

>> Hi my name is Phil Dwyer. I retired after 37 years with PSE and G. And I left there as the lead for employment and labor relations. And since I retired I joined the fulltime faculty here at Rutgers University. As manager of labor and employment relations it involved a few things. Primarily I would say it focused on 2 areas, negotiations, and conflict resolution. Those are the 2 largest components of the job. So negotiations involved contract negotiations with the union leaders. Day-to-day negotiations that took place to resolve disputes. Other forms of conflict resolution, mediation, arbitration. I would serve as company spokesperson in those venues. On a daily basis I would meet with both senior executives, union leaders, my staff, line managers, to align the interest of all the parties to make sure that we were negotiating agreements that supported the business. We were maintaining good employee relations. We were making sure that employees were focused and rowing in the right direction to please the customer. And that involved a lot of face-to-face meetings. So it was a highly mobile job involving a lot of running around and moving around the state to different locations, which I enjoyed. So I teach labor and employment relations, a number of courses. Conflict resolution. The dynamics of work and work organization which is about teamwork, and also negotiations, which is something I've been dabbling in for many years. I know something about. And we focused primarily on this interest-based negotiations method that I talked about earlier, where the parties seek to gain win-win outcomes and mutual gains from the negotiations process, not just simple negotiations where the parties compromise. So it involves a great deal of creativity and teaching students how to work in the creativity into the negotiation process. It's very rewarding.