In Search of the Rosetta Stone of the Mediation Profession

Although people have their choice today of an ever-growing number of how-to books and articles about the mediation process, this plenitude was hardly always the case. In fact, back in the early 1950s in the United States, three young mediators with the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service (FMCS) drafted a 62-page memo on the subject of their work which included 120 different techniques of mediation, many of which would be familiar and useful to practitioners today. Their pioneering work, however, was neither recognized nor encouraged by the FMCS; in fact, it was suppressed. This article focuses on the reasons for the suppression of that work, providing an overview of the vast changes that have taken place in mediation's history and the federal labor-management mediation agency over the past half-century.