Welcome to Cabot Dow Associates!

Cabot Dow Associates (CDA) is a leader among human resource consultants, specializing in compensation, employee-management relations, labor contract negotiations, alternative dispute resolution and human resource management issues. The CDA consulting practice focuses on compensation, sustaining long-term relationships, balancing employer and employee relations interests, sharing risks, and promoting excellence in the stewardship of financial resources. This focus often involves representing management in bilateral labor negotiations, mediation, and/or interest arbitration.

What is Justice? A resort to the dictates of reason, for example, demands that we be fair to all the details, facts, and people involved in any concrete moral situation. The reasonable person acts like a court of law, trying to be just to both sides of any dispute. In doing so, he or she ignores all questions of character, since all people are equal before the law. – Detrich Bonhoeffer

CDA negotiations consulting has specialized in the public and private sectors of human resource management and labor relations for many years.  

CDA specializes in dispute resolution and often coordinates its work with the employer’s legal counsel, if needed.  The Cabot Dow team specializes in customized area market assessments and compensation projects.  Often this activity is in support of negotiations, mediation and interest arbitration (e.g., to resolve contracts covering electrical workers, police officers, firefighters, ems/als employees, transit operators and other essential personnel).

CDA consulting uses a blend of collaborative and traditional approaches to negotiations.  CDA is daily engaged in developing and following guiding principles established by employers, making labor negotiations plans and pursuing a determined course of action.

CDA consulting has over eighty years of experience in public and private sector management and, specifically, in structuring compensation, negotiations and administration of collective bargaining agreements. Each negotiator and consultant has a broad understanding of dispute resolution and expertise in how private and public agencies operate.  This includes compensation systems, the structure of organizations, the role of elected officials, private boards and public commissions in setting labor policy.

CDA consulting team members are persistent in addressing the need to recruit and retain quality employees, being responsive to customers who are, in turn, responsible for providing professional public and profitable private services — all within a culture of thrift.  Our consulting services help clients successfully navigate a rapidly evolving business and human resources environment, helping clients improve interactions with their most important partners–their customers.