[Excerpt] The objective of this paper is to investigate what happens during first contract negotiations, especially the unproductive ones that do not result in an agreement. Complete files were reviewed of 54 first contract cases collected by the AFL-CIO Industrial Union Department in 1993. Nineteen of these cases were updated during 1995 with follow-up interviews. Interpretation of the case studies was facilitated by a detailed analysis of 195 responses to a 1994 first contract survey conducted by the AFL-CIO Task Force on Labor Law. The original research was supplemented with a review of recent NLRB decisions on surface bargaining and hard bargaining.