Collaborative Workplace Option

Clive Thompson

Description

This short book is a guide for parties who want to explore, develop or strengthen a more cooperative model of workplace relations. The focus is on the unionized workplace but the insights are relevant to all workplaces where stakeholders want to engage for mutual gain. It is written principally for an Australian audience, but the principles are universal.

Sujets

• Gestion et management
• Industrial relations

Informations

• Publié par: Siber Ink Publishers
• Date de parution: 16 mars 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781928309192
• Langue: English

Extrait

THE COLLABORATIVE WORKPLACE OPTION


The Collaborative Workplace Option
INTEREST-BASED BARGAINING, CONSULTATION AND PROBLEM-SOLVING: A GUIDE FOR PARTIES AND PRACTITIONERS
C LIVE T HOMPSON
J EROME T B ARRETT
J OHN O’D OWD
2018



First published 2018
by

SYDNEY & Cape Town
Trade enquiries: [e-mail]
© Clive Thompson, Jerome T Barrett, John O’Dowd
ISBN 978-1-928309-17-8 (Print edition) ISBN 978-1-928309-18-5 (PDF ebook) ISBN 978-1-928309-19-2 (EPUB format)
This book is an update and extension of Interest-Based Bargaining by Jerome T Barrett & John O’Dowd (Trafford, 2005)
This book is copyright under the Berne Convention. In terms of the Copyright Act 98 of 1978 no part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.
Siber Ink CC, PO Box 30702, Tokai 7966, South Africa
Typesetting and cover by G J du Toit


Preface

Collaboration is a matter of choice. One might think inherently so, but in fact there are societies and frameworks which pretty much oblige people to engage intensively — to work together. Not so in Australian workplace relations. Cooperation is talked up, but not directed. It is an option, and one that can only be exercised jointly. Even the first overtures must be by agreement. So a case for collaboration needs to be made, good enough to persuade not just a party but the parties. And the case needs to be made repeatedly: at the inception of the inquiry, as the project gets underway, as agreements are implemented and with ever-changing circumstance after that. And circumstances change all the time, year-in and year-out. In a sceptical world, collaboration is a demanding option.
This short book is intended to serve as a guide for parties who want to explore, develop or strengthen a more cooperative model of workplace relations. The focus is on the unionized workplace but the insights are relevant to all workplaces where stakeholders want to engage for mutual gain.
The text is directed towards an Australian audience, but is in fact the remoulding of a guide first produced by Jerome Barrett and John O’Dowd for trans-Atlantic and especially Irish readers. 1 Which is another way of saying it is intended for general application. It may be a bit of a stretch to say the lessons are timeless and universal, but they certainly reach out and across.
Workplace bargaining is a major theatre of employer-employee engagement, and so rightfully enjoys a great deal of attention in what follows. There are a variety of ways in which bargaining can be played out, and a particular country’s industrial history usually explains why the prevailing model is what it is. This Guide looks at the range of possibilities but puts centre stage the approach known as ‘interest-based’ bargaining (IBB). The idea with IBB is that parties should set out to identify and work at their — and their counterparts’ (and this is important) — underlying needs rather than hammering away at their competing positions. To the extent they can achieve this, a more productive dialogue and better results can be had.
There is an assumption here: there are generally more shared than conflicting interests in most democratic societies with developed economies. So it makes sense to search out and grow these common interests. Conflict is there, too, and needs to be intelligently managed. Better still, reconciled.
Bargaining for the purpose of achieving collective agreements is not the only terrain of engagement, of course. Employers and employees are in almost continuous communication interspersed with consultation, for better or for worse. The subject matter of these exchanges can range from day-to-day operational matters through to major workplace changes. An interest-based approach can make a positive difference here, too. And therefore this text also has things to say on how attuned consultation can complement interest-based bargaining.
It is common today for unions and employees to be genuine and explicit in their desire to see businesses and public sector organizations succeed. The class rhetoric of yesteryear is often absent or at least muted. Employers regularly make the case for shared interests as well. However, it turns out that the apparently common sense activity of promoting mutual gains in the workplace is difficult to get going and very difficult to sustain. This Guide tries to make it all a little easier. The quest is worth it.
Inevitably, there are caveats. The workplace contexts where an interest-based approach can bring benefits have their limits. In particular, it will struggle to deliver shared rewards where there are marked power imbalances. Stand-alone, it is not an approach with promise for vulnerable workers.
* * *
The original edition of this work had an ‘Irish-American’ raison d’être. Why the need for an Australian sequel? Australia, naturally enough, has its own unique workplace relations context, and if a mutual gains approach is to get any serious local purchase, the recipe will need to be tailored.
The centralized system of wage setting in Australia was overturned with the advent of enterprise bargaining from the early nineties onwards. Employers and unions found themselves, fairly suddenly, in different engagement space and in need of new skills and approaches. There were two strands of history to draw on, one cooperative and one adversarial.
During the eighties a number of formal social compacts — the Accords — were struck between the Labor government and the Australian Council of Trade Unions, bolstered by support from some key employer organizations. The essence of these macro-level deals was that unions would exercise wage restraint and focus on productivity in return for job and social security. This was accompanied by pioneering workplace partnership efforts at some of the country’s largest and most well-known corporations.
The Accord spirit broke down as the rigours of globalization began to make their domestic impact in the early nineties, along with the deprivations of a punishing recession. The arrival in 1996 of a new federal government with a different worldview sealed the end of the chapter. Employers were now given a legislative invitation to disengage with unions and to forge direct, unmediated relationships with their employees.
Many employees and unions had, in any event, formed the view that cooperation had not worked for them, that they had been co-opted into someone else’s agenda. At the same time, the comfort for unions of a guaranteed role in the setting of terms and conditions of employment through centralized awards was being eroded by the enterprise bargaining innovation and new legislated space for individualized contracting. In such beleaguered times, the reflex was to draw on a settled labour tradition: hard bargaining.
Positional bargaining is in fact the stuff of the Australian industrial relations legacy. The ‘ambit’ claim — the making of an industrial demand of such extravagance that no employer could meet it — was needed in earlier times to attract the conciliation and arbitration jurisdiction of the federal tribunal. The ‘log of claims’ mentality of yesteryear was extended effortlessly into the emerging era. Before the nineties had run their course, enterprise bargaining and adversarial bargaining had become largely synonymous.
But for the reasons already touched on and to be expanded on later, positional bargaining comes with serious limitations in a world that demands sophisticated solutions. Some unions and employers became simultaneously disenchanted with the stock engagement (and disengagement) patterns, and began looking for alternatives. The Fair Work Act of 2009 has something to offer in this regard. Like its predecessors, it advocates workplace cooperation in its objects statement, even if the rest of its provisions do not do enough to fortify that aspiration.
A great many workplace actors are happy to affirm their general support for a more cooperative model of workplace relations. Its objectives appear laudable and its features sensible. Experience on the ground, though, shows that the understanding is superficial and the commitment tenuous. Many employer and union negotiators are trained and steeped in traditional negotiation; few have had exposure to collaborative problem-solving. Behind mutual gains is a logic that drives sharing in the economy. The appetite for sharing amongst those with labour market power and influence has limits; limits which can be reached all too quickly when tested.
There is, though, a thin seam of executives, managers, HR practitioners and unionists who really do appreciate the strength and virtue of the mutual gains model. There is also a modest number of facilitators, mediators, lawyers and other consultants with expertise and experience to support the workplace actors.
Given the legislative, cultural and institutional deficits, employers and unions who want to forge stronger relations must do so largely autonomously. They do not have too many home-grown precedents to draw on. The mutual gains encounters out there are scattered, incomplete and often ephemeral. This Guide is intended to draw the threads together, and to flag that there is in fact a coherent alternative to the often combative, often dulled mainstream. There are also the makings of an alternative community, one with ambitions to become more commonplace, perhaps even best practice.
The assembly process for enterprise workplace agreements is extensively regulated in Australia. There are rules to trigger its pursuit, shape its contours and signal its end. A tidy body of law around the good faith bargaining requirements has