Employers should strive for 'real' partnership by making trade unions part and parcel of the workplace community, writes Mike Jennings.
I recently talked to an employer who is very taken with the notion of "partnership" in the workplace and who made no secret of the fact that he sees it as infinitely preferable to what he called "the old-fashioned, adversarial model of trade union bargaining".
He told me that, as his contribution to trying to support this "modern way of resolving conflicts", he deliberately is more accommodating over issues raised through the partnership forum rather than by shop stewards through the industrial relations procedure. "It's my practical way of demonstrating that there is a better way to do things," he said.
Listening, I thought of the example of the man who, having left home earlier than usual one morning decides to use his extra time to allow him to play "Mr Nice Guy" on his trip to work.
He stops at every orange light. He obliges all other motorists at every opportunity. Indeed, at intersections he generously gives way to not one, not two, but three, or more surprised but delighted drivers queuing to get in to the bumper-to-bumper traffic flow.
Our hero is feeling as virtuous as St Francis of Assisi when, to his amazement, he hears a loud blasting of car horns behind him and an angry voice roars from the queue behind "Hey! Mother Teresa, we're trying to get to work too!!!"
Being generous is all well and good, but if you display your generosity selectively don't be surprised if you end up causing offence to those who feel slighted.
So how is this little parable relevant to our partnership-loving employer? Well the obvious lesson is that he is risking causing resentment amongst his neglected shop stewards. But, on a deeper level, he is probably undermining his own stated aim of fostering a spirit of partnership. Will workers really accept as genuine, displays of respect distributed solely on the employer's terms and not otherwise?
In any conflict between employer and employee , the employer always starts off with an advantage - the very fact of being the other party's employer, the signer of their pay cheque. Workers seek to redress this imbalance by acting collectively. They use trade unions, not only to help them better express their case, but to put an equality of economic power into the equation. The "equalisation of power" is delivered by the ability, if necessary, to inflict retaliatory damage on the employer usually through taking, or threatening, industrial action.
Telling your employees that you will treat them with respect, but only outside a mechanism where they have independent or balancing power is a bit like putting up a sign which says "all workers will be treated with respect ... at the tradesman's entrance".
I believe - though it sounds like a paradox - that all genuine trade unionists should look forward to the day when trade unions will no longer be necessary. That we will get to a day when people are treated fairly and with respect because they deserve it and not because they have the economic muscle to demand it.
This same idealism underpins the analogous desire to build a society where policemen and armies are unnecessary and superfluous.
However, in the meantime, given the number of bad guys out there in the real world we are wise if we don't divest ourselves of our means of protection just yet.
After decades of displays of active hostility by employers towards all forms of trade union organisation it is perfectly understandable that many workers would be suspicious of new concepts of "partnership" being promulgated by employers. If the leopard hasn't changed his spots is there a justification for the belief that we are perhaps witnessing an attempt to kill off by kindness defensive structures which have withstood countless campaigns of "union-busting"?
The way to convince workers that the employers are serious about building real partnership would be to invite workers into the tent "fully armed" as it were, that is fully represented and empowered by their trade union affiliation.
Yet this is not the route chosen by most Irish employers. Employers' hostility to trade unions and trade unionists' suspicion of partnership has created a situation where, in many workplaces, there are two structures in operation - the partnership forum and the traditional industrial relations procedure. And it has become the norm, somewhat illogically and self-defeatingly, that understandings are given to the effect that partnership bodies will not "encroach" into the area of industrial relations.
Predictably, few intelligent workers who have the option of being represented by a trade union (and, in reality, not all do have this option - but that's another story) would allow major, crunch issues such as pay and discipline and other "hard" industrial relations issues to be decided in a forum in which they are not allowed to rely on the support and power that union membership gives them.
So, inevitably, many partnership forums are reduced to talking shops discussing relatively minor or trivial workplace issues. Or, when they do discuss core, important issues, this gives rise to a suspicion that the forum is being used as a means of "showing up" or discrediting the in-house trade union. Either way, this is a wasteful way to do business.
So what is the answer?
I believe employers who see partnership as an alternative to trade unions are missing the point and engaging in an inevitably futile exercise. What they should be striving for is the creation of a "real" partnership which recognises that trade union membership is for employees a logical and necessary counterbalance to the inherent economic power enjoyed by the employer.
Instead of competing with - and trying to sideline trade unions, wise employers should try to make these unions part and parcel of the workplace community. A partnership of equals is at the end of the day the best and possibly the only viable partnership worth having.
And I still have my dream of a world without policemen or armies.
Mike Jennings is a SIPTU official