Developing Positive Employment Relations

Offering a critical assessment of the main conceptual debates concerning labour management partnership and cooperation at the workplace, this book evaluates the search for positive employment relations in five countries. The provision of collective employee representation, normally through trade unions, is central to most definitions of labour management partnership, and the aim is to develop collaborative relationships between unions, employers and employee representatives for the benefit all parties.  While traditionally associated with employment relations in the coordinated market economies of the continental European nations, partnership approaches have attracted increasing attention in recent decades in the liberal market economies of the UK, Ireland, USA, Australia and New Zealand. Developing Positive Employment Relations assesses the conceptual debates, reviews the employment relations context in each of these countries, and provides workplace case studies of the dynamics of partnership at the enterprise level.

Stewart Johnstone is Senior Lecturer in Human Resource Management at Newcastle University Business School, Newcastle University, UK. A major strand of Stewart’s research has been the dynamics of employee voice and participation in both union and non-union firms. In particular, his research has examined organizational attempts to develop collaborative workplace relations in pursuit of mutual gains, and assessed the outcomes of such workplace partnerships for employers, employees, and unions.

 Adrian Wilkinson is Professor and Director of the Centre for Work, Organisation and Wellbeing at Griffith University, Australia. Adrian has authored/co-authored /edited twenty books and over one hundred and forty articles in academic journals. Adrian is also (co)Editor-in-Chief of the Human Resource Management Journal (HRMJ), a Fellow of the British Academy of Management, an Academican of the Academy of Social Sciences in the UK and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Social Sciences. 

“We need to start looking at the question of social partnership and social dialogue from a comparative perspective if we are to understand why some systems are more robust than others and why some approaches to partnership lead to better outcomes for both workers and their employers, and indeed society as whole. This book fills an important gap in that it begins to look more closely at what we mean by social partnership and how we can understand what drives it and what configures it in different systems of regulation.  This books includes some of the most important people working on this concept and it is very sensitive to the differences between partnership systems in terms of their form and its content. The debate on social partnership is becoming much more contested due to the pressures on the ability of worker representatives and managers to sustain mutual and long term gains and benefits. This text provides ways we can understand these challenges and the way some systems are more resilient and robust in their development. The book is a vital next step in our understanding of the concepts.” (Professor Miguel Martinez Lucio, Alliance Manchester Business School, The University of Manchester, UK)