Lecture Notes
Okay, so given that the industrial relations perspective is going to guide us through this course, let's just highlight a couple of, a number of critical assumptions associated with the industrial relations paradigm. And just to be clear, as I said on the previous slide, we are all free to adopt, to accept, to agree with whichever one of the paradigms or none of the paradigms that I've talked about, but much of the way I'm going to talk about unions, collective bargaining, labor relations throughout this course is going to be based on these industrial relations assumptions. First, as noted on the previous slide, the industrial relations paradigm believes that labor is more than a commodity, that the skills, the unique skills that employees have that they bring to their organizations are valuable and cannot easily be replaced in the same way that you might replace a widget or a car or any other commodity, that skills are not easily marketable, and it's not always easy to change jobs in the way in which neoclassical economists might tell us; that's assumption number one that's important to keep in mind. Assumption number two that conflict is inherent in the workplace, that conflict between labor and management, between employees and management is an inherent reality in organizations, but despite the fact that conflict is inherent to the workplace, the relationship between labor and management is mixed motive, and this is an important term, mixed motive, it means that there are areas in which unions and management have divergent interests and yet there are areas around which labor and management have common interests, and the goal in bargaining, this is going to be central as we move towards negotiation and bargaining in this course is to figure out where there are divergent interests and where there are common interests and how could those common interests be enhanced. And finally, collective bargaining, labor relations is about multiple interests of employers, employees, unions, government, even though it's not on the slide, and the public.
