Developing Positive Employment Relations, 1st ed. 2016 International Experiences of Labour Management Partnership

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.

Part 1: Concepts: Partnership in theory-. Chapter 1: Introduction: In search of good employment relations (Stewart Johnstone and Adrian Wilkinson)-. Chapter 2: Trojan horse or tactic? The case for partnership (Jimmy Donaghey)-. Chapter 3: Why partnership cannot work and why militant alternatives can: historical and contemporary evidence (Andrew Danford and Mike Richardson)-. Part 2: Institutions: Partnership in Context-. Chapter 4: The evolution of participation and partnership in the UK context (Stewart Johnstone)-. Chapter 5: Workplace partnership in Ireland: irreconcilable tensions between an ‘Irish third way’ of voluntary mutuality and neo-liberalism (Tony Dundon and Tony Dobbins)-. Chapter 6: Labour-Management Partnership in the United States:  Islands of Success in a Hostile Context (Adrienne E. Eaton, Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld and Saul A. Rubinstein)-. Chapter 7: Evaluating Social Partnership in the Australian Context (Cathy Xu, Glenn Patmore and Paul Gollan)-. Chapter 8: Battling in a Bleak Environment: The New Zealand Context for Partnership (Helen Delaney and Nigel Haworth)-. Part 3: Cases: Partnership in Practice-. Chapter 9: Partial partnership? The Contradictions of Partnership at PowerCo (Jonathan Hoskin, Stewart Johnstone and Peter Ackers)-. Chapter 10: Workplace cooperation at Aughinish Alumina case (Tony Dundon and Tony Dobbins)-. Chapter 11: The Kaiser Permanente Labor Management Partnership:  1997-2013 (Thomas A Kochan)-. Chapter 12: In search of workplace partnership at Suncorp (Dhara Shah, Cathy Xu, Paul Gollan and Adrian Wilkinson)-. Chapter 13: Improving productivity in Fonterra’s Whareroa site (Helen Delaney and Nigel Haworth)-. 

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.