CONFLICT AT WORK

Abstract

Conflict at Work With our forthcoming project, CONFLICT AT WORK, our aim is to make a useful and durable contribution to management education in industrial relations. Briefly, the main features of the project are that it is designed for policy‐making and executive levels of management and its purpose is to show the scope for reshaping industrial relations primarily at company and plant level. The themes include union recognition, multi‐unionism, redundancy, procedural change, wage and salary reform, and the roles of the shop steward and the supervisor. The emphasis is on voluntary joint agreements, but the implication of the Industrial Relations Act are spelled out where they have a direct bearing on the issue under discussion. Earlier this year we mounted two special programmes on the Bill and the draft Code of Practice, the films of which have been in great demand by industrial trainers ever since. Because the Act is not central to the CONFLICT AT WORK series, those who are expecting the legislation to be some kind of panacea for their domestic problems are liable to be disappointed. The Act cannot give any simple answers to complex problems. As Dr George Bain says in the opening programme on recognition of white‐collar unions, ‘I think in many ways management may well be expecting the law to do its job for it. The reason that managers are paid well — in most cases at least — is because these are complex decisions which require sophisticated analysis and sound answers. And you simply can't have a mechanistic formula which gives a certain percentage or certain lights which flash which tell you when to take the decision.’

Citation

(1971), "CONFLICT AT WORK", Industrial and Commercial Training, Vol. 3 No. 10, pp. 456-460. https://doi.org/10.1108/eb003164