A trade union leader has criticised companies which use a variety of consultants and advisers while denying their employees the right to be advised by a union. Mr Des Geraghty, currently seeking the vice-presidency of SIPTU, the largest Irish-based union, was speaking at a seminar during the Congress of the International Industrial Relations Association in Dublin yesterday.
Human resource managers kept insisting that people were the most important factor in an enterprise, "while consistently investing enormous resources of time and money to resist the right of the same people to trade union representation," he said.
Trade unions in the 21st century must become the focal point for a new social movement upholding the values of solidarity, equality and democracy in the workplace and in the wider community, he said.
Prof Bill Roche, dean of the graduate school of business in UCD, said that optimism about "new industrial relations" has been replaced by a more sober recognition that there had been only limited application of their principles.
The "new industrial relations" as discussed in the 1980s included concepts such as "partnership", new forms of work organisation and investment by companies and public authorities in training.
However, experience showed that this made little progress in the US, and in Europe it was predicted that the "German model" of industrial relations, based on works councils and strong unions, might eventually be undermined in an increasingly open and deregulated single market.
Prof Willie Brown of the University of Cambridge told delegates that the UK had just emerged from 18 years of a government which was distinguished by its hostility to collective bargaining. Eight major Acts were passed to weaken the power of the trade unions.
In that period trade unionisation fell from 50 per cent to 32 per cent, and coverage by collective bargaining from 83 to 45 per cent. There was an enormous decline in strikes, with days lost per 1,000 workers falling from 440 in the early 1980s to 24 in the early 1990s.
However, he said, this actually had little to do with the legislative regime introduced by the last British government. A study of trade union density in the OECD countries showed the UK in 10th place in 1980. It was still in 10th place in 1990.
The changes were primarily the result of economic trends, of globalisation, privatisation and deregulation, he said. There was more competition in certain sectors, and therefore less for the trade unions to share.
However, studies showed that companies where unions existed tended to be more sophisticated in their management than those where they did not, he said.
Some kind of representative organisations were going to be necessary in the future. "How can you run a large, complex organisation without some sort of consultation and some sort of consultative organisation, whether or not it is a trade union?" he asked.
Prof Keith Sisson of the University of Warwick said that he expected initiatives from the EU which would have a profound effect on regulatory systems. Statutory works councils were one possibility.
In its documents on a Europe-wide social model the EU was increasingly representing this not only as a more moral way forward, but as a way of getting management in Europe to change and modernise.
What was emerging from studies, he said, was how little management had changed. It was still hierarchical, there was little teamwork and little partnership.