Developing positive employment relations: International experiences of labour-management partnership

Abstract

Ideas of employee participation and voice have a long history as part of the search for positive employment relations, and have also attracted extensive interest among human resource management (HRM) and industrial relations researchers. In practice, participation can refer to a wide range of approaches and techniques, ranging from direct employee involvement initiatives such as profi t-sharing, quality circles and communication techniques, to giving workers ownership and control of organisations (Wilkinson et al. 2010, 2014a). In between these two extremes is the pluralist idea of representative participation, where the central assumption is that diff erences of interest will inevitably arise in organisations, and that eff ective employee representation is important in attempting to reconcile diff erent interests (Johnstone and Ackers 2015). Historically, collective employee representation would normally be provided by independent trade unions through collective bargaining and joint regulation of the employment relationship.