From Collective Bargaining to Strategic Partnership

The thought

Industrial relations are critically important today for both employees and businesses. Alongside harmonious working relations, they are central to business survival, productivity, investment and employment.

When the trade union, employer, managers, employees and representatives work together with the right understanding, they can help prevent a struggling business from closing and contribute to its renewed growth. By contrast, a poorly managed collective bargaining process or persistent discord in industrial relations can affect the business’s sustainability, investment decisions and whether investment remains in the country where it is located.

Modern industrial relations are therefore a matter of survival and productivity. They require us to consider the future of the business and the future of the employee within the same frame.

Why it matters

We might ask: ‘How can a trade union contribute to a business, investment, growth and employment?’ Its contribution can be considerable: through ideas for improving productivity, supporting employees’ development, strengthening the culture of occupational health and safety, and bringing all of this into a strategic collective agreement through a modern approach to industrial relations.

The role of collective agreements also needs to be reconsidered in this light. Alongside setting pay and employee benefits, they can support the productivity the business needs, employees’ creative and innovative contributions, and shared ownership of future strategies. They can become strategic, collective agreements that take employees’ needs into account and strengthen their development.

At the heart of this approach is a mutually reinforcing cycle. Strategic, collective agreements strengthen the business, creating firmer foundations for investment, competitiveness, sustainability and employment. The value created also returns to employees: as development, capability, sustainable employee rights and entitlements, trust and a stronger future. As employees grow stronger and develop, their sense of belonging deepens and their contribution increases. That contribution, in turn, strengthens the business.

As the business grows stronger, employees grow stronger; as employees grow stronger, the business grows stronger. Strong employees and strong businesses mean strong industry and a strong economy.

From experience

When the relationship comes to life only at the negotiating table, each round begins from positions shaped by what happened — or did not happen — in the preceding months. Trust, or its absence, arrives at the table already formed.

In environments with large blue-collar workforces, the quality of everyday dialogue often shapes negotiations more than any single proposal. When problems are raised and addressed early, fewer accumulate into demands. When information is shared regularly, fewer discussions begin with suspicion.

To sustain this dialogue and enable negotiations to produce effective outcomes, joint working groups, productivity committees and collective working mechanisms should be developed and strengthened. Their value becomes clear when they bring issues from the workplace onto the agenda, develop solutions together and follow through on the results of decisions taken.

This requires listening more closely to people on the shop floor. Solutions are not developed only at negotiating tables, in meeting rooms or in offices. The real value lies in the information, ideas, experience and suggestions that flow from the shop floor to the negotiating table. A difficulty employees notice in their daily work, an improvement they suggest or an experience they share can be the starting point for an important advance in productivity, safety and working conditions.

Building on the thought

Employers, trade unions, managers, representatives and employees can make a difference in industrial relations if they move away from viewing problems as being between the two sides and develop an approach centred on shared topics they can work on together.

This perspective makes it possible to create a shared working agenda to which each party can contribute through its own responsibilities.

A collaborative approach does not mean the absence of disagreement. Management and trade unions may represent different legitimate interests; those differences deserve respect. Collaboration means recognising that, alongside those differences, there are shared interests in the sustainability of the business and the quality of working life, and that both can be worked on deliberately.

A practical starting point is to choose a concrete topic whose importance both parties recognise: productivity, skills development, the organisation of work or occupational health and safety. Work based on shared information, with clear responsibilities and results that can be tracked, develops the capacity to create value together. This experience also strengthens the foundations for subsequent negotiations.

Strategic partnership means being able to turn the agreement reached at the table into generating ideas together in the workplace, creating value and sharing the value created. The collective agreement is an important stage in this cycle; the cycle does not end when the agreement is signed.

The negotiating table matters. So does everything that happens before and after it.