NationStates Jolt Archive

Howdy people, for anyone who isn't Australia this year we are having a federal election, and our politicians on both sides are stepping up the rhetoric etc, and today I received a Liberal party pamphlet (it was even signed by John Howard.... oh) about my local Liberal candidate, the whole thing was basically trumped up statistics, graphs and cherry picked data to make the government look good. Anyways one graph showed that under the Hawke/Keating Labor years the number of industrial workplaces disputes (that were solved via arbitration) were higher to the only 15 this year. So my question is, are disputes in the workplace, and their arbitration a good thing? Do they show democracy in the workplace and workers wanting better conditions and wages? The pamphlet said that 1000 days were lost to such disputes, but is this a bad thing, do people deserve the right to strike etc?

do people deserve the right to strike etc?

Better question: shouldn't people just quit putzing around with band-aids (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_liberalism) and just solve the problem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autogestion) outright?

I prefer cogestion.

Arbitration just implies that people couldn't settle their difference properly and through discussion and negotiation. Not a good thing, no.

I quite like the old German system for labour relations: the workers always had some number of seats on the board of directors, so they were involved in decisionmaking. That ended up requiring management to work together with the workers in the actual company (not some anonymous union behemoth) - the idea was to get agreements rather than arbitration. Worked quite well too (though it had its drawbacks).