Management Attitudes Towards Unions in the Australian Automobile Industry: A Gap Between the Rhetoric and the Reality?

Abstract

It has been argued that with a decentralised IR system, and unions absent from the workplace there will be a rise in employee commitment to the organisation and an increase in productivity. Other research indicates that union membership and employee participation programs that are administered jointly with unions are positively associated with job satisfaction and organisational commitment, improvements in product quality, and performance improvements. To discover if a gap exists between the rhetoric and reality of managerial attitudes and practice research was undertaken in three Australian companies. The findings show that a pluralist collectivist view outweighs that of unitarist individualism.