1993 Employee Presentation - Alternatives and Future Directions

Abstract

Arguably the concept most central to the field of industrial relations is employee representation. The field was founded in the early 1920s by progressives in both academe and the business world who were repelled by the inefficiency, inequity, and authoritarianism that permeated the workplace of that era. Their desire was to use scientific investigation to discover new methods, institutions, and principles that could resolve these problems and thus create a "win-win" outcome of higher productivity, profits and wages, and more harmonious relations between employ ers and employees.How was this goal to be accomplished? Whatever their other differences, these progressives were united in one fundamental belief-that a prerequisite for improved industrial relations is some form of employee representation or "industrial democracy. " By industrial democracy, the founders of industrial relations had several ideas in mind: that workers should have an explicit voice in the governance and operation of the workplace, that this voice should take a collective form in which the employees designate certain of their colleagues to act as their representatives to management, and that the rights and interests of employees be protected from arbitrary or opportunistic management actions by a workplace system of due process.