Sunday 6 November 2011

The right to manage

One of the frequent comments made after the recent Qantas dispute was that employers manage an enterprise, not employees. I think this is bullshit and I had hoped this sort of ideology had disappeared over the last decade.

Everyone who works for a company is an employee. Companies, or more specifically their management, who take the view that it's the role of management to manage and employees to do as they're told are probably not going to maximise returns to their shareholders. Organisations work best when there's a cooperative approach, not a culture of mistrust.

George Megalogenis makes the comment in That stale old 70s IR debate again that:
Herein lies the rub of globalisation. If Australia wants to remain on the right side of history, labour and capital have to continue to co-operate as they did during the GFC.
Edit 21/11: Ross Gittens notes that Change is worker's only certainty and looks at how structural change generally makes us all better off. However, such changes may be quite disruptive to some people:
The trouble with structural change, of course, is that the benefits go to the customers - new products, wider choice, lower prices - while all the problems go to the people working in the disrupted industries.
He then looks at Qantas. Qantas is being forced by the market to undertake radical changes. However, the costs of these changes are being resisted by it's employees:
Half the trouble at Qantas is the employees' failure to recognise how the game has changed for their company, robbing them of their former bargaining power. The other half is the arrogance of management in their resort to ''managerial prerogative'', in their failure to explain and debate the new realities with their staff.

It's painfully clear management-employee relations within Qantas are utterly poisonous. The blame for that should be shared equally. The fate of Qantas is important in its own right, but it's more important as a case study in how big, unionised companies cope with structural change.

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