Industrial Relations I: Concept, Scope and Evolution, Approaches, Actors and Models, Conflict and Cooperation, Bipartism and Tripartism, Employers' Organisations, and Industrial Relations in a Changing Scenario

Industrial relations are the relations between employers and employees, and their organisations, and the state, arising out of employment. The ILO describes them as dealing with the relationships between the state and employers' and workers' organisations, or between the occupational organisations themselves. Allan Flanders defined the subject as the study of the institutions of job regulation. Their scope covers the relations of individual workers with management, collective relations between unions and management, trade unionism, collective bargaining, disputes and their settlement, workers' participation, grievance and discipline, labour legislation and the role of the state. Their objectives are industrial peace, higher productivity, fair terms and conditions, industrial democracy and the protection of workers' interests. The indicators of the state of industrial relations are strikes and lockouts, man-days lost, absenteeism, labour turnover, grievances and the extent of collective agreements.

Alan Fox, in a research paper for the Donovan Commission (1966) and later in Beyond Contract (1974), distinguished the frames of reference through which managers and scholars see the workplace. The unitary frame sees the enterprise as a team with one source of authority and common goals; conflict is abnormal, caused by agitators or poor communication, and unions are unnecessary intruders. The pluralist frame, associated with the Oxford school (Allan Flanders and Hugh Clegg), sees the enterprise as a coalition of groups with different interests; conflict is normal and legitimate, and the task is to institutionalise it through collective bargaining and agreed procedures. The radical or Marxist frame (Richard Hyman, Industrial Relations: A Marxist Introduction, 1975) sees workplace conflict as an expression of the class conflict between capital and labour; collective bargaining only manages conflict within capitalism, and the "industrial relations system" is itself a form of control.

• Systems approach: John T. Dunlop, Industrial Relations Systems (1958) — see the next section.
• Human relations approach: from Mayo, the stress on communication, supervision and morale, treating conflict as a symptom of poor human relations.
• Psychological approach: management and labour perceive the same facts (wages, incentives, a new machine) differently, as Mason Haire showed, and conflict follows from those perceptions.
• Sociological approach: industry is a social system; urbanisation, migration, caste, family and social change shape industrial relations.
• Gandhian approach: industrial relations built on trusteeship (the employer holds wealth in trust for society and the workers), non-violence, the worker's right to strike only for just causes and after other means are exhausted, and voluntary arbitration, as in the Ahmedabad Textile Labour Association.
• Strategic choice approach: Thomas Kochan, Harry Katz and Robert McKersie, The Transformation of American Industrial Relations (1986), in which management's strategic choices at three tiers (strategy, collective bargaining and personnel policy, and the workplace) drive change.

John T. Dunlop's Industrial Relations Systems (1958) applied Talcott Parsons's idea of the social system to industrial relations. An industrial relations system, he wrote, is comprised of certain actors, certain contexts, an ideology which binds the system together, and a body of rules created to govern the actors at the workplace and the work community. The three actors are a hierarchy of managers and their representatives, a hierarchy of workers and their spokesmen, and specialised government agencies (and private agencies created by the first two). The three contexts are the technological characteristics of the workplace and work community, the market or budgetary constraints, and the locus and distribution of power in the larger society. The ideology is the set of ideas and beliefs commonly held by the actors that defines their roles and binds the system. The output is the "web of rules": substantive rules (wages, hours, conditions) and procedural rules (how the substantive rules are made and applied), set by management, by government, by bargaining or by tribunals.

Dunlop's model has been criticised for being static, for neglecting behaviour, conflict and the individual worker, and for assuming a shared ideology. Later models built on it. Alton Craig's open-systems model treats industrial relations as a system of inputs (the goals, values and power of the actors, and the environment), conversion mechanisms (collective bargaining, grievance procedures, joint consultation, strikes, legislation) and outputs (the rewards to workers and the terms of employment), with feedback to the environment. Kochan, Katz and McKersie's strategic choice model replaced the fixed actors with active strategies, especially management's choice to avoid unions or to cooperate with them.

Conflict and cooperation coexist in every employment relationship: the parties depend on each other to produce, and they divide what is produced. Conflict may be organised (strikes, lockouts, go-slows, work-to-rule, gheraos) or unorganised (absenteeism, turnover, sabotage, indiscipline). Cooperation is built through joint consultation, participation, productivity agreements and the procedures of bipartism and tripartism. Bipartism is direct dealing between employers and workers without the state: collective bargaining, works committees, joint management councils and bipartite settlements. Indian banking is its leading example, where the Indian Banks' Association and the bank unions have signed a series of industry-wide bipartite settlements since 1966.

Tripartism brings government, employers and workers together to shape labour policy, and it is the ILO's founding principle. In India the first Tripartite Labour Conference met in 1942 and became the Indian Labour Conference (ILC), with the Standing Labour Committee as its smaller body; its sessions produced the need-based minimum wage norms (15th session, 1957) and the Code of Discipline (1958); its 46th session was held in 2015. Industrial committees (for plantations, coal, cotton textiles, jute, engineering, chemicals and other industries) deal with industry-specific issues. Wage boards, tripartite with independent members, were set up for major industries from the late 1950s, the working journalists' boards under the Working Journalists Act 1955 being the statutory ones. Tripartism's strengths are consensus and legitimacy; its weaknesses in India have been its advisory character, irregular meetings, and the exclusion of the unorganised majority from its table.

Employers organise to present a united front in bargaining, to represent their interests to government and in tripartite bodies, to advise members on labour law and personnel practice, and to train managers. In India the principal bodies are the All India Organisation of Employers (1932, associated with the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry), the Employers' Federation of India (1933, Bombay), the All India Manufacturers' Organisation (1941), and the Standing Conference of Public Enterprises (SCOPE, 1973) for central public enterprises. The Council of Indian Employers (1956) coordinates them, above all to nominate the employers' delegation to the International Labour Conference. Chambers of commerce (the Associated Chambers of Commerce, FICCI of 1927, and the Confederation of Indian Industry) speak on labour policy too, and internationally the International Organisation of Employers (1920) represents employers at the ILO.

Industrial relations in India have changed since 1991 in several directions at once. Product-market competition and privatisation pushed restructuring, voluntary retirement schemes and plant-level rather than industry-level bargaining. Employment shifted towards contract, fixed-term, outsourced and platform work, much of it beyond the reach of unions and of the older Acts. Union membership fragmented and strike activity fell while lockouts and closures rose in share; human resource management promoted individual rather than collective relations. Workplace conflicts in new manufacturing clusters (for example, over the recognition of unions and the use of contract labour) showed that conflict had moved, not ended. The state responded with the Second National Commission on Labour (2002) and then the four labour codes, which raised thresholds, introduced fixed-term employment, a negotiating union or council, a re-skilling fund, and social security for gig and platform workers; the codes are taught in the chapters on each Act.