Judith Sloan

It’s good to see Judith Sloan (Productivity Commission and Australian Fair Pay Commission Commissioner, Director of the Westfield Group and Board member of the Lowy Institute) moving into comedy:

In the Weekend Australian (Nov. 26-7), she writes,

…in a perfect world, the ideal arrangement is for employers and employees to reach agreement about wages and conditions by mutual and private consent.
(p. 22)

‘Bahahahaha’, as the youth say.

In the real world, there are more employees to choose from than there are employers. In the real world, employers hire trained negotiators to carry out their end of the bargaining.

In the real world, employers wield more power than employees.

So in the real world, employees increase their power by acting collectively.

But then you get two parties wielding equal power but pursuing opposing desires: employers, higher productivity (read: more work for less pay); employees, better pay and conditions.

So workers strike and management ground the fleet.

And that’s why you sometimes need arbitration — mediation of the two parties’ claims.

And that’s why, even though it may be the case that the ‘idea that a third party should be deciding on aspects of the employment relationship between an employer and the workers is anathema to contemporary thinking on human resource management and the promotion of high-productivity workplaces’ (ibid.), one should not put too much stock in orthodoxy, particularly when that orthodoxy is nothing but the conclusion deduced from a set of premises lifted from that intellectual fiction: a perfect world.