Management of Industrial Relations Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words

Management of Industrial Relations - Essay Example For the better part of a century, it has played a key role in the representation and advising of employers all over Australia and their employment law experts have been actively involved in majority of the test cases in the industrial jurisdiction of fair work Australia (Australian Federation of Employers, 2014). AFEI is a nonprofit organization and its membership spans over 3,500 with more than 60 affiliated industry associations, today, their key role is advisory and they also represent and assist employers in as far as meeting their obligations in respect to workplace relations in concerned. They may or may not include collective agreements and unlike trade unions which are comprised of individual workers, employer organizations allocate membership to enterprises instead. However, most of the legal terms that are used to define trade unions can also be applied on employer organizations. It has been argued that employer organization is simply the employer’s response to trade unions which by virtue of their numbers and activism tend to have considerable power over employers. While this is debatable, it is not by any means simple, employers’ organizations to a large extent are indeed the response to trade unions but they also serve other purposes that have no bearing on the issue of labor. There has nevertheless been an extensive history of antagonism between trade unions and employees organization which gives credence to the assumption that in many ways their interests are mutually exclusive. In the 1890’s in Australia, powerful worker unions tried to dictate to the ship owners what goods they should carry this was done through a strike that threatened to bring down the shipping industry and which rewired over 2000 constables to manage. However three years after the fact, the ship-owners had come together and in response