Hypothetical Industrial Relations Scenario

School Management Memorandum Re: Individual Workplace Agreements The members of the board of Lutece Academy, a secondary school that serves approximately 700 hundred students and has a tradition of excellence in education, has been considering the merits of making a fundamental change in the nature of the relationship that exists between the school and its staff. That current relationship (with the exception of the administration) consists of traditional collective bargaining rights that are negotiated with the heads of each union's representatives at the school.

This is the norm for schools in the region and indeed in the country, which has a highly unionized school workforce. However, again like other schools in the region and the country, Lutece Academy has been considering a change in the nature of the relations between staff and administration by instituting individual workplace agreements between each member of the staff and the administration (and thus the board as well.). This memorandum argues against such a shift to individual workplace agreements.

These agreements vary slightly from jurisdiction to jurisdiction and from worker to worker, but the following description provides an excellent example of this type of arrangement: Queensland workplace agreement is a written individual employment agreement setting out the wages, conditions and working arrangements between an employer and an individual employee. An employer can negotiate a Queensland workplace agreement with each employee individually, or with a group of employees. If it is negotiated on a group basis, it must be signed individually by each of the employees covered.

An employee has the right to appoint a bargaining agent to represent them in negotiations. A bargaining agent can be any person or even a union. Queensland workplace agreement is a stand-alone agreement that completely overrides an award. It replaces the award under which an employee is currently working unless the Queensland workplace agreement specifies otherwise. Queensland workplace agreement overrides a certified agreement only if the certified agreement contains specific provisions that allow this to happen (http://www.wageline.qld.gov.au/ir/awardsagreements_qldwork.html).

This might seem as if it were a relatively innocuous arrangement However, an investigation of the research on this issue (which relates the experiences of other schools who have either considered or who have actually made the changeover to individual workplace agreements) suggests that this would be an extremely unwise move for the Academy to take. This memo examines the reasons for this, while also summarizing the reasons that are generally proffered for the advantages of individual workplace agreements. We shall, in fact, begin with these.

The most common complaints against union workplaces in general is often held up against unionized school sites too, primarily that unions tend to inflate labor costs without offering the same level of return that the same cost in salaries would offer in an open shop and - generally considered to be an even more damning charge - unions create artificial boundaries and rules so that one group of workers who could quite easily accomplish a job sit idle while those in another job category who are authorized to do the work at hand are still on their lunch break.

Certainly, as both Karmel (2000) and Levacic (1995) argue, this is sometimes the case. Let us take these two criticisms of the unionized workforce in turn. First: It is generally true that unionized workers are better paid (and receive better benefits) than those who have either individual workplace agreements or wimple work-for-hire understanding. One interpretation of this fact is that union staffs are more costly in terms of each hour that the average worker spends on the job.

But there are a number of different ways of assessing both cost and value, and it is important to do so in as intelligent and nuanced a way as possible, as Knight (1993) argues. One of the primary reasons that unionized workforces are more expensive on an hourly basis is that they consist of (on average) more highly trained and more experienced workers. (This is related to the concept of flexibility, as will be discussed below).

Karmel (2000) notes that individual workplace agreements tend to replace more experienced and more skilled workers with less experienced and less skilled ones. Individual workplace agreements are designed to expand the range of duties that an employee can be called upon to do to increase the different positions that person can be used in without running into the barriers set up by unions to protect areas of specialization.

Although, of course, this is not always the case, it is often the case (and more often than not, one might speculate) that specialized worker is in general the best person for the job. Individual workplace agreements directly and intentionally undercut such specialization and such expertise by hiring people who can be "plugged in" wherever the management might need them for the day. This works in some cases, or rather it works better in some cases than in others.

In a position that requires relatively few skills (and simply hard work) it is possible to substitute one worker for another with relative ease.

But there are still costs involved, for every position at the school requires some skills and if one has a school workforce that is being constantly switched back and forth amongst different jobs there will always be a cost in terms of individuals trying to learn (on the job, over and over again as that job shifts) what it is that they are supposed to be doing.

An alternative method of dealing with this problem (and one that emphasizes the strengths of unions while minimizing their weaknesses, as Marsden, 1997, suggests) is to create an overall employment structure for the school that is inherently relatively unspecialized. The following diagram suggests such a general structure, with those positions represented by the blue boxes being union positions and those to the left being non-union (i.e. unrepresented, management positions).

Such a structure permits a high level of efficiency without the costs associated with individual workplace agreements because it contains relatively few job categories (i.e. It is already relatively low on specialization) and because it contains enough non-union positions that there are skilled workers available to step in to lend a hand if something needs to be done that cannot be done in an appropriate period of time by a unionized worker.

It is true that unionized workforces are more rigid than non-unionized ones and this does sometimes lead to inefficiencies. If a classroom needs to be painted, it is quite likely that the teacher and his or her students could do quite a decent job on their own painting the room, but it is unlikely that they will be.