Airline pilots and public industrial relations

Abstract

[Extract] In the context of third world development all industrial relations may be said to be public industrial relations, in the sense that an industrialising elite can rarely allow for long industrial relations to proceed unregulated by itself in either the private or the public sectors of a national economy. This is especially so where economic development is dependent upon multi-national corporate investment, as is the case of many of the newly industrialising countries (NICs).l In the NICs workforces are restrained by public policies to conform to national economic development imperatives, while the multi-national employers operate relatively unrestrained on a transnational plane, shifting capital to where the best returns are anticipated (Palloix, 1973: 137-163). Typically, labour organisations are required by the governing elite to forego such comparative bargaining advantage that their collective solidarity in an imperfect labour market may offer them in order to assure the maintenance of a stable national wages structure and an industrial relations climate attractive to the elite's desired current and potential multi-national investors.