The concept of industrial action with special reference to the equality of arms principle

Abstract

Employers and employees usually come together in a common workplace to make products or provide services for an unspecified time. Employers who are not satisfied with workers can, at least if the action can be objectively justified, discharge them. Workers who find their jobs intolerable are free to quit. However, the usual intention in offering and accepting employment is to enter into a continuing relationship. Continuing relationships, however, be they marital, business partnerships, or employment, are vulnerable to changing, sometimes diverging, interests, perceived or real. In other words employment is liable to conflict, both individual and collective. Industrial conflict is indeed only a fraction in the realm of industrial relations, even though a mere cursory glance at the world's history of trade unions and industrial relations, reveals industrial conflict as a protagonist of this drama. Industrial relations between labour and management are primarily based on obligations which each party is bound to respect and which are in fact abided by on most occasions, since neither party's endeavour is to provoke conflict together with its uncalled for consequences. This notwithstanding, there have been, along the years, several sources of conflict between labour and management, which conflicts have in turn triggered the imposition of economic sanctions on the respective parties. This is not meant to imply, however, that union and employers resort to economic sanctions whenever a dispute needs resolving. Workers' organisations have a number of means at their disposal to promote and defend their economic and social interests. Some of these are simple protest actions, for example, protest meetings or petitions which do not cause any direct damage to the employer. Negotiation, conciliation, arbitration and the bargaining table are most certainly the first and obvious choices by way of peaceful means of dispute settlement machinery. Indeed, every industrial relations system worth its salt should provide legal regulation of this machinery. If the parties to the dispute cannot, however, reconcile their differences through these peaceful methods, they may very well resort to industrial pressure through concerted action or industrial action, as it is more popularly termed, of which the strike and the lock-out are the best publicised examples.