‘converging or Diverging Interests? a Two-stage Cohort Study of the Determinants of Employee Attitudes to the Workplace Relations Act’’ School of Industrial Relations and Organisational Behaviour Working Paper Series

When the Workplace Relations Act 1996 was introduced by the current government in 1996, it was justified on the basis that it provided a regulatory framework which allowed firms to structure their industrial relations practices to suit their own needs and those of their employees. It was argued at the time the Act would provide a basis for generating more productive workplaces and more harmonious employment relations. This view, which is inherently unitarist in orientation, runs counter to the general view of the nature of employment relationships and, within the industrial relations literature, the argument that the Act was intended to undermine the position of unions and provide greater scope for firms to exercise managerial prerogative in their own interests. This paper seeks to contribute to this debate by investigating the extent to which individual employees support or oppose the objectives of the Workplace Relations Act using a unique data set collected in Victoria at the time of the passage of the legislation at the beginning of 1997 and one year later, at the start of 1998. The two-stage analysis allows us to identify changes in attitudes as individuals gain knowledge and experience of the new industrial relations reality. The findings provide * The authors affiliations are, respectively, School of Industrial Relations and Organisational Behaviour, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW 2052 and School of Business, Swinburne University of Technology, Hawthorn, Victoria, 3122, Australia. The research was supported by Special Research Grant No. PSC2520 from the University of New South Wales. We would like to thank Michael Alexander, Braham Dabscheck, Suzanne Hammond, and David Peetz for helpful suggestions. We would especially like to thank Chris Cregan who generously provided us with the data set on which the research was based, and for her helpful and detailed input into the analysis and redrafting of the paper. All omissions and errors remain our own.