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Business or Association? The Strategic Responses of Employer Associations to the Decentralisation of Bargaining in Australia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2023

Peter Sheldon  and
Louise Thornthwaite
Peter Sheldon
Affiliation:
School of Organisation and Management, University of New South Wales
Louise Thornthwaite
Affiliation:
Sydney Graduate School of Management, University of Western Sydney
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Abstract

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Decentralisation of bargaining poses particular challenges for employer associations. It reduces the sense of collective identity among members, decreases the attraction of associations’ traditional collective goods and increases the urgency and array of individual member needs while increasing the costs of servicing them. Decentralisation also threatens revenue as large companies, the financial backbone of associations, shift employment relations activities in-house. This weakens the attractions of membership with the risk that employer associations will retain only smaller, heavily dependent members. We discuss employer association attempts to meet these challenges while competing with commercial service businesses. Their strategic choices lie on a continuum between traditional membership-based organisational identity, with its roots in movement as well as organisation, and one that more closely approximates a business services firm. Associations experiment along this continuum as they develop strategy iteratively and the article identifies factors that help determine their choices.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Economic and Labour Relations Review , Volume 15 , Issue 1 , June 2004 , pp. 128 - 158
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2004

Footnotes

*

The journal’s two anonymous referees made perceptive criticisms and constructive suggestions. We are grateful to them as well as to In Jun (UNSW) who provided us with some useful sources. We also particularly thank all the employer associations officials we have interviewed over the years.

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