FAIR CHOICES: FLEXIBILITY AND NEGOTIATING POWER IN THE WORK PLACE

Paul Monk

Paperback, 250 pages

$29.95 (inc GST)

ISBN: 978-0-9802936-9-2


THE EASY TO FOLLOW BOOK FOR EMPLOYERS AND EMPLOYEES THAT EMPOWERS THEM BOTH IN ARRANGING EMPLOYMENT TERMS.

"Both sides of politics, because they are trying to cater to the demands of a heterogeneous set of constituents, have overly complex and intellectually unwieldy industrial relations policies. To sell those policies, they need to engage in PR about IR. What is needed, as an antidote to such PR, is as clear and simple an explanation as possible as to how to grasp what is going on in the present debate and how to negotiate sound agreements with skill and ease. That is what I have attempted in this book. Its spirit is one of fostering both the willingness and the skill to negotiate better conditions consistent with gains in productivity and the capacity of businesses to adapt and innovate in a global economy."
- from the Preface

"For well over a century, Australia has attracted the interest and curiosity of practitioners and theorists of industrial relations. In the great constitutional debates of the 1890s, our founding fathers gave the proposed Commonwealth a power to settle interstate industrial disputes by conciliation and arbitration...It was a system which served Australia quite well, I think, but the news I have to deliver today to those of our visitors who still think Australian industrial relations is run this way, is that it is finished. Not only is the old system finished, but we are rapidly phasing out its replacement and have now come to do things in a new way."
- Prime Minister Paul Keating, address to the International Industrial Relations Association, August 1992.

Paul Monk is managing director of Austhink Consulting and a public intellectual of genuinely independent standing on a wide range of issues. He is the author of Thunder From the Silent Zone: Rethinking China (2005) and Sonnets to a Promiscuous Beauty: A Homage to the Western Canon (2006). A former senior intelligence analyst for Australia's Defence Intelligence Organization, where he was Japan and Koreas desk officer in the early 1990s and head of China analysis in the mid-1990s, he has a PhD in International Relations from the Australian National University and a BA in European History from the University of Melbourne.