Industrial relations can be as complicated as human nature can make it, which is very complicated indeed.
Do you remember the story by Edgar Allan Poe called The Purloined Letter? It is the most perfect example of the conflict between perception and reality, and is, of course, the model on which all good detective stories are conceived.
It comes to mind in this context because one of the more difficult issues that arises in industrial relations is conflict of interest.
There was a period in the history of thought, known as an axial age, that lasted about 500 years, when a pandemic of thought swept over the world. Certain people like the Buddha, Lao Tse, Confucius, and Aristotle wrote down their thoughts and each, in their various and as far as I know completely unconnected parts of the world (there was no internet yet), changed the history of human thought.
In the western world, Aristotle was one of them. He wrote about a way of thinking which was divided into physics, ethics and logic.
Physics developed into what we now call science. Ethics is the basis of moral law, governing how things ought to happen but often don’t; and logic, what is often called the laws of reason, or the laws by which observable things actually happen.
It is pretty obvious when you think of it. A cannot be both A and not A at the same time, for example.
In religion, the biblical gospel of Matthew explained it using the words: “No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other.”
The book was not written in English and has been translated by many different people many different times, so these may not be their actual words, but you can get the meaning easily enough.
In industrial relations, it is sometimes explained as: “A person cannot run with the hares and hunt with the hounds.” Which is to say a person cannot genuinely represent conflicting interests simultaneously.
I believe there are similar proverbs in many other professional disciplines, reflecting the contemporary architecture of cultural anthropology called “dualism,” whereby things exist in opposites like mind and matter, good and evil or for me or against me.
[caption id="attachment_929848" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Watson Duke and his team Game Changers celebrate winning the PSA election on December 17, 2020. - File photo/Roger Jacob[/caption]
Please note, however, that this only applies to logic or reason. There is a subdivision of philosophy that stands on its own called epistemology and, even worse, another called metaphysics which claims to deal with the abstract nature of reality.
Poets and politicians and lawyers will tell you that it all depends on how you define good or evil.
Which brings us to conflicts of interest in industrial relations. In dispute handling there are usually two different interests, that of the company, which is a conglomerate of functions, and that of the trade union, which is a conglomerate of employees.
It is important to mak
