“The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.”

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world”

– William Butler Yeats

When world civilisations are all simultaneously going through a period of transition, as it certainly appears we are doing at the present, when the old, accustomed binary systems of thought and decision-making we were brought up to use as methods of guiding us through life are faster and faster being replaced by complex unitive approaches – no more either/or; no more either right or wrong; no more either lawful or unlawful; no more our way or their way, and we have to grapple with both/and – with the confusing blending of both science and philosophy, where astrophysics leads seamlessly into religion, and you wake up one morning and what you have always known is a “false fact” and even the old interpersonal relations and interactions are not what they seem to be; everywhere you look, you have to look again.

Industrial relations is not exempt.

Those of us brought up to respect the law are accustomed to looking to the Industrial Relations Act for guidance, but even there the clear light of reason does not always serve us well. And for new practitioners freshly out of academe, where every discipline was founded solidly on binary thought (other than in physics, which then can become wildly exciting), discipline can be not what it is supposed to be.

If we thought employment and industrial relations had to do with relations between employers and employees, for example, it may be somewhat disconcerting to discover that the Industrial Relations Act, while it has a definition for “employer,” has no definition for “employee”; but there is one for “worker.”

And in case you thought otherwise, “employee” is not the same as “worker,” although it contains “worker”; and is not the same as “manager,” although it contains “manager.”

The original drafters of the law, following common law, apparently depicted “employer” as a kind of “sole trader” or “owner manager,” not envisaging the evolution of a situation where an employer may employ many managers and where industrial relations between manager and manager can become far more contentious than those between worker and manager.

Why this was so has not been explained, because even back then, large enterprises employed multiple managers.

[caption id="attachment_977692" align="alignnone" width="1024"] The Industrial Court, Port of Spain - FILE PHOTO/JEFF K MAYERS[/caption]

The famous woman pirate Ching Shih employed 3,000 at the peak of her career, and trade disputes were reputedly common among them (well, they would be, wouldn’t they?).

Although the distinction between matters of right in dispute-handling and matters of interest are the basis of all dispute-handling, neither term is defined in the act, or even stated.

So for clarification, a “matter of right” is something an employee has by “right,” once they are employed; and "employed" means hired orally, in writing by