Advanced Studies in Industrial Relations: Theories, Minimum Wage, and Trade Unions

Running head: ADVANCED STUDIES IN INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS1
ADVANCED STUDIES IN INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS
Name of the student
Name of the University
Author’s note

Introduction
Industrial relation also known as employment relation focuses on employement
relationship. It deals with the complex interrelationship between employee and employer,
trade union, employer organisation and the state. In this report, the theories of industrial
relation is studied and focuses on the analysis of Minimum Wage case in 2019. This theories
of Industrial relation is characterized and analyses employer peak body and NGO. It
discusses about the importance of trade union in an organisation and analyse the issues
related to practice of industrial relation in Australia.
Overview of Minimum wage submission in employee peak body
The Australian Workers’ Union is an employer peak body which conducts the
minimum wage for un-apprenticed junior employees. The AWU supports the submissions o
Australian Council of Trade Unions. There are some issues for adult wage rate for entry level
employees in the vehicle manufacturing and vehicle repair in the VMRSR Award is equal
with adult national minimum wage (Forsyth 2016). The relevant junior rate in VMRSR award
receives a lower wage rate than the award free junior employees.
Overview of minimum wage in NGO
ACOSS is a NGO that provides community service and welfare services and the
poverty and inequality helps to fulfil the requirements of needy people. The minimum wage
improves the employment growth. As the peak organisation, the non-government community
services sector helps to enrich the interest of certain issues of employees regarding
employment by social services (Holgate 2015). The capacity of service sector is to
implement high quality services that enhances the increased number of potential employees
those who depend on the award system of wage.

Theories of Industrial Relation
Industrial Relation is a complex and ever-changing relationship between employees
and industry management. The theories of Industry Relation emphasize on different elements
of Industrial Relation function and process (Bélanger 2019).
The trade unions of an organisation represents the firm’s association of workers which
form a legal unit or also called the bargaining unit. The main objective of trade union is to
stand for the employees and workers to bargain for wages and suitable working conditions,
enrich strong relations between employees and employer, to take actions to promote
collective bargaining, they settle employee’s problem and address the demands on employees
in the organistaion. (Forsyth 2016).
There are four theories of industrial relations:
The industrial relation have three major theoretical framework which understands and
analyses the workplace relations. Each framework have certain perception of
 Unitarist- The unitarism perceives an organisation as an integrated and maintains
harmony. In this the management and the employees of an organisation shares a
common goal by establishing mutual co-operation (Kaine 2018). Consequently,
unions are not considered as important in some organisation as they feel loyalty of
employees must be prioritized with the organisation.
 Pluralist- Pluralism perceives a firm to be a more powerful and enhances with
divergent groups which have its own legitimate interests with some objective and
management. The dominating groups of the organisation are the trade unions and
management. The pluralist perspective denotes that the conflict is inherent in
industrial relation as different groups have different opinions (Kelly 2015). The
management mainly focuses on convincing the employees and coordination rather