Towards a New Paradigm of IR Strategy

In the realm of managing industrial relations (IR), organizations are handicapped in two ways: the government?s labour regulations and compliance regime, and their own inability to extricate themselves from half-baked theories and poor management practices. Research findings indicate the growth of the informal sector at the expense of the formal sector, but with low productivity, low wages and virtually no job security. And in the formal sector, data indicates rising conflict often laced with brutal violence. While organizations in the formal sector wait for labour reforms towards greater labour market flexibility that would lead to greater labour mobility and higher productivity and employment in the formal manufacturing sector, they could undertake a paradigm shift in their IR strategy. Such a paradigm shift in IR strategy would not just obviate many of the ills besetting the industrial relations scenario, but provide a competitive advantage. Based on a year-long work in a steel tube manufacturing company in western India, this paper distils the architecture of a paradigm shift in IR strategy for organizational turnaround.