Industrial Dispute: The Concept of Tripartism

An industrial dispute is a clash or difference in opinion between the management and workers of a corporation or industry as a whole pertaining to the employment terms. The affairs of industrial disputes are regulated by the Industrial Dispute Act, 1947. The Act provides for various courts of inquiry, industrial tribunal and boards of conciliation.

A trade union, which acts as the representative of workers, plays an important part in initiating as well as resolving an industrial dispute. Certain factors that lead to industrial dispute are wages, working conditions and working hours. Both management and workers use various tools and techniques to pressurize each other. For instance, while the management may opt for lockouts, workers resort to strikes and gheraos. Similarly, various methods are adopted to ease the tension in the employee-employer relationship; important among them is tripartism.

Industrial Dispute: What is Tripartism and How Does It Help?

Tripartism promotes the idea of partnership between the labor and the management. The two main principles of tripartism are:

• Management and workers should share a relationship of partnership rather than that of employer and employee. They should work in synergy towards the building up of the national economy.
• It holds the whole community liable for protecting the interests of workers and ensures that workers are not deprived of their due share in gains of economic development.

As the name suggests, tripartism involves three parties that participate in reaching a consensus or peace pertaining to the matters of industrial dispute. The three participants are the trade union, employer and the government, which conduct meetings to review all aspects of a situation, advice one another and try reaching a consensus.

The government plays the most important part in this process; it initiates in bringing the management and representatives of workers on the same platform. The Annual Labor Conference is the chief instrument for tripartism. It initiated proposals like worker participation in management, worker education and minimum wages legislation.