A collective agreement is signed by two parties representing employers and employees following a process of bargaining, very often a lengthened one, on the substantive and procedural norms that regulate the employment relationship at the workplace.

The substantive norms or rules relate to aspects of the substance of the employment relationship such as wage rate, the length of the working day or week, holiday entitlement, sick pay, dismissals, discipline and the handling of redundancies.

On the other hand, procedural rules establish the procedures through which substantive issues are to be handled. They lay down rules on how negotiation about disputes is to be conducted and set norms relating to the behaviour and actions by employees that are congruent with the interest of the organisation. Some of these norms and rules are imposed by the law aimed at setting standardised forms of employment relations.

Thus, there is a political tone in this process in the sense that it is a rule-making activity that involves power relations between the parties that serves to define rights, duties and obligations.

Although the process of collective bargaining leading to a collective agreement has not caused a total elimination of industrial conflict, the mere existence of this negotiation machinery tends to temper the conflict and reduce its incidence. Scrutiny of the Maltese industrial relations scenario reveals that the magnitude of industrial unrest, measured in terms of the number of workers involved in industrial actions and the number of work days lost, has been much lower in degree in the new millennium than the last three decades of the 20th century.

Strike activity might have been dampened by the competitiveness of the economic market. However, this lower incidence of strike action in the new century may also be due to a much more solid foundation of social dialogue between employers and trade unions, which elevated collective bargaining to a mature level.

The actors involved in the industrial relations scenario do not only accept each other’s existence but support each other’s objectives. This higher level of consensual ethic, emanating from this maturity, has given a twist to power relations by creating a culture of healthy social dialogue at company and national level and by delineating the issues subjected to joint control and decision making.

Ironically, this issue of joint control proved to be the source of conflict between the Medical Association of Malta and the government. The MAM is claiming that the government breached a clause in the collective agreement when it failed to consult it about the contract signed with a foreign firm to run three of the main State hospitals in Malta.

A new trend in industrial relations whereby the militancy mood is being transferred to the higher-grade professionals

According to the MAM, the collective agreement lays down that the union has to be notified six weeks in advance about a deal involving the transfer of power to a private firm. To assert its right to be consulted it demanded that it should be privy to the contract signed between the government and the private firm. In the meantime, it ordered industrial action targeted at the outpatient department and primary health centres. It warned the government of an escalation of actions if it failed to accede to its request.

This industrial action may be a symptom of the change in the industrial relations scenario. By insisting on a voice in the regulation governing the workplace, in this instance State hospitals, the MAM is changing the procedures of conflict regulations and decision making and, thereby, the whole nature of industrial system.

Strike action in most cases used to be about substantive issues such as a pay rise. On the day of the strike, picket lines would congregate outside the place of work to dissuade, and sometimes even impede, strike breakers (often called blacklegs or scabs) from reporting for work.

Without resorting to such picketing, the MAM reported almost full compliance by doctors to its directives.

The act of solidarity traditionally prevailing among blue-collar workers at the Drydocks and employees in the manufacturing sector was also manifest among the doctors. This seems to confirm the new trend in industrial relations whereby the militancy mood is being transferred to the higher-grade professionals.

In the Air Malta saga, bargaining proved to be much tougher with the pilots than with the other categories of employees.

The proletarian workers manning the picket lines in front of the gates of the workplace have become an image fromthe past.

The generators of different patterns or shapes of industrial action have transformed industrial relations in the sense that the procedural aspects of collective bargaining and agreement are being given the same weight as the substantive.

Saviour Rizzo is a former director of the Centre for Labour Studies at the University of Malta.