THE most disappointing thing about the review of the Fair Work Act and the reaction to it is the way they push industrial relations towards being more adversarial rather than less.
At time when so many businesses face unusually challenging pressures for structural change, we need more co-operation between the industrial partners, not more class struggle and barracking from the sidelines.
The standard approach to industrial relations reform is to see it as about "getting the balance right". There's a fundamental conflict of interest between labour and capital, we think, plus a wide difference in bargaining power, so the objective is to ensure the eternally battling parties are fairly evenly matched.
That's the public policy objective, of course. If you're on one side or the other, your objective is simply to get the rules changed in a way that gives you the drop over the other side.
The conventional view is that, with its attempt to install individual contracts as the chief form of bargaining and marginalise the unions, WorkChoices pushed the balance too far in the direction of employers.
So it was fair enough - particularly after voters seemed to reject WorkChoices so decisively - for Fair Work to push the balance back the other way. The review's job was to decide whether the balance had now been pushed too far the other way.
The trouble with the review is that it didn't do much more than adjudicate the rival claims, legal section by section. With two of the three members of the review being lawyers - and one a judge - you couldn't have expected anything else.
Although the media portrayed the employer groups' reaction to the review as angry, I suspect they were quite pleased. They won more points than they expected to, while the unions won fewer.
One trouble with the traditional approach to regulating industrial relations - supervise a fair fight - is that it's reinforced by all our other adversarial institutions. It comes naturally to lawyers, but also to politicians.
There's nothing Julia Gillard and Labor would love more than a rematch on industrial relations and there are plenty of urgers on the Liberal sidelines spoiling for a punch-up.
For once, however, Bruiser Abbott isn't tempted, judging correctly that such a them-and-us contest would greatly favour "them". Electorally, WorkChoices is still toxic.
Should Abbott win the election, it will be interesting to see what gap emerges between his pre-election rhetoric and his post-election policies. Many of his backers are hoping for a yawning chasm.
Just as the traditional industrial relations approach is adversarial, so the IR experts are highly factionalised. Most academic experts long ago chose sides between the unions and the employers. Trying to find experts who can see both sides of the argument is one of the trials of my job.
Wherever there are adversaries, there you can expect to find the media, doing their best to increase the fun by amplifying the conflict. What's new is to have the national dailies taking sides in their reporting, with the union side of the story virtually unmentioned.
Whenever there's a brawl, it's hard for interested bystanders to resist the temptation to join in. I suspect that's the story with big business leaders: they're not greatly affected, but they know whose side they're on.
Consider the results of last week's CEO Pulse survey of 96 chief executives. Fully 82 per cent of them think Fair Work is having a negative impact on productivity. That's for the whole economy. For their own industry, it's down to 60 per cent. And for their own business? Down to 51 per cent, with 45 per cent saying it's having no effect.
Coming from people with such obvious alignment, that tells me we don't have a lot to worry about. It reveals the classic survey gap between first-hand experience and the general impression people have picked up, mainly from the media.
My guess is a few big, militant unions are taking every advantage of Fair Work to make unreasonable demands. And they're being vigorously opposed by a few equally militant, unreasonable big businesses.
But we shouldn't allow people with a vested interest in conflict to misdirect us. The real problem with Fair Work is that it's not doing as much good as it could be at a time when bosses and workers need to pull together.
