Public Policy and Industrial Dispute Resolution in a Cross-National Context.

The subject of cross-national variations in industrial conflict, especially in strike activity, has challenged researchers for many decades. It has also bedevilled public policy makers for whom the question is: will governmental regulation aimed at resolving industrial disputes have the desired effect of reducing conflict? Using a huge sample including all major industrialized countries, industrial relations scholars since the end of the war have constructed several intriguing models in an attempt to tackle the problem. These are briefly reviewed in this paper to show that the very breadth of their scope, while answering some important questions, raises other difficult ones. It would perhaps be more revealing to compare the experience of a pair of countries in depth. But choosing the pair presents some difficulties. On the one hand, countries with very different sets of industrial relations institutions, politics, industrial structures, and patterns of trade union organization, such as Sweden and the United States, would perhaps present too broad a contrast to capture more than the most obvious, and hence trite, differences. On the other hand, countries like Canada and the U.S. may be too similar, especially in the general attitude to regulation of industrial conflict.