ABSTRACT
Industrial relations understood as formal agreements and supplementary legislation regulating and stimulating labour-management cooperation on issues related to operation, working conditions, quality of work as well as welfare systems, has been demonstrated to be competitive in terms of safety over more unilateral employment systems (i.e. Gunningham 2008, Nichols, Walters & Tasiran 2007, Reilly et al 1995). Collaborative systems have always served a dual purpose in the sense that employees have contributed to industrial growth and moderation of wage, and in return workers were accepted legitimate rights for secure working conditions and benefits from growth (i.e. Grimshaw and Rubery 2003). In Norway, the Industrial Democracy Program (Emery and Thorsrud 1969, Gustavsen 1992) launched in the late sixties supported by the Confederation of Norwegian Enterprises, the Norwegian Confederation of Trade Unions and the Government at that time, has become the back-bone of a practice of collaboration between shop-floor workers’ unions and management as to institutionalize industrial democracy in the workplace. This IR-practice on enterprise level is often referred to as the micro-model of the Norwegian IR-system, a model of varying practices of bipartite-and tripartite collaboration on issues related to safety in the work place.
