EMPLOYEE RELATIONS

Employee Relations

Employee Relations

Introduction

Labor strikes are as old as the United Kingdom. Industrialization began following the War of 1812, and by 1880 UK was the world's premier industrial power. Its “labour wars” were also the fiercest on Earth. Government intervention during the two world wars finally brought these bloody labour conflicts to an end, and labour-management relations became domesticated.

Labor or trade union movements are the quintessential example of the means by which workers under capitalism have collectively created their own independent organizations to represent their interests. Union movements are the aggregation within a nation-state of these individual labour or trade unions, so that we can speak of the union movement in, for example, Britain or the United States or union movements across the world. Unions, and thus union movements, are conscious social organizations united by several interconnected propositions and beliefs (Crouch, 2002, 66).

The Working Class Goes to Heaven

Elio Petri's The Working Class Goes to Heaven (La Classe Operaia Va In Paradiso) is a bleak look at the psychological wounds compulsory by the factory regime on its chief character, Ludovico Massa. Cruelly nicknamed Lulu the Tool by his pissed off and contrary co-workers, in a factory where he operates a lathe, his obsessive output making him the measure management use to gauge everyone else's work rate.

The movie was part of Italy's Il cinema politico wave, a cinematic movement where directors monitor the tensions in a country polarised, much like Dario Fo brought the crisis of the day to the stage of popular theatre. As the hang over of 1968's Red Autumn turned into one long winter of dissatisfaction through to the late 70s, workers brought the anti-authoritarianism of the universities into the factories, and the artistic village brought these influences into their own fields.

Lulu arises everyday at 6:30am, shaking his partner in frustration that she gets to sleep in later than him; it's that everyday invasion of work to the domicile. Reading the morning paper's business section he recognizes wholly with his organization moves on the exchange: "we're buying Beckenbower." Over coffee he give details as an appendage to a production unit - a machine that feeds itself raw materials - producing on the lathe and then stop working at night.

The choreography of Lulu at work tends towards a sexual pounding of the machine. He finds his speed for the breathtakingly foolish race for the piece rate flanked by exclaims of "a bolt, a bum" and terrifies a female co-worker with this aggressive sexual behaviour. As he trains two students in the factory, the tensions between his work ethic and the generation, who some of the older workers are starting to listen to every morning at the gate, starts to become clear - but when he loses a finger to his machine everything changes for him.

As a director Petri is antagonistic to all the forces in the movie, all are rather retarded by the systems they reside in; from the extreme left students who bay at the factory workers through ...