THE ETHICS OF HRM 39It is now individual legal rights at work, provided and enforced by the state, that
are the primary motors of industrial relations, with collective bargaining relegated
to the public sector and those areas of the private sector where, for the most part,
employment is declining.
Individualism has been fostered through the notion of the ‘sovereign cus-
tomer’ and the primacy of individual choice and enterprise responsiveness
to that choice (Korczynski 2002; Sturdy, Grugelis, and Willmott 2001). This is
embodied in New Labour’s proposed reforms of public sector services, which
unions view as likely to undermine collective organization in its last bastion.
The ‘enterprising individual’, with its connotations of personal initiative, inde-
pendence, self-reliance and the willingness to take risks, and accept responsi-
bility for one’s actions, celebrates individualism at the expense of collectivist
solidarity. In a world enamoured of the virtues of free markets, supply-side
economics, privatization and deregulation, collectivism is distinctly out of
fashion. It conjures up ‘past-their-sell-by-date’ images of blue-collar workers,
in dying industries, resisting the tide of progress or ‘feather-bedded’ public
sector workers selfishly putting the rest of the public, working flexibly and in a
‘disciplined’ fashion in ‘leaner’, ‘fitter’, ‘new’ sectors of the economy, to unnec-
essary inconvenience. It is significant that New Labour’s mantra with regard to
trade unions is the call for ‘modernization’, which seems to embrace the idea
that the way forward is ‘to extend individual rights, rather than rights acquired
through union membership’ (Waddington 2003: 338). From this perspective,
collectivism may be seen as a passing phase, redolent of Fordism and the
Keynesian settlement that privileged producers—a phenomenon completely
at odds with a post-Fordist, post-modern world where individual choice,
expressed through consumption, is privileged. Collective bargaining’s only
justification from this perspective is in its ‘contribution to the construction of
partnership in the workplace in the quest for global competitiveness’ (Howell
2004: 19).
Against this background of declining collectivism, what ethical justifica-
tions might be made in support of individualism and collectivism respectively?
The ethics of individualism and collectivism
Ethics is about the identification of the good and its just or fair distribution.
Just as trade unionism, as an expression of collectivism, may be seen as an
essentially modernist project, so the modernist ethics of the Enlightenment
and beyond (Kant, Mills, Rawls), are in a sense collectivist, as they depict
ethics as comprising collective codes of conduct that exist over and above
the individual and which can be used to legitimate independent action. This