Messy disputes at BA and Royal Mail are embarrassing. The path to smoother industrial relations depends on open dialogue between strong unions and robust management

In December my son had an operation. He went under the knife at 11.30am and, thanks to sophisticated anaesthetic and surgical techniques, walked out of the hospital with me just over two hours later. That's nothing, a doctor friend of mine informed me: technology now allows a surgeon on one side of the world to perform the most complicated micro-surgery on a patient on the other.

On the same day I read about the High Court ruling against the planned 12-day Christmas strike by cabin crew at British Airways. Freshly awed at the wonders of modern medicine, I wondered why management practice is still so archaic that workers have to withdraw their labour and forgo pay in order to make their views heard.

But while much of the management action that precipitates strikes seems clumsy, is workers' reaction any more than bone-headed resistance to inevitable change? My personal experience is limited to a three-month walkout nearly 20 years ago over the imposition of new technology: we journalists were, apparently, happy to carry on bashing away on our old typewriters and then laboriously cutting and pasting our copy to make articles more readable. Thanks to new technology I can now do my job from anywhere in the world in half the time it used to take me.

Not all change is quite so positive, of course, and the issue of modernisation that is at the heart of the two biggest and lengthiest disputes of recent years—those at BA and Royal Mail—involves significant job losses. Yet modernisation is nothing new: in the 1950s and 1960s whole swathes of British industry, including rail, coal and steel, were overhauled, with relatively low levels of industrial dispute. Unions were far stronger then, too, but they understood and accepted the need for change, and worked together with employers to implement it in a way that was to their best possible mutual advantage.

Indeed, the truism that people don't like and are resistant to change should be challenged. The issue is not transformation itself, but the pace and nature of change and the extent to which it is imposed rather than discussed.

What's more, the solutions reached as a result of involving employees are often more creative and sustainable than those that are steamrollered through—just witness the progressive alternatives to widescale redundancies spawned by the collaboration and co-operation between employers and staff during the recession.

In contrast to the highly participative nature of unions in many European countries, UK business suffers from an "us and them" mentality. Many cite the falling numbers of strikes as evidence of improving industrial relations, but that's debatable. There are more employment tribunals than there were 15 years ago, sickness absence and job turnover are higher, trust in managers is falling, and a Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development survey found that only one-third of employees are engaged with their employer, one-third are ambivalent and a third are actively disengaged.

It's significant that engagement has fallen as unions have become weaker. True, the collective rights embodied in union representation have been replaced by greater individual liberties, but enforcing those freedoms is difficult, as anyone who has ever dared to bring a legal case against their employer will testify. So what we have is, arguably, the worst of both worlds: few collective advantages and practically unenforceable individual benefits.

Because there is no institutional route for workers to express their anxiety, they channel it in a different way. And such underground action is potentially far more damaging to employers than well-managed, open and above-board debate.

The best industrial relations come down to good communications between a strong union and robust management, each of them aware of their rights and responsibilities. But both sides have got out of practice in recent years, and find themselves boxed into corners.

Public sector employers facing months of unrest due to imminent spending cuts should heed the words of industrial relations doyen Lord McCarthy, who said that blunt instruments, handled skilfully, can be highly effective. But it's hard to escape the conclusion that industrial relations would improve if we had more, stronger unions, not fewer, weaker ones.