Beyond Litigation: A Partnership Approach to Industrial Relations Dispute Resolution from the Perspective of Justice and Utility

Abstract

Industrial relations disputes remain an inherent feature of modern labour systems because the employment relationship is structurally marked by unequal bargaining power between workers and employers. In Indonesia, dispute settlement is formally regulated through a multi-stage mechanism involving bipartite negotiation, mediation, conciliation, arbitration, and litigation before the Industrial Relations Court. However, excessive reliance on litigation tends to produce legal-formal outcomes that do not always realise substantive justice or social utility. This article aims to reconstruct industrial relations dispute resolution through a partnership-based approach grounded in the theories of justice and utility. This study employs normative legal research using statutory, conceptual, and comparative approaches. Primary legal materials consist of labour and industrial dispute regulations, while secondary materials include journal articles, ILO reports, ACAS publications, and comparative literature on industrial relations systems in the United Kingdom, Germany, and Singapore. The findings show that litigation has inherent limitations because it is adversarial, procedural, costly, and insufficiently capable of preserving long-term employment relationships. By contrast, a partnership approach positions workers and employers as relational actors with shared interests in business sustainability, labour protection, and productivity. From the perspective of justice, this approach corrects the imbalance of bargaining power between workers and employers. From the perspective of utility, it reduces conflict costs, accelerates settlement, and promotes industrial stability. The novelty of this article lies in integrating partnership, justice, and utility as a conceptual foundation for reconstructing industrial relations dispute resolution beyond litigation. The article recommends strengthening substantive social dialogue, professional mediation, protection for weaker parties in non-litigation processes, and repositioning the Industrial Relations Court as a last-resort mechanism.