managing employment relations. Employers in Nigeria are just taking advantage of the weak institutional and regulatory frameworks to the detriment of their employees. As long as this situation persists, workers' rights would continue to be abridged. The truth is that employers do not want to share the control of employment relations with their employees. That is why they are coming up with new managerial ideologies and philosophies to justify their position. This much was admitted by an official of Nigerian Employers Consultative Association(NECA). In his words“most employers adopt the modern model of industrial relations, which discourages formation of workers' union and the use of collective bargaining to fix terms and conditions of work…. the new trend in industrial relations is employee relations, which emphasizes individualism instead of collectivism, hence the use of Joint Consultative Council instead of collective bargaining to settle industrial conflict. In employee relations, since there is no union and union leaders, opinion leaders are invited to participate in Joint Consultative Council”. Of course, the reference to“the new trend in industrial relations” is nothing other than the situation that has been promoted by the ascendancy of neo-liberalism as the framework of economic policies globally. This is the major thrust of the human resource management(HRM) approach to industrial relations. As a labour control strategy, the major import of the HRM approach is in its“preference for individual management communication with employees, rather than relying on collective forms of information exchange through trade unions”(Rose, 2001). It is to this extent that the HRM strategy is regarded as a union-avoidance strategy and for effect most firms adopting this approach do not allow the existence of unions in spite of relevant labour laws. As confirmed by both trade union officials and employers' representatives in the course of this study, at the point of selection, employees are made to denounce participation in trade unionism and made to believe that the union is irrelevant to their career advancement. In addition they are made to believe that with skills/expertise and commitment to the organisation, the sky is their limit. However, without the union or any collective platform to address common interests, employees become more vulnerable, while management assumes an unfettered control of the labour process and employment relationship. The adoption of this approach has been helped by the emergent new economic order packaged as globalization. It has altered industrial relations practice from the much advertised tripartite relationship into a unipolar or unitarist order. In his conception of industrial relations, Dunlop(1958) describes it as a tripartite system because of the 59