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Union memberships in organisations

发布时间:2017-04-02
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Contents

Introduction

Management of Employee Relations

Characterisation of Non-Unionism

Conclusion

References

Marks and Spencer (M & S) and Sew and Sons (S & S) have a bilateral trade arrangement. M & S provides S & S with contractual, pay per-item, sewing manufacturing business while S & S separately provides the workforce to complete the sewing manufacturing process. Thus, while employees of S & S are not employees of M & S, they must follow M & S instructions and directions for manufacturing quality. M & S provides stringent rules and strict directions to S & S employees. In recent times, S & S has suffered high staff turnover rates, cited by employees to be in part due to the low income of per-item sewing and manufacturing. However, the main concern at S & S seems to be surrounding the influence of M & S on the employee production rates and employee satisfaction. Neither organisation maintains a unionised membership, thus when M & S altered the manufacturing process and pay structures at S & S, employees of S & S had no medium for communication. They had the option to leave the company or perform under conditions that were unsuitable for internal and external motivation, including lowered pay and lowered skill bases.

Union membership in the UK has diminished since a peak in 1979, with a slight increase after 1997 due to the New Labour agreements (McCracken and Sanderson 2004). Researchers Barry and May (2004) question if unionisation is a desirable form of employee representation when the global worldview and the UK labour market has moved towards collective bargaining and an era of growth. Alternative employee representation schemas, including open door policies and strong manager-employee relationships are a newer form of substitution that represents an optimistic workplace strategy (Barry and May 2004). Non-union organisations have different managerial attitudes, both imparted by socio-cultural and corporate-culture connotations. The distinction, in the traditional sense, between non-union organisations is that two main paradigms of thought exist as a result of managerial attitudes and behaviours. The first is anti-unionism, where manager seeks to suppress and substitute union membership with expressive behaviours, such as policies and regulations that either remove the ability of the employee to seek out union membership within the confines of the organisation; or enhance the confines of the organisation to lessen or remove the need for unionisation in the employee’s mindset (McCracken and Sanderson 2004).

Non-union organisations are not a homogeneous group. The difference for managers in small organisations is often "no interest in employee participation, have few formal procedures for regulating employment relations, and invest little in human resource management skills" (Bach 2005:446). In contrast, other non-union organisations develop a strategy of sophisticated human resource management, this is particularly true for large organisations (Bach 2005). Thus, wide variations in defining a typical non-union organisation exist, especially as the various organisations develop responses to legislation and employee relationship communications (Bach 2005). Managers are often fearful of unions that increase bureaucracy and cost, thus reliance on legislation for employee relationships are the typical structure (Bach 2005). The impact of employee work legislations is ultimately that organisations with no union recognition maintain a preference to remove formal indirect structures of employee representation, relying instead on direct employee to management communications, and occasionally through an employment consultant (Bach 2005).

Traditional non-union facilities with over 20 employees are noted with trends that move towards establishment-level bargaining and decentralised management. In this, it is examined that the smaller establishments have more difficulty in responding to employee service pressures from unionised traditions (due to individualism), yet managers of larger facilities are able to overcome this pressure through initiation of non-unionism policies and establishing collectivism (McCracken and Sanderson 2004). M & S does not have an anti-unionism policy, but instead maintains employee relationships that are continuously geared towards improving the state of work for new employees and strong communications with tenured employees. However, at S & S there is a major difference. M & S manufacturing does not strictly oversee S & S employees, but they can determine if S & S employees receive pay for performance through quality assurance checks. Thus, for the smaller S & S establishment there is a very high negative correlation between responding to employee pressures on an individualised basis and ensuring that the collective is able to earn an income, where the collective income is based on M & S acceptance of quality assurance.

The employee contract is the exchange of labour powers for monetary reward, where the organisation seeks to maximise labour powers and initiate cost-saving strategies (Hollinshead, Nicholls and Tailby 2003). Unionisation increases cost, and thus organisations often promote substitutions to unionisation such as profit-ownership sharing schemas (Hollinshead, Nicholls and Tailby 2003). The non-union organisation ha a desire to overcome the external business environment’s unpredictable changes through the development of shorter product life-cycles and increases in product-service delivery, thus the context of labour pressure is created and manifested as cost reduction (Hollinshead, Nicholls and Tailby 2003). Non-unionisation for a typical manufacturing facility creates fewer complications in downsizing and increases options for direct employee communications and product-service process innovation, allowing the organisation to have greater effect over its economies of scale, rather than relinquishing that effectual impact to a union (Hollinshead, Nicholls and Tailby 2003). Financial participation schemas within the employee labour contract attempt to relate pay with performance through the entire organisation, in the ultimate goal to develop commonality between employees and employer (Hollinshead, Nicholls, and Tailby 2003). Financial participation schemes at M & S are very high, where the retailer removes complications through communication with direct employees and maintains high control over the manufacturing and distribution process. However, for S & S employees the lack of a union means that M & S is able to dictate cost reduction by altering the manufacturing product-life cycle from intelligent, hand crafted work to piece-meal style of manufacturing process, where the employee who can assemble the most product from strict and non-innovative instructions gains the largest reward. Thus, employees of S & S are not participants in their financial participation schemas, but are victims of it. They suffer lower wages and lack of union involvement at the manufacturing level, while M & S employees gain individualism.

Within the UK, a characterisation of unionisation (and, lack thereof) is that employee involvement is voluntary, where organisations and employees are compelled to establish arrangements based on the collectivism needs of both parties (Hollishead, Nicholls and Tailby 2003). Within typical non-union organisations, paternalism is the most common in production markets, where the employees and floor-level managers are restrained by employer choices, and formal discipline and recruitment strategies focus on following the expectations of labour legislation and manufacturing production, rather than the needs of the employees (Head and Lucas 2004). Within the paternalistic employee relationship strategy of non-union organisations, a common cost reduction strategy is to prevent unionisation through workforce restructuring, where the result is that a greater scope of managerial control allows for more numerical flexibility (Head and Lucas 2004). M & S is a typical non-union organisation in this area as it functions within the patterns of paternalism, where employee relationships are established based on the needs of management and recruitment strategies focus on initiating policies that focus on the individualism needs of employees. However, M & S’s paternalistic cost-cutting strategies as they involve S & S manufacturing are also typical of non-union organisations in that the patterns of workforce restructuring, in particular the movement of skilled labourers to non-skilled piece-assembly work with lower pay is a common manufacturing strategy of organisations that lack unionisation and employee voice.

In a quantitative review of several hundred non-union and union organisations, researchers Dundon and Rollinson (2005) found disadvantages and advantages for non-union membership. An imperative concept when discussing the structure of a typical non-union organisation is that employees are individualised, thus in non-union firms employees and managers feel that managerial freedom is the strongest advantage of non-union organisations (Dundon and Rollinson 2005). Thus managerial strategies may prefer non-unionisation in that it allows for stronger amounts of workforce structuring freedom. This is true at M & S where the human resource strategy is based on the ability of managers and employees to communicate and create solutions to problems through high amounts of managerial freedom. Similarily, disadvantages exist, where communication in non-union organisations is easier due to direct contact, it also requires "that effective communications along individualistic lines requires a degree of time, effort, and money" (Dundon and Rollinson 2005:66). Non-union status also allows management to have the ability to pay lower wages, where wage negotiations are often a unionised agreement (Dundon and Rollinson 2005). In particular, research shows that there is a succinct lack in fringe benefits. Less than half of non-union organisations report "that they provided and occupational pension scheme for all employees" (Dundon and Rollinson 2005:66). Furthermore, no non-union organisations provided "paternity leave or childcare at the workplace,” and very few offered private medical insurance and facilities for socialisation (Dundon and Rollinson 2005:67). This is true at S & S where managers and employees may not prefer the non-union strategy because they create lacks in recognition and reward, and line managers are constricted by the specific dictations of upper management and, in this case at least, dictations of supervisory bodies such as M & S.

Typical non-union organisations share some characteristics, “what has been a growing trend of deliberate management policies to exclude trade unions (where a non-union policy is in operation), or marginalize trade unions such as the tactic of promoting joint consultation as a replacement for collective bargaining” (McCracken and Sanderson 2004:278). In the non-union sector, employee relationships are typically characterised by freedom of managerial decision making (Head and Lucas 2004). In particular, the typical non-union organisation has hiring and releasing freedom, especially in regards to unskilled workers (Head and Lucas 2004). The repercussions of this freedom for the employees are that hard human resource strategies create more vulnerable employees. However, for managers in the typical non-union organisation this allows for retaining and cost control decision making opportunities: “[...]managers, mainly in small privately owned organisations, use pragmatic and cost-cutting approaches, including low-skill, short-service workers, low pay and insecure employment conditions” (Head and Lucas 2004). M & S can be considered a typical non-union organisation where they have responded to the trend of promoting freedom of managerial decision making and enhanced capabilities for cost control decisions. At S & S, it can also be stated that there is a typical non-union organisation where unskilled workers are hired and fired based on the requirements of M & S, without communicable human resource strategies that could alleviate the distressing state of employees suffering from low pay and low skilled work. However, when the relationship between M & S and S & S is examined, it is shown that there is not a typical non-union relationship. Primarily, a non-union would offer employees the ability to communicate and bargain with management in regards to the manufacturing needs. In this case it is shown that due to M & S’s interventions and stringent directions, employees of S & S are not offered the ability to communicate their needs to M & S, thus creating a distressful situation where there is almost no employee relationship and a succinct lack of collectivism and bargaining.

In conclusion, it can be stated that M & S is a typical non-union organisation. It allows for the freedoms, benefits, individualism, and other enhanced non-union characteristics that are common for human resource strategies. Non-union organisations also have more leeway in employee development and workforce structure, thus are able to allocate and reallocate resources as necessary to maintain the needs of the workforce. On the other hand, according to the research above, S & S is also a typical non-union organisation. It allows employees and managers little freedoms in wage negotiation, work negotiation, and work structures. Employees at S & S suffer from low morality and low wages due to a restructuring of work prompted by the commission of M & S. The result for the non-union S & S is higher turnover rates and lack of skilled workers. The conclusion is that both M & S and S & S are identifiably typical non-union organisations, however the relationship between both companies has created all the negative connotations of non-union organisations at Sew and Sons, while Marks and Spencer employees experience affirmative and positive managerial strategies.

Bach, Stephen (2005) Managing Human Resources: Personnel Management in Transition. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing

Barry Michael and May, Robyn (2004) New employee representation Legal developments and New Zealand unions 26 (2) pp. 203-223

Dundon Tony, and Rollinson Derek (2004) Employment Relations in Non-union Firms. London: Routledge

Head Jeremy and Lucas, Rosemary (2004) Employee relations in the non-union hotel industry: a case of “determined opportunism”? Personnel Review. 33 ( 6) pp. 693-710

Hollinshead, G., Nicholls, P.And Tailby, S. (2003). Employee. Relations. 2nd Ed. London: Ft Prentice Hall.

McCracken Martin and Sanderson Michael (2004) Trade union recruitment: strategic options? Employee Relations. 26 ( 3) pp. 274-291

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