Human Resources Labor/Management Relations Which

Human Resources

Labor/Management Relations

Which events do you feel were most important in shaping the labor relations system? Do you feel that earlier events from the nineteenth-century still have an impact today, or are the current system more of a product of the twentieth-century?

Modifications in labor markets and employment relations in the United States have received substantial attention over the years. The opening position for recounting these changes is usually the institutional construction of labor relations of the postwar era of 1945 to 1975. This era was distinguished by normal full time positions and open ended, long time employment associations that were frequently ordered inside solid inner employment markets. Employees characteristically played out their careers with one company who often treated them like family, and who positioned pay directed by organizational conventions founded on internal standards of equity (Kalleberg, 2001).

The organization of employment relations was changed by the financial, social and political proceedings that occurred during the 1980's and 1990's. These proceedings included: the recurrence of price competition fueled by superior global opposition, technological progress characterized by the extensive use of computers facilitating new schemes of supervision and power, augmented variety in labor force composition mirrored in higher percentages of women and non-white employees, and greater supremacy of capital markets and the connected corporate financial reform (Kalleberg, 2001).

These proceedings led to the termination of the post war scheme of employment relations and to the appearance of new institutional regulations which came to be known as the new agreement among employers and their workers, which led to a new labor market. These new relationships can be seen in the decrease of solid inner employment markets and larger inner firm mobility, the vanishing of the cooperation envisioned as a family unit, layoffs of workers even in superior financial times, and organization procedures that redesigned the business by cutting back, subcontracting, outsourcing, employing temporary workers, and connecting pay to performance (Kalleberg, 2001).

Case Study

How much power or influence do the labor and management sides have over workplace rules and organization?

There are fundamentally three layers of decision making that takes place in a labor-management relationship. These decisions are very influential in the interrelationships among activities at different levels of a company's structure. They enlighten the origins of any established disagreements or discrepancies that take place amid the practices and strategies of the organization. It is important that companies consider the consequences of strategic decisions and examine the effects of increased contribution by individuals and work groups in the industrial relations system.

Level 1 is that of strategic decision making. It is at this level that main approaches are believed to exert long-term pressures on collective bargaining. Instances of such concerns are: what businesses invest in, where they locate work locations, and whether to buy or make a variety of apparatus. The public sector connect in strategic decision-making of the first level in deciding what services and goods are responsible for presenting to the public, and choosing whether to offer goods and services itself or contract out.

Level 2 is collective bargaining. This layer portrays the route and conclusions of contract negotiation, and includes such matters as collective bargaining, personnel strategy formulation, and expansion and management of key public policies governing labor management relations.

Level 3 is the day-to-day workplace issues. This layer describes the process by which policies are carried out and how they affect individual employees, managers, and union representatives on an everyday basis. Job and work association and design, work rules, worker-supervisor relationships, and public policy governing individual rights at the workplace are carried out at this level (Burt, 2006).

Examples of this third level can be seen in both of the cases being looked at. The company in the Unilateral Work Rule Changes were looking to change the everyday work polices of its employees in regards to at work accidents and the sick leave policy. Both of these things are issues that affect the workers on an everyday basis. The management side of this issue had the power to make these changes and the labor side of the issue in the form of the union did not choose to bargain about them because they understood that they way the contract was written management had the right to make changes such as these.

In the case of Are Teaching Assistants (TAs), Research Assistants (RAs), and Proctors Employees Under the NLRA, the question at hand was whether or not these different groups were indeed classified as employees of the university and if so whether they were entitled to join the union and have the protections that being a union member would afford them. This issue again affected these people in regards to their everyday working environments. If they were to be classified as employees and thus allowed to unionize then their everyday working conditions would most likely be very different.

While unionization of employees in the private arena has been steadily declining, the reverse has occurred for workers in the public sector. In recent years, government employees joining unions, including schoolteachers, has actually gone up. Currently the teachers' unions exercise a tremendous deal of authority, throughout the educational arena. Almost everyone concurs that public schools have to be improved and whether or not meaningful changes occur often relies mainly on what the teachers' unions decide to do. It is thought that the outlook of the teaching system in this country relies on how the unions decide to use their authority (History of Labor Unions, 2010).

Over the path of more than a century, the labor advancement has had a tremendous influence in shaping how people in America exist and work. The pressure that the unions have had over the years has been tremendous over the extended and sometimes violent effort for authority in the workplace. The labor advancement's importance has forever been unstable because of people's approach in regards to ordered labor. Currently, just like in the past, a number of people avidly think that unions are vital institutions of liberty, whereas other people believe that they are at greatest a relic and at the worst a barrier to advancement (History of Labor Unions, 2010).