Unionizing Effort

Labor Relations Union Environment There are several differences between a union environment and a non-union environment. The most striking distance is that the workers are organized, and that has significant implications for the relationship between management and the workers. With respect to most issues, including pay and working conditions, negotiation on these issues is with the union, in the form of a collective bargaining agreement, rather than individually with each employee.

Most things will be more formalized, which will affect processes for just about everything, and that includes critical issues like discipline. The union will be the face of the workers, and thus there will be limited interaction between management and workers in most cases. The division will be fairly cultural -- the organization itself will change. So the unionized shop is a more formalized environment, often more antagonistic but even when it is not, it is more mechanistic.

Management has limits on its controls, for example, and this will affect how and when management seeks to affect change on the organization. It is likely that the organization will become less responsive, as it must partner with the union to get any changes through. What use to be simple processes will now be subject to negotiation and political trade-offs. In essence, the company is going to change a lot if the workers unionize (Gustafson, 2015). Over time, the employees will extract more pay and benefits.

They have this ability because a union is a collective, and in this it has much more bargaining power than any one employee would have had individually. The organization needs to consider that this will affect its cost structure, and may need to think about how that will affect strategic overall. It is not just that, but unions are also protected by specific rights, including the right of free association. Management should be aware of the special laws that are in place.

For example, management is not allowed to interfere with the organizing process, just in case anybody was thinking of doing so. The right to strike is a big one, because now the organization will be threatened with shutdown, if there is no collective bargaining agreement in place. The business is now faced with total shutdown, or near total, and depending on the nature of the business might want to consider having plans for that, especially if it starts to get close to the end of a collective bargaining agreement.

So a free environment leads to a more flexible situation, where management and each individual employee can define roles, pay and benefits, in addition to being able to change these things more quickly. A unionized environment will slow all of this down, and increase the bargaining power of the workers. This will change the culture of the organization, the structure and a lot of different process that govern how the organization meets its strategic objectives.

The workers are going to have a much greater level of involvement in all of these issues. The Campaign There are limits as to what management can and cannot do during a unionization campaign. These limits have been established and tested in court, and management would do well to understand these laws, and the involvement level that management can have when there is an organizing effort in their staff. In the past, management may have had broader limits on its responses to union organizing.

First, management has to establish its stance on the issue. Freeman and Kleiner (1988) found that where the likelihood of union victory is high, management often does not fight the unionization, because it wants to retain healthy relations with these workers, with whom they will soon be negotiating a CBA. The employer can seek to make the workplace a better place, in order to narrow the gap between what the union is basically promising the workers and what they are already receiving.

There is a trade-off at work for many workers, especially knowing that they must get value for the union dues and for the changes to the working environment. Thus, management can dissuade workers from unionizing by limiting the differences between what employees are already getting, and what they think they will get from unionizing (Freeman & Kleiner, 1988). Basically, management has to uphold the National Labor Relations Act. This gives workers the right to organize into unions, to strike and to take collective action.

The management cannot, therefore, infringe upon the right to organize. That means that management cannot do anything that will be seen as attempting to disrupt the organizing process. A recent National Labor Review Board ruling noted that companies must allow employees to use company email in their organizing, as the latter is a protected activity, and employers cannot infringe on a worker's right to undertake it (NLRB, 2015). So for management, the best they can do is to deal with the issue proactively.

Once a union organization drive is underway there is basically nothing the company can do to disrupt that process. In some cases, a company has closed a facility that is having a drive, or that has recently unionized, but the reality is that this does not occur too frequently. Management instead must provide workers with pay and a working environment that are pretty close to what the employees would get if unionized. There is even room to provide a superior environment.

The employees therefore might not see the value in the trade off of joining a union. In terms of actively discouraging unionization, however, there is little the company can do without opening itself to a challenge under law. The company may not interfere with the organizing effort, and cannot undertake any action that would appear to be interfering with the organizing effort.

Indeed, the company cannot even mount an information campaign on its own behalf, which is why so many companies undertake preventative measures, that will discourage a union from attempting to target their business, or will ensure that the union does not gain any traction should it attempt to make inroads.

The best advice for a company that is experiencing a unionization drive is to stay out of it, and if pressed affirm the company as a great place to work and one that will respect the wishes of its employees with respect to unionization.