Explain how unions, human resources management personnel, and government interventions (such as laws and regulations) serve to address worker rights and worker safety.
Labor unions, human resources management personnel, and government interventions serve to address worker rights and worker safety in a variety of different ways. The confluence of all of these entities helps to create an environment for workers which is conducive to health and, ideally, to long term propagation of the ability of the laborer to continue to work. However, each of the aforementioned mechanisms is able to facilitate these ends from multiple perspectives. In most ways, labor unions were the initial catalyst for the rights which workers gained and which are today enforced by human resources management personnel and government interventions.
Labor unions are directly responsible for some of the most foundational rights for laborers throughout Occidental society, and in the United States, in particular. After the advent of the Industrial Revolution, virtually anyone (including women, children, etc.) was capable of working for as long as humanly possible in conditions which were oftentimes noxious. Labor unions are credited with advocacy measures for eight hour work days, time off for eating and resting, and even basic minimums in terms of compensation. The formation of these unions and their activity in this regard helped to stipulate the specific needs of workers in these regards.
By extension, many of the demands of labor union were eventually canonized into laws and regulations through government intervention. Today, eight hour work days are normative (Bradberry, 2016). There are laws—typically reinforced at the state level—dictating how long laborers can work prior to attaining a rest period. These legal mandates specify the minimum...
In this regard, the early efforts of labor unions were promulgated and codified by government reinforcement.
Human resources management personnel, then, are responsible for the specific implementation of these measures for individual organizations. They create the policy for companies which adhere to the foregoing protocols. Those protocols establish the minimums. Human resource management personnel, of course, can exceed those minimums by attracting employees with even better benefits packages, longer lunch periods than the law allows, and other means of recruiting and retaining employees. As such, there is a synthesis of the interactions of labor unions, government interventions, and human resources management personnel which plays an integral role in addressing worker rights and worker safety.
Evaluate whether unions and HRM have unique roles for different groups (i.e., the organization, management, and the workers) or if there are areas of overlap.
Labor unions do not necessarily have unique roles for different groups. In general, these groups are focused on the rights of the laborer for employment (Block, 2011). Although those rights are oftentimes discussed collectively, more often than not they specifically apply to individual laborers. It is the consideration of how labor union rights affect individual workers that forms the basis for the collective bargaining stance of such organizations. In this regard there is a considerable amount of overlap in how such unions interact with the different groups which typically include the organization it is dealing with as a whole, its management, and its workers as well. Those interactions are predicated on championing the rights of the individual, a fact which is represented at each of the previously mentioned…
