Employment Relations

1
Employment Relations

• Future Trajectories?

2
Recent Developments

• The Actors
• Management
• Impact of globalisation and deregulation
• Power balance change in their favour has meant
  easier to initiate change
• More individualised approach to achieving goals
  employee voice but dual voice non-union voice
• Individualisation partial and may be costly

3
Recent Developments

• Trade unions
• Contrasts in approaches organising model v
  partnership model
• Trend decline in union density and in union
  influence even since 1997 marginalising of
  unions has continued (Smith and Morton work)
• Growth of less unionate bodies Professional
  unions RCN, RCM, PCS
• European developments assisting unions but also
  rendering them less important
• Not a US model but not European either

4
Recent Developments

• The State
• More interventionist in terms of regulatory law
  but restrictive legislation of Thatcher era
  remains
• Public sector remains area of tension in
  employment relations education, health service,
  London Underground
• Business friendly but also floor of rights,
  encouraging business to develop own standards of
  fairness and equity
• Best Value agenda, see Agenda for Change in
  NHS

5
Recent Developments

• Outcomes
• Developments in employment regulation CB,
  managerial regulation
• Strikes and indicators of manifest conflict
  labour turnover, absenteeism
• Substantive outcomes pay, hours, holidays,
  productivity
• Procedural outcomes discipline, grievance,
  absence, harassment ET cases
• Employee involvement/engagement psychological
  contract (health)

6
And the Future?

• Can examine using FOUR main concepts
• IDENTITY
• INEQUALITY
• POWER
• CHANGE

7
Identity

• Historically, work, occupations and organisations
  seen as providing important source of identity
• Increasing insecurity risks transferred from
  organisations to individuals (Beck 2001)
• The rise of acquisitive individualism (Heery
  and Salmon 2000)
• Without rigorous state agency-enforced law
• The economy will continue to generate more
  workplaces in which the nature of employment
  relationships is almost exclusively a matter for
  managerial choice (Millward et al. 2000)

8
Identity

• Focus on new forms of identity decline in work
  (Gorz 1998, Beck 2001), decline in work as the
  basis for identity
• See postmodernism and the cult of the customer
• New social movements identity shifted more to
  groups women, gays and lesbians, religion
  these become important outside as well as inside
  the workplace.

9
Inequality

• Inequalities in work and the workplace remain
  (see status divide), as do inequalities in
  outcomes. Hamel (2000) has argued
• Employees ought to be valued more we call them
  members or associates but they are still
  dispensable come the first downturn. We talk of
  wanting them to have imagination and creativity
  then put them into mindless re-engineered tasks.
  Companies say they want employees to have a
  work/life balance but then make the company
  central to their employees lives at the expense
  of family and community

10
Power

• Structuration that no real constitutional
  recognition of employees within the corporate
  form labour as another factor of production
• As production shifts towards software and
  knowledge capital may be scope for core workers
  to impact materially on the structure within
  which they are situated. But these are likely to
  be the exception, with most confined to a life of
  uncertainty with no effective voice
• Willman (2007) continued decline in union-only
  voice mechanisms in UK over past 25 years, rise
  of dual voice and increasingly non-union voice

11
Change

• Re-regulation of employment relations since late
  1980s
• New Labour emphasis on fairness, partnership
  but limited impact on practice
• Change but how much?
• Continuity much in evidence
• CIPD increasing focus on New Agenda of
  engagement, through variety of mechanisms
  including EI but acknowledge problems of
  achieving this within the prevailing management
  cultures in the UK