Assess the Advantages and Problems Facing an Employer Seeking to Manage Employee Relations in a Non-Union Environment.
MSc EMPLOYEE RELATIONS
Dr. Joe McBride
Dr. Arjan Keizer
06003512
[pic]
I certify that this assignment is the result of my own work and does not exceed the word count noted. Number of words: 1500 (Excluding references, title page)
Assess the advantages and problems facing an employer seeking to manage employee relations in a non-union environment.
The issue of the ‘non-union’ firm has come to the forefront in Britain principally because it has been seen as an exemplar of one strand of the new industrial relations (Beardwell, 1993). During her reign in the 1980’s, Margaret Thatcher was a staunch opponent of Britain’s powerful trade union and her government brought about its downfall (BBC News, 2004). As the overall level of union membership and density has fallen in Britain throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, researchers have begun to pay more attention to the non-union employment sector (Beaumont and Harris, 1993). Employee relations in non-union settings remain largely uninvestigated by industrial relations researchers (Mcloughlin and Gourlay, 2007). Non-unionism is more paramount in certain parts of the country and in certain sectors in the UK such as High technology firms which are frequent exemplars of new human resource management techniques designed to substitute for unions. The term ‘non-union’ is concerned with a situation where trade union recognition is absent; in some situations non-union does not mean the complete absence of a trade union (Dundon and Rollinson, 2004). Examples of non-union representation are joint industrial councils, peer-review dispute resolution panel, European works style-council (Kaufman and Taras, 2000).
Non-union firms differ in quite substantial ways; Guest and Hoque (1994) identify four possible types of non-union establishments. Firstly is the ‘good’ establishments (otherwise known as a ‘full utilization, high involvement model’ (Kelly, 2002) which have clear HRM strategies and make extensive use of a
Dr. Joe McBride
Dr. Arjan Keizer
06003512
[pic]
I certify that this assignment is the result of my own work and does not exceed the word count noted. Number of words: 1500 (Excluding references, title page)
Assess the advantages and problems facing an employer seeking to manage employee relations in a non-union environment.
The issue of the ‘non-union’ firm has come to the forefront in Britain principally because it has been seen as an exemplar of one strand of the new industrial relations (Beardwell, 1993). During her reign in the 1980’s, Margaret Thatcher was a staunch opponent of Britain’s powerful trade union and her government brought about its downfall (BBC News, 2004). As the overall level of union membership and density has fallen in Britain throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, researchers have begun to pay more attention to the non-union employment sector (Beaumont and Harris, 1993). Employee relations in non-union settings remain largely uninvestigated by industrial relations researchers (Mcloughlin and Gourlay, 2007). Non-unionism is more paramount in certain parts of the country and in certain sectors in the UK such as High technology firms which are frequent exemplars of new human resource management techniques designed to substitute for unions. The term ‘non-union’ is concerned with a situation where trade union recognition is absent; in some situations non-union does not mean the complete absence of a trade union (Dundon and Rollinson, 2004). Examples of non-union representation are joint industrial councils, peer-review dispute resolution panel, European works style-council (Kaufman and Taras, 2000).
Non-union firms differ in quite substantial ways; Guest and Hoque (1994) identify four possible types of non-union establishments. Firstly is the ‘good’ establishments (otherwise known as a ‘full utilization, high involvement model’ (Kelly, 2002) which have clear HRM strategies and make extensive use of a
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