Employment Relations

How would you characterise employee representation in the UK workplace? To what extent do you agree with the argument that the UK is ‘lightly regulated’ in this regard?

Introduction

This paper seeks to analyse the characteristics of employee representation in the UK and concerns about is the UK ‘lightly regulated’ in regard of the employee representation. Employee representation can be known as the right of workers to seek a union or an individual to represent them to negotiate with their organizations with a wide range of management issues, such as wage rate, working hours, working conditions, health and safety and also their benefits. It is vital to have a formal system of employee representation in a business. This can give an opportunity for a business to communicate with employees and the law requires a business to consult with the employees in some situations. It helps management and employees to understand more about the workplace issues and other factors that could affect a business. Moreover, this could help to build up trust between employees and managers and therefore workplace relations could be improved. In the UK workplace, there are forms of employee representation which are trade union, non-trade union and indirect representative participation. As for the UK is ‘lightly regulated’ in employee representation is being concerned, there are many workplaces still do not have their employee representations. To a large extent, I agree with this argument. Common structure of employee representation does not exist in the UK and the most common way that legally forces employers to deal with employees is the unions. However, union recognition is decreasing.

Characteristics of worker representation

Employee representation is basically refers to the discussions between employers and employee representatives. This helps to protect employees’ right and to make sure that they are fairly treated. Those representatives could be elected by employees or