Industrial relations Реферат

The term ‘industrial relations’ (IR) came into common use in Britain and North America during the 1920s. It has been joined by personnel management (PM) and, since the 1980s, human resource management (HRM). All three denote a practical activity (the management of people) and an area of academic inquiry.

‘Industrial relations’ has in principle never been so restricted. In practice, however, attention until recently often focused on certain parts of the economy. Whether or not there were good reasons for this neglect (and the case is at least arguable), the situation has changed, and recent research has addressed growing areas of the economy such as call centres. To avoid confusion some writers prefer the term ‘employment relations’, and if we were starting fr om scratch this might be the best label; yet the term ‘IR’ has become sufficiently embedded that it is retained here to cover relations between manager and worker in all spheres of economic activity. The focus is employment: all forms of economic activity in which an employee works under the authority of an employer and receives a wage in return for his or her labour. Industrial relations thus excludes domestic labour and also the self-employed and professionals who work on their own account: the contractual relations between a self-employed plumber and his customers are not ‘industrial relations’, but the relations between a plumbing firm and its employees are. In the UK self-employment comprises about 12 per cent of people in employment. The bulk of the working population is thus in an employment relationship, with the great majority of them, of course, being employees rather than employers.

What has IR to say about how we might analyse such issues? The employment relationship has two parts, market relations and managerial relations. The former is the more obvious. It covers the price of labour, which embraces not only the basic wage but also hours of work, holidays and pension rights. In this respect, labour is like any other commodity with a price which represents the total cost of enjoying its use.

Yet labour differs fr om all other commodities in that it is enjoyed in use and is embodied in people. A machine in a factory is also enjoyed in use and for what it can produce. Yet how it is used is solely in up to its owner. The ‘owner’ of labour, the employer, has to persuade the worker, that is the person in whom the labour is embodied, to work.

Managerial relations are the relationships that define how this process takes place: market relations set a price for a set number of hours of work, and managerial relations determine how much work is performed in that time, at what specific task or tasks, who has the right to define the tasks and change a particular mix of tasks and what penalties will be deployed for any failure to meet these obligations. A standard text thus defines IR as the ‘study of the rules governing employment’. The importance of this definition is developed below.

The employment relationship is by definition a relationship between an employee and an employer. This direct relationship may be mediated by the two other key institutions to IR, the trade union (or more rarely a non-union collectivity representing employees) and the state.

A trade union in its most basic role represents a group of workers in a specified part of their relations with a single employer. A union’s role can be measured in terms of density, mobilization, extent and scope.

• Density is the proportion of an identified constituency who are members of a union.

• The extent of a union’s activity refers to the range of the constituency: a union can represent a small group of employees in one locality, or all the employees in an occupation, or all the employees of a given employer, or extend beyond an occupation or an employer.

• Mobilization – the degree to which unions identify common interests among their members, persuade the members as to what the interests are, and organize in pursuit of the interests – is important because, most obviously in countries such as France, a union may be capable of mobilizing more employees than its nominal members. By the same token, members will not necessarily follow a union’s policy. Unions face issues of how far they represent members and of aggregating membership interests into a common policy.

It is useful to begin with the nature of rules. Rules do not have to be clearly enunciated, and many of the most important ones are not. A long series of shopfloor studies has revealed that expectations about how work is to be performed often arise from informal understandings. For example, a worker new to an establishment may discover that a supervisor permits workers to leave early at the end of a shift. She may then learn that this concession is granted only when work is slack or when a strict manager is absent, and that it is not wise to advertise it too widely. She may even find that this local understanding counts for nothing if managers decide to enforce the formal rules. Whether or not managers in fact enforce the formal rules and how they do so will depend on a variety of factors. These include:

• the procedures of the firm. If it has a system of warnings and appeals, it may issue a warning for a first offence, but in the absence of such disciplinary procedures it may act in a more sudden and less predictable way.

• the presence of a union. Can a representative make out a case for clemency on the grounds of the inexperience of the worker concerned or that the relevant practice had become taken for granted?

• the role of the law. If a worker is dismissed for a breach of a rule, can it be shown that the dismissal was fair in the circumstances?

This example shows that ‘the rules’ are many and varied, that different types of rule may apply to any given situation, and that rules have to be interpreted in action for them to have any practical meaning. The status of a rule also varies. A loose understanding may indicate normally accepted practice. But it may have little force.

When understandings attain rather more acceptance and legitimacy they may be termed custom and practice rules. As the classic study of the subject shows, managements may unwittingly allow one-off concessions to grow into established expectations. Wh ere workers have the power to insist that the expectations are honoured, a custom and practice rule is born. A later study showed that managers, too, generate custom and practice rules. In one case, a written rule in a collective agreement requiring that workers be given notice if they were to be laid off was successfully ignored by managers who pointed out that workers who stood on their rights would be entitled to only their low basic rate of pay, whereas if they went home early they could ‘get a lift with the housework’. Managers here used power to persuade workers wh ere their own interests lay.

Finally, why does not custom and practice continue to grow by a process of accretion? One important answer is that managements crack down on activities which get out of hand. They may do so on a piecemeal basis (for example in much of the UK car industry during the 1950s, when managements would attack shopfloor leaders when immediate conditions allowed, but without rooting out the challenge

‘Contract’ refers to a relationship based on the principles of hire-and-fire and individual responsibility. It is thus related to the more obvious idea of a relationship based on pure market principles but is also broader in recognizing that specific and detailed obligations can be provided through organizational rules and not the market. For example, many organizations use systems of performance appraisal which are defined by the organizations’ rules rather than a market in any exact sense of the term. ‘Status’ covers longer-term relationships and the treatment of the employee as an investment rather than a cost; for current purposes, we may include the provision of means for employees to participate in decision-making. A purely contractual relationship will give no space for such ‘voice’ and will treat employees simply as hired help, whereas in a more lasting relationship members of an organization may be expected to engage in its key choices. There are two reasons, which run through many debates on the employment relationship. The first relates to efficiency: giving workers a say may improve organizational functioning in some way. The second relates to equity: employees investing in a long-term relationship have rights which need to be respected [4, p.163].

The employment contract regulates the work relationship between the employer and employee. It stipulates the remuneration for work done by the employee. An agreement is signed after the work offer is accepted. The employer and employee both have rights and expectations that are stipulated in the contract.

Such contract is legally binding and enforceable by law even if it is an oral agreement. It is however safer to get a written employment contract containing the following mandatory provisions:

• name of company;

• full names of the employee;

• proper work description:

• commencement of employment date;

• work address;

• remuneration;

• minimum and maximum working hours;

• fringe benefit package, including a retirement plan, employee stock options, holiday pay. and health insurance benefits;

• sick leave stipulations;

• pension regulations;

• termination of employment

• minimum notice time;

• procedures for complaints;

• disciplinary procedures;

What goes on within the employment relationship is crucial, not only in terms of the pay which is earned but also the conditions under which it is earned: the degree of autonomy the employee is granted, the safety of the work environment, the opportunity for training and development, and so on.

For the employer the work relationship is crucial in two different senses. First, it is commonly argued that capital and technologies are increasingly readily available, so that a firm’s competitive position depends on the skills and knowledge of its workers.

Some analytical grounding for this argument comes from the resource-based view of the firm which developed from debates on strategic management. This view sees the firm as a bundle of assets and argues that it is the configuration of these assets, rather than positioning in relation to an external market, which is central to competitive advantage. Not surprisingly, HRM and IR writers have latched onto this idea, arguing that ‘distinctive human resources’ are the core resource. Second, and fundamentally, these ‘human resources’ are different from other resources because they cannot be separated from the people in whom they exist. The employment relationship is about organizing human resources in the light of the productive aims of the firm but also the aims of employees. It is necessarily open-ended, uncertain, and, as argued below, a blend of inherently contradictory principles concerning control and consent.

Finally, paid employment is important to society for what it expects in terms of ‘inputs’ and produces as ‘outputs’. Inputs include how much labour is demanded (with obvious implications if demand is less than supply, resulting in unemployment) and what types of labour are sought (influencing, for example, the kinds of skills which ‘society’ provides through the education system). If employment is structured on gender lines, this will have major consequences for the domestic division of labour and the roles of men and women in society; the traditional image of the male breadwinner applied not only to paid employment but also had implications for the ability of women to engage in politics, the arts, and sport. ‘Outputs’ include not only goods and services but also structures of advantage and disadvantage. These are properly called structures because they are established features of society which are hard to change, for example differences of pay between occupations and between men and women.