Employee Relation, the Trade Union of the UK - Assignment Example

Employee Relation Contents Contents 2 Introduction 3 Body 3 Answer 3 Answer 2 4 Answer 3 4 Answer 4 5 Answer 5 6 Answer 6 6 Answer 7 7 Answer 8 8 Answer 9 8 Answer 10 9 Answer 11 10 Conclusion 11 References 12 Introduction Trade unions started recruiting members from outside the organizations. These staffs did not belong from any union background. These staffs were trained by trade unions. This helped them to increase their number of members. Unions play major role in delivering and improving business performances. Globalization has forced the UK companies to take part in competitive business process. For this reason the trade union membership became less attractive to the employees and they started focusing more on their responsibilities for improving the business process. Body Answer 1 Trade unions have faced the problem of declining membership level. This problem became intense day by day. For this problem the strengths of the trade unions have significantly decrease. To handle this problem the trade unions renewed themselves in different ways. The structures of the trade unions were organized in such a way which facilitates its members to produce their views and opinions easily. This helped the trade unions to satisfy its members and make them feel their opinions and views are important to the unions. By implementing this way the trade unions tried to retain their members. Trade unions increased their benefits and facilities which a member will get by joining with them. The senior members of trade unions started motivating and influencing the existing members to bring new members. The unions developed systematic approaches for campaigning on any issues. This helped them to highlight the cause for which they are campaigning and through this way they are able to reach maximum number of people. This process facilitates the trade unions to attract many people to join them. Answer 2 Social partnership is recurring national pay agreements which are used by a country to handle its weak economy and high inflation. Social partnership is one of the promising ways to renew trade unions at workplace. Social partnership secures the recognitions of trade unions and helps them to organize themselves. Social partnership provides a legal framework to the trade unions. Social partnership played an important role in highlighting renewal practices of trade unions. Social partnership facilitated the trade unions to build strategies for recruiting and retaining their members. This type of partnership is accounted as a social and democratic way of participation in trade unions. With the help of social participation the trade unions were able to implement fairness in organization by minimum wage legislation. As a result the government recognised the aspirations of trade unions which benefited them in their success. Trade union rights are renewed and established properly by social partnership agreements. Social partnership agreement helps the trade union to restructure them. The relationship among trade union members was enhanced by this agreement. The power trade union in recruiting and resenting its union members are improved by establishing social partnership. Answer 3 Employees face many advantages and disadvantages for the absence of union in the workplace. Trade union plays an important role in increasing the benefits, wages, layoffs and promotions of the employees. The union leaders guide the employees to follow specific ways or rules for getting those benefits. Work procedures of the organization are improved by the rules and regulations implemented by trade unions. For the absence of trade union the employees or organizational members face problems in getting those benefits. Trade union acts a middle man in between company’s management and workers. Employees make effective communication with the management of the company through trade unions. Therefore in the absence of trade unions organizational members sometimes face problems in communicating with top managers. In many cases it has been noticed that trade unions tries to complicate simple issues of business which make the work process difficult. In that case employees can’t perform their work and as a result they cannot perform the responsibilities of their job. Some members of trade union often tend to take undue advantages by using employees. The trade unions often get involved in performing unethical job which hampers the career growth of employees. The absence of trade unions provides all of these advantages to the employees. Answer 4 There are many reasons for which the trade union of UK has declined. The trade union was facing major problem of losing its members. Many important members of trade union were leaving their membership as a result the strength of trade union was lower down. High level of bureaucracy was practised in this union. So the members of this union faced difficulties in producing their views and options. These increased complexities in trade union caused its decline. The economy of UK faced three major changes which creates some negative impact on its job market. For the change in UK’s economy many employees had to leave their job. For this reason they could not participate in trade union actively. The government of UK played an active role reducing the power of trade unions. Legislature and policies of UK were changed to restrict the activities of trade unions. For gaining success trade union had reduced its strikes. It started recruiting members from outside the organizations. Answer 5 There are some factors which influences the growth and use of emotional labour in various workplaces. In competitive business environment almost all the companies provide same types of goods and services. So for creating a strong position in the market a company focuses on providing a good emotional service to its customers. Respecting every customers and greeting them well are the main task of emotional labours. By this process emotional labours easily convince the customers and influence their purchasing behaviours. In the busy workplaces often the employees forget to maintain proper behaviour with the customers. For this reason the companies tend to loss many of its customers (Addison and Belfield, 2004). Emotional expressiveness of employees like their facial expressions, gestures, voice etc creates strong impact on customers buying behaviours. The emotional expressiveness of employees expresses their desires and emotions related to their work. This influences the company to use emotional labour to understand how employees value their job. Emotional labours helps to modify situations by using appropriate strategies which influences customer’s emotions. All of these factors influence the growth of emotional labour. Answer 6 Emotional work is a process which tries to change things on the basis of quality, feelings, degree etc. Emotional works is involved in managing own feelings. This work helps to maintain relationships by showing off emotions. Emotional labour means the person who show’s off emotions publicly in the workplace through his body gesture, facial expression etc are known as emotional labour. Emotional labour display’s his feelings in a particular situation for convincing people or handling situations. But emotional work involves in normal display of emotions to express feelings. On the contrary emotional labour works on the basis of profit motive whereas emotional work only focuses on building or maintain relationship. As an emotional labour a person needs to control his original feelings (Belfield and Heywood, 2001). He has to behave as per the rules and regulations of the company. But in emotional work a person do not needs to control his feelings. He can show off his actual expressions. Emotional work is associated with private matters of a person whereas emotional labour is associated with his workplace. Answer 7 Emotional dissonance means the uneasy feelings that a person experiences when someone examines the importance of emotional experiences as problem in his identity. This creates negative feeling within the person. In this case the real emotions of the person and his fake emotions are totally different from each other. Emotional dissonance also highlights the conflict and difference between actual emotional experiences of employees and the required emotional experiences of the organization. Emotional dissonance reduces the self esteem of employees. As a result they become dissatisfied. Surface acting means pretending or doing fake presentation of emotions by using artificial or unnatural body language, communication etc. While doing surface acting people use various body gestures for convincing others. Person involved in surface acting use soft tones, attractive language, etc to show of fake emotions (Addison and Belfield, 2001). In surface action people hides their actual feelings and emotions for pretending in front of others. Deep acting means the control of internal emotions by a person for making other believe that the person is actually enjoying interacting with others and he is happy with it. In this case a person pretends this type of feelings and tries to ensure that he is not showing any negative reaction. Answer 8 To some extent emotional labour influences and controls workplace environment and practises. Every organization has some strong rules and regulations which its employees have to follow and perform whether they like it or not. By using emotional labours companies prevents its employees to show off their actual emotions which could have negatively affected the performance of other employees. All the organizational members need to follow particular behaviour or organizational culture for maintaining the workplace environment. Emotional labour behaves in such a way which helps the company to maintain its organizational culture. Customers are very important for every company. Emotional labour contributes a lot in satisfying the customers. Their pleasant and polite behaviour help to attract more customers and retain the existing customers. This type of labour plays a vital role in managing and overcoming different situations with their artificial and fake behaviours. Therefore this helps to control various problems in workplace (Roche, 2001). Answer 9 The four different types of trade unions are as follows: Craft union is one of the simple types of trade union. This trade union are formed by the workers who belong from the same occupation, specialization, craft etc. This union is formed irrespective of industries in which the employees are engaged. In this union people are elected from different industry. India Pilots is an example of craft union. This trade union is mostly found in Asian countries like India, China etc (Traxler, 2000). Industrial union is established on the basis of industry. Different segments of the industry are focused more for developing this union. For example when the labour force of garment industry develops a union having workers of various crafts then the union is known as industrial union. Different types of workers get involved in this union and enhance the strength of industrial union. As a result this union are very much efficient in making negotiations easily with the companies. Industrial union helps to bring both skilled and unskilled unions together which encourage them to improve their performances. Industrial union are extensively noticed in United Kingdom and then in USA (Waddington, 2001). General union include all types of workers irrespective of their occupation or the industry in which they are working. Another name of general union is labour union. Employees of different companies are involved in this union. General union deals in large number of issues and problem which are associated with employees and business. This type of union follows bureaucratic style. General union has its origin in UK but it has become very popular in USA. White collar union is formed with high ranking officers and employees. In this union employees of some particular profession take part. The professional include teachers, pilots etc. This is the oldest and largest form of trade union. This type of union is practised in USA, China, UK (Wallerstein and Western, 2000). White collar union is mainly found in service sector like teaching, medical service etc. Answer 10 Employees join trade union to for getting many advantages and benefits in their professional career. The employees get different types of power by doing trade union. They can create their position in the company by doing trade union. With the help of this union the employees get various types of powers which help them to enhance their position in the company. Individual rights and benefits of the workers are protected by trade unions. Sometimes they are able to built good relationship with the management of the company by doing trade union (Ebbinghaus, 2002). . Employees do not join trade union for the increasing number of complexities in trade unions. Strikes of trade union hamper their work process. As a result they can’t perform their job effectively for which the company forms a bad impression about them. For doing trade union they need to spend good amount of time. But with the increase of work pressure employees are not been able to spend so much time (Kloosterboer, 2007). . Answer 11 The factors influencing the decline of Trade Union in UK during 1980s and 1990s are as follows: For the increase in complexities in trade unions large number of people left trade unions. Government rules and regulation of UK were changed and made very strong which reduced the power of trade unions. For the economic change in all the industries of UK were affected in different ways. Some companies were bound to reduce to manpower. As a result the strength of the trade union decreased (Blyton and Turnbull, 2004). Globalization influenced many private companies to start and expand their business in UK. This increased the business competition level which forced the employees to concentrate more on their work rather than in the activities of trade unions. Conclusion Trade union tries to attract young members by improving its campaigns and functions. To some extent these strategies of trade union are successful but in the long run for increase in privatisation trade union is losing its importance. With the help of Emotional labour a company can highlight its displayed rules in front of others. This helps the company to motivate other employees to follow those rules. In this way emotional labour controls different things in a workplace. References Addison, J. T. and Belfield. R., 2001. ‘Updating the determinants of firm performance: estimation using the 1998 UK Workplace Employee Relations Survey’, British Journal of Industrial Relations, 39(3), pp. 341–66. Addison, J.T. and Belfield. R., 2004. Unions and employment growth: the one constant, Industrial Relations, 43(2), pp. 305-323. Belfield, C. R. and Heywood. S., 2001. ‘Unionization and the pattern of non-union wages: evidence for the UK’, Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, 63(5), pp. 577–598. Blyton, P. and Turnbull, P., 2004. The Dynamics of employee relations. 3rd Edition. London: Palgrave. Ebbinghaus, B., 2002. Trade unions’ changing role: membership erosion, organisational reform, and social partnership in Europe. [online]. Available at < http://eucenter.wisc.edu/publications/ebbinghaus02.pdf > [Accessed on 22 April 2015]. Kloosterboer, D., 2007. Innovative trade union strategies. [online]. Available at < http://www.newunionism.net/library/organizing/FNV%20-%20Innovative%20Trade%20Union%20Strategies%20-%202007.pdf > [Accessed on 22 April 2015]. Roche, W. K., 2001. Accounting for the Trend in Trade Union Recognition in Ireland, Industrial Relations Journal, 32(1), pp.37-54. Traxler, F., 2000. Employers and Employer Organisations in Europe: Membership Strength, Density and Representativeness, Industrial Relations Journal, 31(4), pp. 308-16. Waddington, J., 2001. Articulating Trade Union Organisation for the New Europe? Industrial Relations Journal, 32(5), pp. 449-63. Wallerstein, M. and Western. B., 2000. Unions in Decline? What Has Changed and Why, Annual Review of Political Science, 3(1), pp. 355-77. Read More