Employee relations Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Employee relations - Essay Example All these activities could be broadly put into three major categories such as collective bargaining or negotiations mainly wage negotiations, industrial action and legal actions. Unions as representative of workers organizations bargain with employers or various such issues such as wages, allowances, bonus, hours of work, reinstatement etc. The unions have secure bargaining power by statute and bargaining is done with the presence of the third party. Trade unions and its impact: It has been quite a longtime the discussion is going on that trade unions affect productivity of workforce individually or collectively in positive or negative way. Dipp, Lupton and Aslop (2000, 2002) indicate a fall in the extent, which employers regard unions as damaging to industrial relations. Impact of trade unions on productivity and the economic performance of organizations have long been debated. The UK firms are primarily using the latest equipment, automation and technology, resulting in high labor productivity and the ability to produce quality products to meet the requirements of EU and US markets. Differences in technology, automation, age of equipment, levels of employment, all affect labor productivity. Most of the EU producers have increased their productivity in recent years by increased automation, improving technology, and downsizing, instigating â€Å"cultural change† programmes, and bringing in productivity-linked incentive pa y schemes. British political climate hostile to the trade unions has considerably weakened trade unionism. The received wisdom is that unionization rates have fallen rapidly as unions have failed to become recognized in newly setup work places (Machins, 2000). Throughout the 1980’s a range of anti union legislative measures were introduced by conservative govt. and the seemed to have a particularly adverse effect on recognition in establishments’