Unions: Interest-Based Bargaining

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Pages: 7

Nowadays, human resources management (HRM) plays an important role in an organization. At the same time, unions have penetrated into company management with increasing interventions. In the past, the relationship between HRM and unions has always been considered as adversarial with position-based bargaining. Even recently, more and more companies are engaging interest-based bargaining to develop a non-adversarial relationship with unions, it still take time and money to reach a consensus. A typical case happening around us is the recent Ontario college strike. According to the new updated on the website (www.thestar.com), the college strike has become the longest strike in the province. At the same time, the strike also led to social marginal …show more content…
A union is an organized group of workers who collectively use their strength to have a voice in their workplace. Through a union, workers have a right to impact wages, work hours, benefits, workplace health and safety, job training and other work-related issues. Unions in Canada are regulated by federal and provincial legislation. They’re required by law to be democratic and financially accountable to their members. All unions have constitutions that must be registered with government labour boards. Research indicates that the “cost of running a unionized operation is 25% to 35% greater than for a non-unionized one, and this figure does not reflect any negotiated changes in unionized employee wages or benefits. In addition to obvious increased costs, there are those that affect morale, creativity and resiliency. Ultimately, an organization’s profit margin can decline. Productivity appears to be lower in unionized environments.” As union members, they have to pay dues. If the union does function well, their money won’t come back. Research shows that Employee anger or frustration when the collective bargaining process for an initial contract lasts more than a year or does not result in the changes promised by a union during the organizing campaign. (About 75% of initial contracts are still being negotiated a year after the NLRB representation election according to the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service [1996], and 50% of initial contract negotiations never achieve an executed agreement.) Union increases the difficulty for HR to do professional decisions. If a unionized employee is not doing the job properly, the suspension or termination decision by HRM would be prevented by the union. HRM will be no longer effective; it has significant