EMPLOYMENT RELATIONSHIP

Employment Relationship



Employment Relationship

Abstract

The government's intention of developing partnerships in the employment relationship in order to promote greater fairness in the workplace has, to a significant extent, failed. Small companies may not be granting their employees all their statutory rights. Whether this is ignorance or a deliberate strategy is unclear, but the incidence of employment tribunal cases may continue to increase for small and medium-sized companies if they ignore the current employment legislation.

This report examines the changing employment relationship between organizations and their staff. Analyses the relationship in terms of five contractual areas - knowledge requirements, psychological needs, efficiency demands, job design and ethical relations. Describes how a number of these informal contracts have become overweighted in favour of one partner to the contract - the employer, how each of the contract areas can be improved and the costs of not doing this. Also examines the changing role of personnel managers and trade unions and forecasts how these will respond to the employment situation of the future.

Table of Contents

Abstract2

Chapter 14

1. Introduction4

Chapter 28

2. Employee relations in SMEs8

2.1 The state of the employment relationship10

3. Employment legislation and SMEs11

4. Early Employment Regulation14

5. Early Labor Legislation and the Doctrine of Substantive Due Process16

6. The 1930s: The New Deal and the Origin of Contemporary Employment Regulation19

7. World War II and the Postwar Period21

8. The Decline of Unions and the Rise of Individual Employment Rights23

9. The Prospects for Transnational Labor Regulation25

10. Today's hiring managers need to think like marketers26

Chapter 329

11. The notion of contract29

12. Factors affecting the nature of contracts34

12.1 National culture and the economic situation34

12.2 Organizational culture36

12.3 Technical change38

13. The knowledge contract39

14. The psychological contract41

15. The efficiency contract42

16. The work structure contract43

17. The value contract45

18. Consensus contracts: are they achievable?47

18.1 The knowledge contract48

18.2 The psychological contract50

18.3 The efficiency contract53

18.4 The work structure contract55

18.5 The value contract56

19. Traditional players in the contract-making process59

Chapter 464

20. Conclusion64

References65

Chapter 1

1. Introduction

Employment regulation consists of the legal rules and institutions that constitute and structure the employment relationship. Employment regulations determine the nature of the labor contract, the obligations of each party, and the legal means by which each party may press for advantageous terms. It includes not only affirmative interventions by the state into the employment relationship through statutes, administrative regulations, executive orders, or other acts of positive law, but also the background contracting rules with which a buyer and a seller of labor power, that is, an employer and an employee, form an employment relationship.

The content of employment regulation determines the parties' bargaining power vis-á-vis each other (Hale 1923). For example, legal rules determine whether workers are free to join together into unions or whether such actions constitute unlawful conspiracies. Legal rules also determine whether and under what circumstances workers can lawfully strike and picket, and whether they can use secondary pressure or appeals to the general public to support their position. In these and many other respects, the legal rules that govern the employment relationship have powerful distributional consequences.

The content of employment regulation is a product of the each ...