MANAGEMENT

Role of Unions in the Workplace

Role of Unions in the Workplace

Revitalization strategies

It is considered that unions tend to respond to the losses of memberships as well as the emerging of a more uneven labor market in numerous ways. It has been witnessed that there has a decline in the union numbers in 1988 being 326 and tin 2008, being 167. These have highlighted that numerous have emerged to combine the resources in order to improve their average cost of unit, also known as economies of scale (EIROnline, 2009). The chief responses include the concentration of the strategies on organizing, partnership, procurement processes as well as learning in the workplace. It had been recently announced by Unite that the students will be provided the offer of the membership of the community, along with people who are jobless as well as single parents at only an amount of 50 Pence a week. Another scheme is also being currently considered which tends to offer educational facilities as well as the legal support provided in an exchange of the action of collective community (The Guardian, 2011).

Partnership

The concept and the principle of the mutual gains through managers' as well as workers' cooperation have been used by the governments in the late 1990s. This was done in order to motivate the unions in signing charitable agreements of partnerships with the hiring employers. The assumption that had been taken in this approach highlighted that the cooperation would aid in producing more effective as well as efficient working practices, along with an improvement in the financial performances. This would then be shared by the organizations with their own employees through better working conditions as well as better wages (Terry, 2003, pp. 462-467). The 248 partnership agreements signed between 1990 and 2007 covered around 10 per cent of all workers in Britain (Samuel and Bacon, 2010, pp. 431).

In addition to that, a recent study was conducted on these agreements, which managed to highlight its findings that the majority of these agreements were considered to be significantly vacant and not just instruments used for making an exchange of flexible working practices with greater security of the employment. This was the original intention of the proponents. The agreements of the partnership tends to achieve a unpretentious swapping of a guarantee of the involvement of the union in the decisions taken by the managers and in return highlighting their commitment and obligation of working towards the success of the organization. In addition to that, the agreements of the partnership were not considered to be the instruments of the dominance of the employer over the interests of the employee, as was the prediction of many theorists (Samuel and Bacon, 2010). The selection of more than a few famous critics of the approach of the partnership to the positions of the union leadership in the start of the year 2000 marginalized it as a strategy of central renewal and the re-embracement of the partnership across the movement of the union is very unlikely ...