“Nonunionism” Will it be a reality ?????


After the industrial revolution trade unions played most important role in ensuring rights of workers and their intervention were very helpful for the workers to acquire more benefits from the employers. According to (gov.uk, 2017) peak level of the trade union membership in UK was arrived in 1979 and after that is declining. Not only in UK but also in the world concerns , number of membership of trade unions are declining and it raises a question that trade unions mediatory role for negotiations is replaced by another substitute.

It can be identified three approaches according to the degree of union recognition as:
1.     Full recognition – (collective bargaining)
2.     Partial recognition – (negotiations)
3.     Single union deals.- ( single union agreement, strike free) (Armstrong and Tylor 2014).
The constitution of Sri Lanka provides for freedom of association and allows workers to form and join trade unions and there are 2,074 registered labor unions in Sri Lanka, of which 54.5% are in the public sector, 27.5% in the public corporations and 18% in the private sector (WageIndicator 2018). The number of trade union membership reaches 9.5% of the total labor force in Sri Lanka (WageIndicator 2018). Trade union power in private sector is significantly lower than in public sector.

In Sri Lanka, collective bargaining power is vary according to the size of membership and essentiality of their service to the public. Trade unions which have relatively large number of membership and trades which have an ability to influence the management or government due to the essentiality of their service, exercise much bargaining power. On the other hand there is an argument that some of their trade union actions exceeds ethical limits too. Current increasing trend of union actions in Education, health, transport and other sectors make difficulties in general public in their day today activities. Some of these damages are irreversible and non-remedial.

Some firms prefer union membership and intend to live together as they think it is costly to maintain an alternative to communicate, handling grievances, and discipline and safety issues. On the other hand these firms believe that unions are well established channel for employee relations (Armstrong and Tylor 2014).
However union actions may be unhealthy to organisations because it would negatively affect to the reputation of the organisation, raise uncertainty in production or service, customer satisfaction. Most organizations seem unions affect to cost and operational efficiency by means of collective bargaining which may increase cost for production and services (Dias, 2011). Therefore organizations tend to provide safe working conditions, fair pay, and other benefits for their employees in order to avoid forming unions (Dias, 2011). In unionized process it is important to review employee relations. (Dias, 2011) In the management perspective it’s safer to marginalize the trade unions than derecognize because it may easier to deal communication , handling grievances, discipline and safety issues  with union than establishing alternative to those which may costly and difficult to operate. (Armstrong and Tylor, 2014) Some large organizations prefer nonunion relations and adopted employment policies and pay packages which may attractive than trade union membership. These organizations deal with employees individually rather than collectively. Smaller firms deals with employees situational basis and there are no substitution for trade unions (Armstrong and Tylor, 2014).
In different perspectives, there are pros and cons in existing of trade unions. The ultimate objective of trade unions are negotiating and bargaining for employee’s betterment. If the employees’ objectives and employers’ objectives are met in a same interface, union existence is not required. Therefore, modern human resource development methods are fulfilling the requirements of the new millennium towards “nonunionism”.
Reference
Armstrong, M and Tylor, S (2014) Armstrong’s Handbook of Human resource management practice.  14th edition .Kogan page limited: United Kingdom.
Peiris, R., (2010) submissions in relation to the Petition filed by AFL-CIO by the Employers’ Federation of Ceylon. Available at: http://www.employers.lk/component/content/article/408?start=1 (Accessed: 28 March 2018)
 WageIndicator (2018) Trade Unions. Available at: https://salary.lk/labour-law/trade-union (Accessed: 28 March 2018).
Gov.uk, (2017) Trade union membership 2016: statistical bulletin, Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy. Available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/trade-union-statistics-2016.  (Accessed: 01 April 2018).

Comments

  1. Neel BogahawaththaJuly 15, 2018 at 9:48 AM

    Valuable informations were taken. I appreciate your evaluation & thank for providing kind of this blog contents.

    ReplyDelete
  2. NohaniJuly 18, 2018 at 10:40 PM

    Hi Shenali,

    I agree with your points, it is very necessary to keep employees engaged and satisfied with what they are assigned to.

    I feel, it is important HR department to keep all employees satisfied. But, there are still negative attitudes which cannot be satisfied at any point. So, it is a very important of role which HRD should perform during the human resourcing process. They should take the responsibility to hire candidates with high aptitude and high attitude.

    ReplyDelete

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