Trade Unions in the New ER Agenda: Relevant or Redundant

Introduction

For more than hundreds of years, trade unions have been playing a vital role in shaping employee relations by negotiating salaries and other rewards, protecting employee rights and giging employees a collective voice. However, during past few decades with the raise of personalized HR practices, employees used to use direct employee communication methods with the management and also there is a drastically change in the employee expectations. Therefore, do trade union have the same place in the modern employment landscape that they have earlier.

In this article we can examine the role of trade unions in modern employee relations by examine whether they have the same place as in earlier or are being displaced by new models of engagement.

What Are Trade Unions

Trade union is an organized group of workers of an organization or institute either in private sector or government sector who joined together in order to protect and promote their interest collectively. Trade unions always request a better salary, security for their jobs, good working conditions and fair treatments from the management. They always ready to represent their members in disputes. Trade unions believe that employees can achieve more from the management when they act on collectively rather than individuals acting alone.

Some of the key purposes of trade unions are listed below,

·         Collective Bargaining

·         Representation and Advocacy

·         Protection of Employee Rights

·         Support and Welfare Services

·         Influence on Public Policy

The Changing Employee Relations Landscape

Two or three decades before the term Employee relations is not popular and the Employee Relations was synonymous with industrial relations. Therefore, rather than having direct communications it focuses mainly on the relationship between the organization and trade unions. Trade unions collectively manage the conflicts using the formal structures like,

·         Union recognitions

·         Collective bargaining

·         Industrial action resolution

However, currently influence of the trade unions have been declined specially in private sector mainly because organizations are paying attention for the individual relationship between the employer and employee. Therefore, employee relations have a boarder scope and more aligned with current HR strategies. With the decline of trade unions and emerging of employee relations, it increasingly focuses on,

·         Direct communication with employees

·         Managing change

·         Engagement and motivation

·         Work-life balance

·         Employer branding

Are Trade Unions Still Relevant?

Even though in modern HR practices, employees have the opportunity to present their requirements directly to the management, trade unions should be existed to achieve the employees targets collectively specially in specific sectors. It is true that collective effort is more effective than individuals acting alone.

Source: Google Image

Still the power of trade unions is stronger in highly Unionized Sectors like healthcare, education, transportation. Because more than half of the employees are union members of those sectors. In large scale organizations, an individual employee cannot fight for salary increments, good working conditions and security for their jobs. Hence involvements of trade unions should be there for collective bargaining. Further trade unions play a critical role in organizing, mediating, and escalating unresolved disputes.  

Conclusion

Involvement of trade unions is still necessary for collective bargaining even though the employees can have direct communication with the management in current working environments. Trade unions are essential in many sectors to ensure the fairness, equality and accountability.

However, in order to remain their place, trade unions also should adopt for modern workforce needs like,

·         Digital engagement

·         Diversity and inclusion

·         Support for new sectors

·         Global campaigns

·         Partnering constructively with HR

·         Embracing hybrid communication

 

References

• Armstrong, M. (2017). Armstrong’s Handbook of Human Resource Management Practice. 14th ed. London: Kogan Page.
• CIPD (2005). Managing Employee Relations. London: Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development.
• Henderson, I. (2017). Human Resource Management for MBA Students. 3rd ed. London: Kogan Page.

Office for National Statistics (2022). Trade Union Membership: UK. Available at: https://www.ons.gov.uk