Question:

Module: people management
Title of essay: To what extent is the employment relationship based on the expression of conflicting interests?

Answer:

Title: To what extent is the employment relationship based on the expression of conflicting interests

 

The contemporary socioeconomic environments in which people work have changed dramatically. The same thing can be said of organizational workspaces. In such a situation, the employment relationship has had to change. A key area where this change has been experienced has to do with the expression of conflicting interests between employers and employees.

Indeed, in the new employment relationship, a key feature entails the prevalence of temporary, whereby job security is now an illusion (Ackers, 2002). This turn of events has triggered a precarious employment relationship, where conflicting interests are even more pronounced. On the part of employers, a persistent question is on what the ‘new deal’ in the employee relationship should ideally entail. On the part of employees, a dominant challenge is on defining the nature of changes needed in order to ensure that their interests are propagated to increase their chances of survival.

This paper discusses the issue of the employment relationship and the extent to which it is based on the expression of conflicting interests. The first section is on the precarious nature of the so-called ‘new employment relationship’. Then, focus shifts to the issue of state laws as frames of reference in the pursuit of conflicting interests. Finally, a discussion follows on power and influence as sources of conflicting interests in new employment relationship.

The precarious nature of the new employment relationship

The nature of work is changing at an alarming rate. Today, most forms of employment are of the non-standard variety. As a result, fewer and fewer people are pursuing permanent jobs, especially those that come with a complete package of benefits. In fact, these types of jobs are increasingly been considered a deviation from the norm. In such a situation, employees are increasingly being compelled to put their interests before those of the organizations for which they are currently working. After all, they argue, it is always a matter of time before they move on into the next available employment opportunity.

In order to appreciate this changing trend in the new employment relationship, it is imperative to understand first and foremost the nature of this workplace phenomenon (Rubery, 2002). In employment relationship, there are normally two components: managerial relations and market relations. Managerial relations cover issues of how the production process is undertaken while labor relations relate to matters such as the price of labor, basic wages, number of hours worked, and pension rights. The employer ‘owns’ the labor, and it upon him to convince the worker to undertake the duties assigned to him.

In contrast, managerial relations dwell on issues of how much work should be done within a specific time and who should be accorded the rights to determine the nature of tasks to be undertaken. These rights may extend to specify who can redefine and change the mix of tasks as well as the order in which they should be performed in order to achieve the desired results. Ordinarily, a person possessing these rights is also assigned the role of determining which penalties are commensurate with failure to comply with the rules.

In simple terms, an employment relationship is about the way in which the employer relates with his employee. In this relationship, the trade union has traditionally been the main platform for representing the interests of the employee. Meanwhile, there are rare situations where a non-union collectivity is used to represent the interests of the employees.  This mediation is also facilitated through industrial relations and the state.

With the nature of contemporary forms of employment being generally precarious, the role of trade unions is increasingly diminishing. People increasingly have to chart career paths that deviate from the traditional norm, where uniformity was a key factor in stimulating coalescence into trade unions. In situations where trade unions still exist, their density, that is, the constituency of workers who are union members, continues to diminish at an alarming rate. This translates into a corresponding drop in the level of activity within these trade unions.

In such a scenario, individual employees have to resort to advancing their specific interests in their places of work. This creates a situation where there is a lack of oneness of purpose in striving to achieve a certain goal within an organization. In situations where trade unions were the norm, it was common for workers to dedicate their skills to the organization’s goal, if only to build something with which they can perpetually identify (Clark, 1981). Ultimately, the resulting identity would be nurtured and weaved into the existing organizational culture.

Today, the notion of organizational culture has increasingly diminished from workers’ minds. This has been the obvious outcome of high labor mobility both within and across industries in this information age. In the context of such high mobility, it only makes sense for individual employees to ambitiously pursue their interests whenever they report to work without caring much about the legacy that they will leave behind.

On the other hand, employers have been finding it difficult to identify common interests the way they used to when trade unions were operational across all sectors (Roehling, 1998). With clearly defined interests, it was easy for employers to know that to entice employees with whenever they were entering into collective bargaining agreements with them. Therefore, the possibility of getting into a compromise was high.

Nowadays, the best that employers can do is limiting the scope of their benefits to what is required statutorily. Upon doing this, they attract the most talented workforce, employ them on a contract basis, and then endeavor to get the most out of their expertise and skills within the shortest time possible. In such a situation, they are seen as pursuing their interests at the expense of those of workers.

It is not surprising, therefore, that only those workers who put up a spirited fight over their working hours and wages will have their demands met. Such hassles also extend into issues of working conditions, training, job classification, and workplace disciplinary system. This trend is shaping up into an industry-wide practice, even among the most established, highly reputed organizations.

State laws as frames of reference in the pursuit of conflicting interests

In the struggle to have their interests safeguarded, both employers and employees have found an excellent reference point in state laws. Indeed, it is with this scenario in mind that states come up with laws governing working conditions, number of working hours, minimum wages, and a host of other labor-related issues (O’Reilly, 1994). States also exert indirect influences through the way they relate with trade unions, through bilateral agreements, as well as trilateral relationships in which even employers are brought on board in the spirit of corporatism.

Today, workplace rules are not enough to propagate an identity of shared interest between the employee and his employer. Conflicts of interests are no longer viewed as arising from misunderstandings, as suggested by theorists who support the unitarist perspective. Instead, they are fuelled by lack of shared goals, transiency of employment contracts, and the pursuit of market individualism across all sections of society.

The modern society appears to encourage pluralism, where conflict is acknowledged as being inevitable. The main reason is that employers and employees ideally belong to different organizations. In this sense, the employees’ organization is his professional association or fraternity. As different organizations contribute to the process of making rules, it becomes apparent that the risk of conflict of interest has to increase. This is because of differences in terms of centers of authority.

Power and influence as sources of conflicting interests

            The notion of power, although not widely discussed in industrial relations texts, is normally at the heart of conflicting interests between employers and employees (Holmes and Friedman, 1995). In the process of negotiating in matters of rules, issues of power and influence always take the center stage. Employees exercise their power both as individual selves and as a collective team of workers. Very often, in efforts to curtail this expression of power, the organizational managers and employers resort to the tendency to stamp their authority every now and then, thereby triggering conflicts. It is not considered out of the norm for employees to oppose the actions of their employers as well as to rebel by pursuing those individual-based objectives that run contrary to the organization’s goals.

As mentioned earlier, employment relationships are always strongly embedded in the contemporary social life. Thus, even in the case of the quest for power and influence, there is always an underlying ‘social hand’ at work. Ordinarily, both employers and employees find it difficult to establish and entrench interests (Vosk, 2000). On the side of the management, a case in point is a situation where a new payment scheme, no matter how well-intentioned, may end up being perceived cynically by employees. Although the scheme may generally be desirable, employees may express doubts as to whether the management will keep their promise. Moreover, they may fear that there is an underlying undesirable intention behind the momentary positive turn of things. For example, whenever favorable terms of employment are announced in most companies, employees put celebrations on hold until they check whether some jobs are going to be lost in the long run.

Moreover, the changes that have taken place over the past few decades have a lot to do with power resources. One key power resource whose shift has affected the balance of power in employment relationship is trade unions. The influence of trade unions started waning in the 1980s, and this turn of events seems to have heralded the era of the so-called new employment relationship.

Conclusion

In conclusion, it is clear that to a large extent, employment relationship in the contemporary socioeconomic environment is based on the expression of conflicting interests. In the quest for power, employers and employees end up harboring conflicting interests. These conflicts are largely inevitable, considering that the negotiations of rules that take place entail at least two different organizations, each with its own vested interests.

 

Bibliography

Ackers, Peter, ‘Reframing employment relations: the case for neo-pluralism’, Industrial Relations Journal, 33/1 (2002), 2–19.

Clark, Gordon, ‘The Employment Relation And Spatial Division Of Labor: A Hypothesis’ Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 71/3 (1981), 412-424.

Holmes, Dickson, and Friedman, Derrick, The changing employer-employee contract: The role of work and family issues, (New York: Families and Work Institute, 1995).

O’Reilly, Bernard, ‘The New Deal: What Companies and Employees Owe One Another’, Fortune, 1/3 (1994), 44-51.

Roehling, Mark, The Nature of the New Employment Relationship(s): A Content Analysis of the Practitioner and Academic Literatures, (CAHRS Working Paper Series: Paper 130, 1998).

Rubery, Jill, ‘Changing Organizational Forms and the Employment Relationship’, Journal of Management Studies, 39/5 (2002), 645–672.

Vosk, Leah, Temporary work: the gendered rise of a precarious employment relationship, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press Incorporated, 2000).