Question

5. Critically assess whether trade unions have any value to the 21st century firm.

Answer 1

Several pieces of research and surveys point out that the relevance, as well as the trend towards unionization, has been on a decrease. Trade unions are losing their bargaining strength in many different countries including Western countries. Employers are themselves forthcoming in sharing their profits with employees, and the employees and workers do not require union support anymore for getting an increase in wages. Individualization of attitude is now common and more and more people are working towards individual goals and benefits as well, which reduces the significance of collective efforts.

The global marketplace is also quite volatile and competitive now. Unions can no longer protect the employees from mass layoff or benefit/wage reductions because of the competitive business conditions and their implications for the private firms and their employees. Companies nowadays are taking all kinds of measures to reduce costs and to stay competitive and profitable for the stakeholders. Contractual/short term/seasonal employment, outsourcing, and other trends are nowadays more common than ever before. Professionals are also gaining good benefits and satisfaction out of these new employment avenues and platforms. They can now work from the comfort of their homes and can enjoy a better work-life balance in this flexible work setting of the 21^st century. The new employer-employee relationship and work patterns are hence also reducing the importance of unions in the 21st century.

Governments around the world are also now more proactive in protecting the interests of their common citizens and working population. Information now transmits in seconds across the world, and the literacy and awareness rates have also increased, which ensure that governments cannot delay any response to a problem that affects the voters and citizens. There are many different Acts, laws, and statutes in the United States of America that protect the employees from discrimination on grounds of disability, gender, national origin, and other variables and aspects. These include Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Equal Pay Act, the Immigration Reform and Control Act, and others. Employees are hence now getting an even bigger protective umbrella from the laws, and hence depend less on unions for protecting their rights and privileges.

New measures including Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) plans and programs that are being followed by businesses, governments, and even NGOs have also provided the 21st-century organizations a way to ethically manage their houses. CSR allows the 21st-century firms to dictate the solutions and terms through which their responsibility and ethics can be judged.

However, even in this era of globalization and modernization, the security of common people in terms of employment may not be enough. The majority of the population of the world may not have assets beyond their home. Volatile markets and competitiveness cause a push towards uncertainty and risk of unemployment. Social welfare schemes may not be enough and the majority of the population does not have enough capital to live beyond a few months or a year. Therefore even in the presence of the soft and alluring human resource management methods and techniques, and the technological changes that surround the modernity glitz, the majority of employees and working-class remains exposed to the hardest and severest realities of the job market. Markets do create wealth but an equal or comparative distribution of it is nowhere near satisfactory.

Therefore we can say that unions need to modernize and adapt to the new working situations to stay relevant and be valuable for the firms and employees of the 21st century. Their role and efforts may provide more stability to the job market and be quite crucial for the economic welfare of the majority of the working class. The union should also take advantage of the new information flows and use it as a weapon for solving labor disputes. Labour union should I be able to connect the workers in the new era of globalization and the multinational working environment, and campaign for the social legislation that can provide more benefits to the 21st-century workers. Unions can certainly make modern forms more accountable and transparent. Groups may also converge their thinking and line of action to match well with the employer aspirations, when compared to the atomized employee. In these times, economic efficiency, social justice, and individual freedom are all important to the working people. Unions may play a role in improving social cohesion as well as equal economic prosperity, provided their goals and missions are revised to incorporate the needs and aspirations of the modern firms and employees.