Analyse employment relations Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Analyse employment relations - Essay Example As for the employment relation, it is the changes in the socio political context that now includes HRM, and a reduced power of labor unions along with agile management and altering social attitudes. Thus, creating a more diverse landscape, it is also related to the relationship that the management and the employees hold with each other in almost every area of the industry. It can be easily stated that employment relation works better if taken as a philosophy, rather than a function of the management (Wilton, 2010). In the Australian context, the changes have been rather massive in both the areas. These being innovative in nature have brought many new terms in the employment relations, such as commitment, involvement, and performance of the high order. Thus, the management has started to work on new ways to inculcate factors, such as team work and multitasking, so that higher productivity can be achieved. This makes the need to study employment relations huge over the years (Lansbury, 2000). However, it has also been observed that employees working in the aforementioned country are not happy with what has been going on. This means that they feel that the wok is too much and provides very low security. Thus, the need to cater to such issues has also risen in the recent year, which has increased the need to cater to employment relations more (Appelbaum et al. 2000, Davis and Gollan, 1999, Wood and Albanese, 1995, Lansbury, 2000). The following lines will be discussing the whys and hows of the employee relations and changes that occurred recently in this arena. The following lines will also be examining why industrial relations have become less relevant to the study of workplace relations now, than it was in 1980, as well as determining the extent to which the term employment relations best describe the changes that have occurred in workplaces since 1980, relating it with the Australian working arena. As far as the strengths and weaknesses of the unitarist, pluralist, and r adical theoretical perspectives are concerned, it has been observed that the unitarist perspective aims at employee commitment, as well as loyalty by the fusion of the interests of both, employee as well as the employer (Guest and Peccei, 2001 & The Typed Gold, 2010). Also, used for stakeholder management, it caters to handing a win-win situation for the managers by aligning the goals and interests of both parties. However, this perspective also has its weaknesses; this theory does not cater to the power imbalance between the parties and must identify that managers hold an upper hand in terms of power. As conflict is a highly off-putting clause here, it ignores the fact that there are also certain conflicts that are advantageous to the organization in nature, for example the task conflict. Other than that, it is also unclear about how the feelings of the worker are aligned with those of the employer. As for the pluralist perspective, it caters to effective IR interventions made to r esolve conflicts that act as a substitute in decision making process. The approach does not ignore conflict like the one stated previously and uses the same conflict scenario to understand the roots of many problems. The current perspective, thus, might have companies that have a ‘no union policy’ as well as those that encourage such unions so that diverse cultures can be obtained. It does not, however, ignore the fact that unions have a role. Yet, this perspective also holds certain weaknesses, such as too much reliance on rules and regulations, and somewhat also ignores those processes that directly help resolving conflicts (Gennard, and Judge, 2002 and the typed gold, 2010). Furthermore, it also fails to realize that state has