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Employee Relations Issues (pdf)

   

Added on  2021-04-21

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Running head: EMPLOYMENT RELATIONS ISSUEEmployment Relations IssueStudent’s name: Name of the university: Author’s note:

1EMPLOYMENT RELATIONS ISSUEIntroduction Trade Unions feature prominently in explanation of relative industrial decline. Indeveloped European countries, Unions have been blamed for damaging productivity, destroyingjobs and increasing the labour costs. Trade Unions have common goals to protect and integratethe trade, safety standards, benefits to the employees and better wages of the employees. Inpublic and community service, employees like to be part of the trade unions and the membershipfrom this industry has been observing a decline in the past few years. Poor wage, risinginequalities and increased dissatisfaction in New Zealand are led to the renewed interest towardscollective bargaining and social dialogue for strengthening the bargaining power.This essay is going to discuss the question of employment relations in New Zealand thatdescribes about stagnant of Union Density Rate. This essay explains the trade unions role inpromoting collective bargaining. In this essay, in the first half, a decline of union density rate in New Zealand is described.Density rate remained stagnant after the introduction of the Employment Relations Act (ERA) in2000 despite the beginning of the act to support for trade unions and specific objective ofpromoting collective bargaining. In addition, the decline of private sector union membership andcollective bargaining are focussed in this essay in the final section. Union density rates in New ZealandUnion density rate can be described as the ratio of the employees’ numbers who aremembers of the trade unions to all employees of the country (Hirschi, Macpherson & Vroman,2010). In addition, union density rate is lower than collective agreement coverage rate that meansto all the employees in the workplaces are agreed collectively. In New Zealand, trade unionculture has been predominant and NZCTU has been founded in 1987. It has more than 360,000

2EMPLOYMENT RELATIONS ISSUEmembers and it is the largest democratic organisation in New Zealand. From the end of the year1999 to 2006, the union membership increased a bit and growth levelled off with a minimum 1%growth by the end of 2010. However, of late the union density rate decreased by 2% between2013 and 2014. Since the time of 2010 till 2016, there has been 7% decline in union membership(Jacobi et al. 2017). Introduction of the ERA had negotiated collective employment agreementand in addition, during the time of ECA, Government set up many in-house unions andemployees to maintain bargaining for collective employment contracts. ECA had been replacedand unions have been increased to 181 whereas it had started from the 82 in the year 1999. Union density rates over the period between 1991 and 2008Moreover, many of the small unions stopped operating and many of the unions have beenmerged between 1999 and 2006. Subsequently, many of the union membership had reduced tothe small industries. In recent time, registered unions decreased to 117. In the year 1999,December, Union Density in New Zealand was 42.9% (1/4%) and this figure reduced to 21.4%(1/4%) in 2008 (Brewster & Hegewisch, 2017). In the year 1991, numbers of unions were 66 inNew Zealand whereas 2008, numbers of unions increased to 141. Public and Community servicein New Zealand has been predominant to impact on the union membership whereas 23% of themembers are from the healthcare sector. Therefore, it has been observed that density ratedecreased by almost 20% from 1991 to 2000 in New Zealand. Public administration industryprovides third largest union members in New Zealand. In addition, in the manufacturing sector,union density in recent time is 21% and it has been observed a change of membership by -5.7%.As pointed out by Hodder et al., (2017), in rental and real estate service, this union density ratedecline has been highest and it was -22% since 1991 to 2010. On the positive note, apart fromthe public sector, the union density is keeping high volume in postal, transport and warehousing.

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