Page 184 - DMGT310_ENTREPRENEURSHIP_AND_SMALL_BUSINESS_MANAGEMENT

Unit 12: HRM in Small Business

12.3 Industrial Relations Pricing Notes

Human resource management is about managing people so that businesses are competitive and
successful. To do this in a fast-changing global economy, HRM & IR professionals keep up with
issues and trends that affect employment relationships – the labour market and economics, the
product or service market, the political environment, environmental concerns, technological
change, employment regulations, organisational psychology and social trends.
Industrial relations are also a multidisciplinary field that studies the collective aspects of the
employment relationship. It is increasingly being called Employment Relations (ER) because of
the importance of non-industrial employment relationships. IR has a core concern with social
justice through fair employment practices and decent work. People often think industrial relations
is about labor relations and unionized employment situations, but it is more than that. Industrial
relations covers issues of concern to managers and employees at the workplace, including
workplace bargaining, management strategy, employee representation and participation, union-
management cooperation, workplace reform, job design, new technology and skill development.

Notes An IR expert will more usually work for a trade union in order to represent
employees’ interests. However, they may work for an employer in an HRM department,
or for an employers’ association or consultancy, serving the employers’ interests.

Major tasks of HRM and IR are: hiring staff, negotiation of employment contracts and conditions,
performance management and reward systems, dispute resolution, disciplinary processes,
ensuring health and safety of staff, employee motivation, design of work, team and organization
restructuring, and training and development.
“Industrial relations” pose one of the most delicate and complex problems to modern industrial
society. With growing prosperity and rising wages, workers have achieved a higher standard of
living; they have acquired education, sophistication and greater mobility. Career patterns have
changed for larger section of the people have been constrained to leave their farms to become
wage-earners and salary-earners in urban areas under trying conditions of work. Ignorant and
drenched in poverty, vast masses of men, women and children have migrated to urban areas.
The organizations in which they are employees have ceased to be individually owned and have
become corporate enterprises.
At the same time, however, a progressive, status-dominated, secondary group-oriented,
universalistic, aspirant and sophisticated class of workers has come into being, who have their
own trade unions and who have, thus, gained a bargaining power which enables them to give a
tough fight to their employers to establish their rights in the growing industrial society. As a
result, the Government has stepped in and played an important role in establishing harmonious
industrial relations, partly because it has itself become an employer of millions of industrial
workers, but mainly because it has enacted a vast body of legislation to ensure that the rights of
industrial workers in private enterprises are suitably safeguarded. Besides, rapid changes have
taken place in the techniques and methods of production. Long established jobs have disappeared
and new employment opportunities have been created, which call for different patterns of
experience and technical education. Labour employer relationships have, therefore, become
more complex than they were in the past and have been given a sharp edge because of the
widespread labour unrest. In the circumstances, a clear understanding of the factors which make
for this unrest and which are likely to eliminate it would be a rewarding experience for anyone
who is interested in industrial harmony.

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