Many unions around the globe have been experiencing a drop in membership and a decline in density over the last ten years. The union response, as documented in this paper based on a survey of innovations and change in Canadian labour organizations, has been both defensive and pro-active, focusing on protecting current levels of wages and benefits as well as fostering social unionism.
Archives for January 1999
Interest-Based Collective Bargaining: A Success Story
The author examines when interest-based bargaining works and when it doesn’t; traditional and new approaches; how to implement interest-based bargaining; and provides a case study of mutual-gains bargaining in action in an Ontario gold mining company.
Team Training: Does It Increase Satisfaction and Improve Performance?
In the global environment of increasing technological change, companies are looking for alternatives to traditional hierarchical organizational structures in order to maintain the competitive advantage that is necessary for their survival. Increasingly, they are turning to self-directed work teams in pursuit of high performance. But building team-based organizations requires challenging behavioural changes and a well-designed program that provides training not only in technical but also in personal skills. Based on her study of seven work teams in five Canadian organizations, the author provides detailed advice on how to design a training program that will succeed.
Electronic Meeting Systems: Win-Win Group Decision Making?
Electronic meeting systems (EMS) can help conflicting groups move from disagreement to consensus and help enable management and unions to become strategic partners says the author of the study, which provides a detailed account of the operation of an EMS system, potential benefits, and pitfalls to avoid.
Attendance Management Programs: Doing It Right
The author outlines for employers what they need to know about principles established in jurisprudence regarding absenteeism and attendance management programs.
Mergers & Acquisitions: Organizational Culture & HR Issues
This study highlights the importance of the proactive management of HR issues and offers detailed practical advice to practitioners.
Living Happily Ever After… with an Acquisition
Research evidence points to numerous unsatisfactory outcomes of mergers and acquisitions, including high failure rates, sinking profits, and various negative human resource impacts. Managers looking for advice to increase success, however, will find contradictory prescriptions in the literature. For example, some researchers conclude that unrelated or conglomerate types of acquisitions perform poorly, but others report that conglomerate mergers outperform related mergers.
Based on a survey of large public Canadian companies that were relatively experienced in making and managing acquisitions, this study identifies the prescriptions that are actually associated with success, and it provides three critical lessons for managers: the need to manage risk, to manage impulsiveness, and to pay attention to the human dimension. It also reduces the vast number of recommendations about managing the human dimension to a few critical ones.
Interpreting the Collective Agreement: The Duty to Be Reasonable
Court rulings differ with respect to the authority of arbitrators to require management to act fairly and reasonably in exercising discretion under a collective agreement. This paper looks at the legal framework and the controversy over this aspect of arbitration with collective labour agreements.
Transforming Your Workplace: A Model for Implementing Change and Labour-Management Cooperation
How do you manage change while promoting labour-management collaboration? In today’s organizations, unions and management are increasingly being asked to work together in areas that stretch far beyond collective agreements, such as organizational design and business and profitability planning.
Workforce Reduction Practices in Canadian Hospitals
In this health care-related paper, learn the results of a survey of major hospitals across Canada. The research explores workforce management and culture; unionization and labour-management relations; workforce reduction behaviour; and organizational performance.
