Lecture Notes
Let's talk about different perspectives to unions and collective bargaining. And, I'll talk about four dominant, overarching perspectives to unions and collective bargaining.
First, let's talk about the neoclassical economics perspective. Neoclassical economists argue that unions are bad, that they have negative consequences for society and for organizations, and they argue this primarily because unions, they maintain, are monopolies. They artificially raise wages based on their collective power to above market value, forcing organizations and employers to pay wages that they otherwise would not have to pay and, in so doing, interfere with the free market. And, so their argument is unions are bad, and they should not exist. That's one perspective.
The second perspective is the human resource management perspective, which does not view unions positively, but not as negatively as a neoclassical economics perspective. Human resource management, the kind of ideal type human resource management perspective— this does not mean that all human resource managers view unions in this way, but the perspective advanced by the human resource management school is that unions are unnecessary, that in places where there's effective management where management is doing its job well, where management has good practices and policies and arrangements in place, unions are unproductive, and they add unnecessary conflict to the workplace. This approach can be represented by the saying that companies get the unions they deserve. Unions are unnecessary, but in places where management is not effective, where management is not operating to the best of its abilities, unions may, under some conditions, have a role, but where management is doing its job, unions are unnecessary.
The third perspective is the industrial relations perspective, and that's the perspective that our textbook, in some ways, takes, and that's the perspective that I'll advance throughout our course, and the industrial relations perspective argues that unions are important. They're not bad; they're not unnecessary; they're important both for organizations and for employees. The argument at the heart of the industrial relations perspective is that there is a fundamental imbalance of power between companies and employees, and unions serve to balance that gap between companies and employers, providing employees with some collective countervailing power to the employer's power. We'll talk more about the assumptions at the heart of this industrial relations perspective.<br />And, finally, there's the critical industrial relations perspective, the Marxist perspective, that like industrial relations scholars say, unions are important, but unlike industrial relations scholars, argue that they're not adequate, that they're inadequate, that they don't go far enough, that at the heart of the tensions between organizations and employees are systemic imbalances, systemic problems that can't be addressed fully by unions. Unions might get us part of the way, but not the whole way. And, so what's needed is a more general systemic change.
So, if we think about these four perspectives from left to right, in terms of ideological perspectives, a neoclassical economics approach is on the right, is on the far right, unions are bad; moving to the left, human resource management perspective, unions are unnecessary; industrial relations perspective argues that unions are important; and the critical industrial perspective on the far left argues that they're important and inadequate.
I want to be clear about this class. We are all free to view unions and collective bargaining in any way that we'd like, bad, unnecessary, important, important but inadequate. What I want you to get out of this course, and what I want you to get out of this discussion and the discussion we'll have in the live session, is an understanding of these different perspectives and the arguments at the heart of these different perspectives.
