26th May 2009
Does the recession
necessarily spell disaster for industrial relations? Nita Clarke reports on a
new trend for getting the most out of union relationships.
With the
crushing pressure to cut costs now bearing down on so many companies and services,
including in the public sector, it is vital for organisations to ensure that
they are getting the best out of their workforces. While this rightly means
more emphasis on workplace engagement to achieve joint strategies for improving
performance and productivity, it should also mean a serious look whether
relations with recognised trade unions are adding as much value as they might.
Many
organisations in recent years have not tried to maximise the effectiveness of
existing union relationships; relations have bumped along, often tetchy and
certainly unproductive. In other
unionised workplaces the union has been seen as a problem to be ignored where
possible, and manipulated where necessary – certainly not as a potential
partner in the success of the enterprise. Nor have all trade unions necessarily
been keen to move from on from the traditional transactional approaches – and the
shop steward’s comfort zone.
But with
the recession comes the need to maximise the effectiveness of every resource at
your disposal, and some companies are realising that the union relationship
could be a positive factor not only in managing difficult change, such as
redundancies, but as part of a renewed effort to get the workforce behind the
strategic direction of the business or service in order to succeed in the post
recessions world.
As a result
the IPA is receiving an increasing number of requests from employers for
assistance with redeveloping their relationships with in-house unions – to diagnose the existing state of play and
to propose some ways of ensuring the relationship adds value rather than acts
as a drain.
There is of
course a better way than adversarial or ineffectual relations. Partnership
between unions and employers may have gone out of fashion with the advent of a
new generation of trade union general secretaries who were suspicious of the
approach, but all the time, ticking away behind the headlines, some really
innovative examples of partnership working were being developed and
nurtured. And many organisations are
recognising today just how valuable those mature relationships based on respect
and trust are in helping to tackle the challenge of the recession.
The recent
ANUMAN conference heard splendid examples of partnership ensuring a joint
approach to making changes to secure the future. The long standing partnership
agreement between TESCO and USDAW for example has explicitly contributed not
just to the commercial success of the company and the creation of 11,000 new
jobs across the UK, but also to the growing strength of the union, with 150,000
USDAW members in TESCO across the UK, the largest membership in a single
company in the private sector of any union.
In TESCO distribution, for example, the average trade union membership
density is 90 per cent.
BAE
systems, an international high-end engineering success story has a highly
developed partnership relationship with its trade unions which the company
places at the heart of responding to the challenge of change – handling
rationalisation jointly, ensuring an effective skills training agenda, dealing
with the pressures on company pension schemes.
And in the
public sector the NHS is committing considerable resources to developing local
partnerships between trusts and unions, building on transformational examples
such as the London Ambulance Service and Blackpool, Fylde and Wyre Hospitals
where partnership approaches have transformed service delivery and the quality
of patient care.
Companies
without unions too are looking at how the collective voice of the workforce can
be successfully harnessed in partnership to help build operational success, as
the experience of Standard Life and Egg/Citibank in the finance sector
demonstrates.
Collective
as well as individual employee engagement approaches are essential tools to
help beat the recession and meet the increasing challenges of
globalisation. The IPA stands ready to
help companies and services develop these workplace strategies in the months
and years ahead.
Nita Clarke
is director of the IPA
To find out
more about how the IPA can help your organisation make the most of its trade
union relationship, email sarah.dawson@ipa-involve.com
