Establish Union Relationship at Workplace

Relationship between union and management has changed together with environment and economical condition from time to time. Union relations with management should be seen as an essential part of management system and techniques, and not as a discipline or activity apart from management. This paper explores a step in how to establish the relationship between management and union and how management can shape their organization for reaching their goals with support contributed by union. It also attempts to identify some of the elements which may generally be regarded as features of a good industrial relations system. It is not to say the step through this article compulsory to being practice by all industrial life as no one kind of relationship is best and can be fit to all varied circumstances of organization. However, all good relationship has some common characteristic include trust, communication and a good leader to coordinate the movement of organization. These articles will deal in general terms of ways to achieving and maintaining any kind of good relationship in organization.

Introduction

Organizations today are facing an increasingly competitive and rapidly changing environment (Johari,2006). Both management and employee want to protect their interest. Management has to increase their value while employees have to maintain or build up their outcomes in order to survive in the competitive environment. A voluntary organization like the union is a choice for employee to protect their needs in order to balance with needs of company.

Basically the union offers their promise to a number of benefits in order to solicit the member’s commitment. Johari (2006) indicated that some of the benefits include maximizing wages of their members, establishing a join system which both protect their members from arbitrary management actions, allows them to participate in decision making within the organization for which they work, allowing them to express the social cohesion, aspirations and political ideology of their membership.

Labor union can be defined as an organization of employees that uses collective action to advance its members interest in regards to wages and working conditions. (Ivancevich, 2010). According to Ramasamy (2008), Malaysia’s trade union movement is faced with a number of challenges, notably from neoliberal policies and changes structures of employment. According to statistic provided by Department of Trade Union Affairs, as at June 2011, the private sector employee unions at Malaysia are made up for 441 trade unions while trade unions for public sector, statutory bodies, local government and employers, there are 254. Total members who joined unions are 803,003 members. Thus only 6.3 percent of employees belong to a union out of the total labor force of 12.6 million.

However,