The Demand of Trade Union in 21st Century

Assignment: Essay Questions: Autumn Term 2016

Question 3: Discuss the view that workers no longer need to be represented at work by a trade union because, in the 21st century, management already fully takes into account the interests of workers when making decisions that affect them.

Course Name: Human Resource Management

Course Code: MN2705

Student Number: 100817202

The demand of trade union in 21st century

Introduction

With the developing of the economic structure of the country in twenty-first century, the law of protecting both employers’ and employees’ interest has become increasingly impeccable. The influencing force of the trade union has become weaker with each passing day. Workers start to protect their interests by themselves and communicating with their employers directly. The argument of whether the trade union is needful to protect labour’s benefits by representing workers at work has been mentioned by the public more frequently. The main opinion believes that the workers under the fair law and the new scientific management measures in the twenty-first century will not require the trade union protecting workers’ benefits as significantly as before. However, others still hold the traditional view of the profound importance of the trade union would never be useless since the continuous one and only self-benefits attention paid by the miserly employers and, the forever needs from workers with high salaries and wages in order to enjoy their lives. This essay is going to discuss the need for trade unions for workers in the twenty-first century.

The trade union in Britain before 21st century

The profound difference between the interests of employers and their employees never reaches a balanced agreement, since the relation between employers and employees has formed. The employers, seen as the capitalists, only focused on the ways to increase the profits of their businesses as much as possible in the early time. To do so, they exploited their labour’s interest by slashing their wages and salaries in innumerable extreme measures. Therefore, the worker’s needs were always ignored at that age, which were apparent and straightforward needs of wages increasing. However, the imperfect and unfair law and government in the early 19th century could not help with workers’ benefits, instead, it only protected the capitalists’ interest in order to gain profits from them. The strict conditions for workers simulated part of them to become the initial trade unionism, who was narrated as a struggle against oppression in the history of Britain.

As Henry Phelps Brown points out(1983, p.19), in the nineteenth century of Britain, there was a remarkable extent, which the trade unions gained victorian acceptance and approval by the government and became integrated into the economic and political structure of the country. Furthermore, the vast unions began to grow in the quick development of trade unions since the victorian acceptance in the 1870s. In August 1889, one of the most success act of the trade union was the big strike of London dockworkers. This is the famous and profound success of a tanner an hour pay rise demand. The highly intense struggle involved the whole community in the East End of London. The docker's struggle was an important turning point for the organization of unskilled workers and would subsequently and directly lead to the formation of the Transport and General Workers Union (TGWU or T&G) three decades later.(Grahamstevenson.me.uk, 2017)