Collective Bargaining

Posted: October 17th, 2013

Collective Bargaining

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Collective Bargaining

Collective bargaining has been broadly defined as negotiations between employers and employees concerning the working conditions as well as salaries. On the other hand, seniority has been defined as the length of time an employee has served with a certain employer or the state. This has become an issue in collective bargaining, with its advantages and disadvantages. Seniority is used for giving promotions and benefits to employees, where they garner seniority points depending on the payroll each has (Monappa, 2001). It is quite fair since there is no biasness, but also, talent and qualifications are not considered.

One of the advantages of seniority in collective bargaining is that there is no biasness since it depends on when an employee was hired in the organization. This means that employees who have been in the organization for long will have more bargaining power than newly recruited employees will. With such a system, every person is sure of enjoying more benefits as he/she continues working in their organizations. This eliminated biasness that is used in giving privileges and benefits to workers (Monappa, 2001).

On the other hand, seniority can act to discourage hard work among the employees when they know they have a bargaining power just by working in one organization for long. With such a system, talent is rarely considered, including qualifications of giving promotion. An employee could have a higher seniority, but lack talent that is with a newly hired employee, which could encourage better quality. In addition, with such system, very few people at the top will allow change to occur since they benefit form the current situation. More so, this makes it hard to devolve the structure of the organization since with seniority comes more layers in the structure. This makes it quite rigid to change, while a flat structure would be better (Katz & Kochan, 2003).

Because of such cons in seniority systems in organizations, when seniority is incorporated in the collective bargaining, people who my not deserve promotion might get it while those who deserve it are left out. This is not good for the organization since creativity is left aside.

References

Katz, H.C., & Kochan, T.A. (2003). An introduction to collective bargaining and industrial relations. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill/Irwin.

Monappa. (2001). Personnel Management. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill/Irwin.