HR/Employment Blogosphere Update for October 31, 2005
I know, I just went over a month without doing one of these, and now here are two back-to-back. What’s up? Let’s just say I’m trying to get back in the habit. As usual, I’m listing my provocative headlines first to encourage you to click through.
- Striving for Balance in the Role of Human Resources Management
- Creating a Meaningful Performance Improvement Plan or Building a Record for Termination of Employment?
- Blog That Labor Strike!
- Unions as African Americans’ Economic Saviors? Half Truths From the Labor-Loving Left
- Economic Chicken-and-Egg Issue
- Careers to Avoid, for the Long Haul
- Jury of Peers Sneers at the Facts and Law
- We Rock, Writes Ross!
- Premature Labor Union Recognition: As Antidemocratic as a Coup d’Etat
- Halloween Bonus: the Haunted Workplace
Striving for Balance in the Role of Human Resources Management
Nobscot’s WebLog responds very eloquently to the critical hr articles that have been out in force recently:
Is HR working so hard for a seat at the executive table that we’ve lost a seat in the employee break room? We all know that HR’s job is not to be the employee advocate. But we also know that HR’s job is to help the company succeed and reach goals through employees. . .
Let’s admit it. HR people have become afraid of listening to and helping employees. We’ve been called “socialists,” we’ve been called “social workers,” we’ve been told we have no head for business. . . .
[But] if HR is about managing the people component of business strategy, then to whom do we need to be close? The people of course. Understanding employees’ needs and concerns doesn’t make us less of a business person, it makes us a better business person. . . .
There are clearly two tables that HR needs a seat at. Let’s not forget that our success at one is directly tied to our success at the other.
Creating a Meaningful Performance Improvement Plan or Building a Record for Termination of Employment?
About Human Resources says what I have long observed:
Many employees, managers, and HR professionals see an employee performance improvement plan as a step in documenting poor performance that eventually allows you to fire the employee. Not so. Used correctly, the performance improvement plan can help an employee succeed.
This post links to a simple sample form for performance improvement plan documentation.
Yes, documented counseling of a poorly performing employee may lay the “paper trail” for more legally defensible grounds for termination. But it may also guide and motivate the employee to improve his or her performance.
Given turnover costs, the possibility of such success will often be worth the minimal cost of going through the effort of a performance improvement plan.
Blog That Labor Strike!
If lack of internal and/or external communication is something that has hurt striking unions, then use of a blog by a union or union member(s) to communicate about a strike has some potential.
Communicate or Die; American Labor Unions and the Internet is a blog that, among other things, writes about strike blogs. Recently it pointed to the Sutter Strikers Blog and the Detroit Northwest Air Strike Support blog (the latter making me glad we broke away from that standard Blogger template!) .
Unions as African Americans’ Economic Saviors? Half Truths From the Labor-Loving Left
Labor Blog, which apparently has never met a union it didn’t like, under the lofty title, “American Unions And The Pursuit Of Economic Justice,” hails the labor movement as “an important means of economic advancement for African-Americans, who have been present in disproportionately large numbers in the American working class and working poor as a result of the legacy of racial slavery and a racial caste system of segregation.”
Half-truths? Well, unions may have “organized workforces with large numbers of African-Americans,” but students of labor union history know many also discriminated in membership for decades (“Racial exclusion was practiced by many of the craft unions that emerged during the late nineteenth century and was tolerated by the AFL.”).
And it may be true that “as the industrial unions began to decline, the numbers of African-Americans with better-paying union jobs also began to fall precipitously,” but that doesn’t mean the proportion with higher-paying jobs (union and nonunion) declined.
To the contrary, one source says the proportion of black households in the middle class in 1997 was almost double that in 1960, the black middle class growing faster than the white middle class in that period.
Economic Chicken-and-Egg Issue
Labor Blog cites a Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) study for the proposition that “states with strong worker protection and good pay are not a competitive disadvantage compared to the states with weak worker rights and low pay.”
The study compared the states on average employee compensation (wages and benefits), employment opportunities, percentage of low-income workers, gender equity, and unionization, combining all factors into a single score for comparison purposes.
The press release for the study states:
A major finding . . . is a consistent correspondence between the quality of a state’s environment for workers and its economic health. States ranking high on the list generally have faster economic growth and lower poverty rates, and conversely, states at the bottom of the list tend to have slower economic growth and higher poverty rates. This suggests that anti-poverty strategies focused on creating decent jobs is viable as well as desirable, a finding that is especially pertinent in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, whose impact was devastating on the poor in New Orleans.
My skeptic’s chicken-and-egg question: how do we know that better economic growth and lower poverty rates aren’t a precondition to better employee compensation, employee benefits, and other working terms and conditions, rather than a result of them?
Perhaps the focus in the lower-rung states — and poorer regions and metro area neighborhoods in the other states — must first be on creating economic growth and market-priced jobs, with better job quality following as the local labor market becomes more favorable to employees, rather than, for example, market-distorting “living wage” laws.
Careers to Avoid, for the Long Haul
Job blog links this MSN story: “10 Dead-End Jobs,” listing 10 major job categories expected to decline between now and 2012, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (a government agency with an almost indescribably deep website).
Jury of Peers Sneers at the Facts and Law
California Labor & Employment Law reflects on an unusual experience: a lawyer being allowed to serve on a jury (and a blogging lawyer to boot!). This lawyer found this glimpse into the jury room a disappointing reflection of our court system:
It was traumatic because during deliberations, roughly half of my fellow jurors simply ignored the evidence and the instructions. And it’s not because I disagreed with the result that we arrived at. I simply disagreed with the disdainful, prejudicial manner that some of the other jurors had.
We Rock, Writes Ross!
Ross Runkel’s Work Law Blogs has kind words for us here at George’s Employment Blawg and our new format: “George’s (reconstituted) Employment Blawg rocks”:
Hats off to George’s Employment Blawg: consistently informative, and now better than ever. . . I’m a great fan of George’s blog.
Thanks, Ross. Yours are very nice as well.
Premature Labor Union Recognition: As Antidemocratic as a Coup d’Etat
Speaking of Ross Runkel, a few weeks back his NLRB Law Memo blog reported on Elmhurst Care Center, a National Labor Relations Board case holding that an employer extended, and the union accepted, recognition prematurely, in violation of federal labor law, because the employer was not engaged in normal business operations at the time.
Sure, voluntary recognition when just starting up operations can be tricky, but I have a problem with it that goes way beyond that scenario.
You see, the National Labor Relations Act embodies a democratic, majority-rule principle: a bargaining unit should be unionized only if a majority of the employees so decide. An election procedure, with highly refined rules and procedures, exists for this purpose, just as for electing our local, state , and national governments.
There is no good reason I can think of for an employer to bypass this process, voluntarily recognizing a union, thus disenfranchising the employees (hence my “coup d’etat” reference). And as this case illustrates, such recognition may be unlawful, depending on the circumstances.
Halloween Bonus: the Haunted Workplace
Job blog links to a Forbes article entitled “Is Your Office Haunted?”
Many people describe their place of employment as a horror story. But some try to claim it’s the work of a ghost.
Maybe the spirits have decided that spooky mansions and creepy battlefields are passé. Maybe they want to cash in on the glamour of corporate life. Maybe they just wanted the sushi.
Photo credit: Linda’s Manymuses via flickr
