Page 239 - Introduction to Business

CHAPTER 6 Human Resources Management 213

While the Taft-Hartley and Landrum Griffin Acts have played a role in the decline
of unions, they don’t tell the whole story. Shifts in the focus of the U.S. economy have
also played a part in the decline of unionization in the country. Moreover, the strong
resistance by some employers to unions and collective bargaining contracts has
clearly not helped their situation. Finally, some observers, even in the union move-
ment, have said that the unions themselves over the years had become too compla-
cent in their organizing efforts. When all is said and done, though, unions over the past
half century or so have gone from being a central part of human resources manage-
ment in the United States to being a still important but far less significant factor.

International Labor Relations

Interestingly, the decline in the role of labor unions in the United States has not been
fullyemulatedinvariousothercountrieswithdevelopedeconomies.Inothercountries
such as Great Britain, the labor movement has historically been much more directly
integrated into the political process than in the United States. Indeed, in Britain one of
the two major political parties is the Labor Party, and this has clearly helped British
unions gain broader cultural and community acceptance than in the United States.
Other countries, such as Germany and Canada, continue to have relatively more
pro-union labor laws on their books. Under German codetermination, for example,
all large employers are required to have union representatives on their company
boards of directors.
One important issue that has arisen lately is the interrelationship between labor
relations/laws and international free trade agreements. If countries agree to a free
trade agreement or free trade zone, to what extent do the labor laws in one country
apply to the other countries that are part of the agreement? Also, to what extent do free
trade agreements with lower-wage-paying countries encourage the movement of jobs
from the United States to those countries? These were highly contentious issues dur-
ingthenegotiationsamongtheUnitedStates,Canada,andMexicoontheNorthAmer-
ican Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Ultimately, a special labor side agreement to
NAFTA was agreed to; it provides that each country must make efforts to enforce its
own labor laws and establishes a new enforcement mechanism whereby citizens and
groups can complain about the lack of labor rights enforcement in the three NAFTA
countries. The NAFTA labor side agreement also establishes a North America Com-
mission on Labor Cooperation, now based inWashington, D.C., which promotes coop-
erative labor activities among the signatory countries. In more recent U.S. free trade
agreementswithcountrieslikeChile,Singapore,andJordan,however,thespeciallabor
side agreement model has been abandoned in favor of directly addressing labor issues
in the text of the agreement itself. The loss of U.S. jobs to countries we have free trade
agreements with continues to be a very important and difficult issue to address.
reality Do you know any individuals who are members of private sector unions?
CH ECK What about members of public sector, or government employee unions?

Legal Environment of Human Resources Management

LEARNING OBJECTIVE 7
Discuss how and why the field of human resources management has become so highly legally
regulated, especially by the federal government, in recent decades.

Employment-at-Will Revisited
The decline of unions and collective bargaining contracts that began in 1947 with
the enactment of the Taft-Hartley Act put millions of U.S. private sector workers
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