Managing employee relations in sri lanka

The ways in which employee relations are managed will depend on whether or not trade unions are recognized. To a large extent day-to-day management is carried out informally.

Managing with trade unions

Trade unions can be recognized with full negotiating and representational rights, or they can only have representational rights, in other words the right to represent employees over grievances, disciplinary matters and redundancy. Trade union members may also take part in joint consultation, and act as health and safety or learning and development representatives.

Ideally, managements and trade unions learn to live together, often on a give and take basis, the presumption being that neither would benefit from a climate of hostility or by generating 300 HRM Practice constant confrontations. It would be assumed in this ideal situation that mutual advantage comes from first, acting in accordance with the spirit as well as the letter of agreed joint regulatory procedures reached in collective agreements, and second, believing that with goodwill on both sides, disagreements can be settled without resource to industrial action. In practice, both parties are likely to adopt a more realistic pluralist viewpoint, recognizing the inevitability of differences of opinion, even disputes, arising because the interests and viewpoints of employers and employees can never be identical.

 In the 1960s and 1970s things were different. In certain businesses, for example the motor and shipbuilding industries, hostility and confrontation were rife. And newspaper proprietors tended to let their unions walk all over them in the interests of peace and profit.

Times have changed. Trade union power has diminished in the private sector, if not in the public sector. Managements in the private sector have tended to seize the initiative. They may be content to live with trade unions but they give industrial relations lower priority. They may feel that it is easier to continue to operate with a union because it provides a useful, well-established channel for communication and for the handling of grievance, discipline and safety issues. In the absence of a union, management need to develop alternatives, which can be costly and difficult to operate effectively.

Managing without trade unions

 Managements can manage perfectly well without trade unions. It may make no obvious difference to many employees, but some will not do so well. (Millward et al., 1992) established the characteristics of union-free employee relations from the third Workshop Industrial Relations Survey:

·         Employee relations were generally seen by managers as better in the non-union sector than in the union sector.

·         Strikes were almost unheard of.

·         Labour turnover was high but absenteeism was no worse.

·         Pay levels were generally set unilaterally by management.

·         The dispersion of pay was higher, it was more market related and there was more performance-related pay. There was also a greater incidence of low pay.

·         In general, no alternative methods of employee representation existed as a substitute for trade union representation.

·         Employee relations were generally conducted with a much higher degree of informality than in the union sector. In a quarter of non-union workplaces there were no grievance procedures, and about a fifth had no formal disciplinary procedures.

·         Managers generally felt unconstrained in the way in which they organized work. Employee Relations 301

·         There was more flexibility in the use of labour than in the union sector, and this included the greater use of freelance and temporary workers.

            ·         Employees in the non-union sector are two-and-a-half times more likely to be dismissed                       than those in unionized firms, and the incidence of compulsory redundancies is higher. 

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The survey concluded that many of the differences between unionized and non-unionized workplaces could be explained by the generally smaller size of the non-union firms, and the fact that many such workplaces were independent, rather than being part of a larger enterprise.

 Another characteristic not mentioned by the survey is the use by non-unionized firms of personal contracts as an alternative to collective bargaining.

What is the Trade Union law in Sri Lanka?

(employers.lk,2019) Under the Trade Union Ordinance of 1935, a “trade union” is defined as any association or combination of workmen or employers, whether temporary or permanent, having among its objects one or more of the following objects:-

• the regulation of relations between workers and employers, or between workers and workers or between employers and employers; or
• the imposing of restrictive conditions on the conduct of any trade or business; or
• the representation of either workers or employers in trade disputes; or
• the promotion or organization or financing of strikes or lock-outs in any trade or industry or the provision of pay or other benefits for its members during a strike or lock-out, and includes any federation of two or more trade unions;

A “worker” is defined as any person who has entered into or works under a contract with an employer in any capacity, whether the contract is express or implied, oral or in writing, and whether it is a contract of service or of apprenticeship, or a contract personally to execute any work or labour and includes any person ordinarily employed under any such contract, whether such person is or is not in employment at any particular time.

References

1. Millward, N, Stevens, M, Smart, D and Hawes, W R (1992) Workplace Industrial Relations in Transition, Dartmouth, Hampshire

2. http://www.employers.lk/trade-unions-ordinance-i