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Lesson 5 - Union and Business Labor Strategy and Structure
To fully understand modern employment relations, it is necessary to have a solid understanding of contemporary unions and employers. This includes their fundamental purposes, their objectives vis-a-vis each other, their organizational structure and governance, the strategies they employ, and the constraints under which they operate.
This lesson will examine these two parties in some depth, providing the background necessary to understand how each functions in the labor-management relationship. The third party, the government, will be examined in the next lesson.
Learning Objectives
After completing this lesson, you should be able to:
- Name the primary objectives of unions and employers within the employment relationship.
- Compare and contrast the different union strategies and the practices and goals that we see within each.
- Describe the trends in union strategies and the reasons we see for these trends.
- Describe the organizational structure and system of governance employed by unions and by employers.
- Describe union membership trends over the last 100 years.
- Recognize the role of democracy in unions.
- Define, describe and compare and contrast the range of labor relations strategies available to management in the US.
- Align labor relations/HR strategy to the basic business/competitive strategies.
- Describe how the environment around the labor relationship impacts the labor relations process and practices and how the environment affects each of the partie in the labor relationship.
- Be able to debate the positive and negative elements of the labor movement and discuss why unions might hold value to works and the macroeconomy.
Readings and Activities
Check the Course Schedule for specific details on what to read this week.
