Roles and Responsibilities of Bodies that represent Employees Employee organisations

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Roles and Responsibilities of Bodies that represent

Employees

Employee organisations

The main bodies that represent employees in most organisations today are trade unions. A Trade Union is a body, which represents employees working within a certain organisation. The main job of the trade union is that they protect the rights of the employees and make sure they are well looked after by the organisation for which they work and that they are not being taken advantage of.

Trade unions have been around for over 200 years and their role has changed considerably throughout the years. The main functions of trade unions are to improve the economic position and improve working conditions of its members

In order for a trade union to be recognised by firms then they need to register themselves with the TUC (Trades Union Congress).  Any employee is free to join and employers must recognise the trade union and negotiate deals. Employers are not allowed to join as there view on employee’s rights may be biased.

Trade Unions have many features. They listen to all their members and act as the middleman by presenting their members views to the employer. They use a term called collective bargaining, which can be used to negotiate a deal. A group of Unions go to the employer rather than a few of them, and try to convince the employer that the employees are not satisfied and wish to have improvements made.

They negotiate pay raises for their members, and try and improve working conditions; also they make sure the rights of their members are not violated. In order for trade unions to get what their members have a right to; it is quite common for them to take drastic action. This tends to be in the form of going on strike. This usually seems to settle a dispute for their members but is also a disadvantage to the members as they have to take a day off unpaid.

Staff Associations

As I have stated earlier on at Blacks they do not have a trade union that protects employee’s rights. What they do have though are staff associations. Staff associations represent workers, in a similar way to trade unions. Seeing as Blacks to not have a trade union the staff association has the responsibility of carrying out the duties that a trade union would perform.

The staff associations at Blacks are made up of area mangers. The area mangers all have allocated stores in each section of the UK to which they serve the employees of Blacks settling any problems that could arise. The Harrow, Ealing and Brent Cross store all have one main area manager who serves the employees. Each area manger covers a minimum of three stores. There are 20 area mangers that currently cover all the 70 Blacks stores in the UK. When the area managers come together to discuss various issues this is where they become the staff association.

The area manager comes in store at least once every month to see if there are any problems that he needs to address to the other area managers, unless he is called in by the employees if they are unhappy about pay for example. If certain points or problems are raised from the visit the area managers set up a staff association meeting so as to give the employees a chance to voice any problems they have or changes they want made.

Staff associations are similar to trade unions in terms of the functions they carry out for employees. The staff association at Blacks has clear objectives and functions which they work hard to achieve and fulfil. These are the following:

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  • Obtaining satisfactory pay
  • Ensuring good working conditions
  • Reviewing job descriptions and specifications
  • Negotiating bonuses for achieving targets
  • Ensuring job security
  • Adequate work facilities

Satisfactory pay

Satisfactory pay is always an issue no matter what organisation you make work for and Blacks are no exception to this fact. Unsatisfactory pay is on of the main reasons that employees are unhappy. They may well be happy with the job description but the salary could make a big difference.

If a worker is unhappy with their current pay at Blacks they could simply tell their ...

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