Hello and welcome to my first international employment
relations blog entry for the semester. As it happens, I am also conducting this
upcoming week’s tutorial presentation for this topic so I thought I would take
the opportunity to provide you all with some additional information regarding
the topic of modern employment relations in the United States with particular
reference to the diametrically opposed approaches to work, labour relations and
business of two extremely large American multinational retail companies.
In considering the future of employment relations in the
United States, and subsequently Australia’s ER outlook, Goodwin and Machonachie’s
2006 article entitled, ‘Wal-Mart or
Costco: Australia’s 21st century choice?’ introduces an
extremely interesting concept in ‘Institutional
Isomorphism’. This idea is defined as a ‘constraining process that forces
one unit in a population to resemble other units that face the same set of
environmental conditions’ (DiMaggio and Powell 1983) and essentially involves
organisations duplicating the structures, strategies and practices of other
similar organisations.
Essentially this concept of Institutional Isomorphism means that new business within the United States must replicate other successful organisations in order to be profitable and this in where the idea of the 'low' and 'high' road approaches to employment relations become relevant. The 'low' road is an approach exemplified by extremely successful American retail company Wal-Mart which involves extremely low wages, a strong anti-union stance and poor working conditions. Meanwhile, one of its major competitors in Costco exemplifies the 'high' road approach which involves a belief that employees deserve a fair share of the profit that they help generate, a supportive view of union involvement, high working conditions and even a strong health care system.
(‘The high and low road’s exemplified at Costco and Wal-Mart respectively
can be thought of as good and evil for American retail workers)
In researching this area of international employment
relations, it became extremely apparent to me that more and more US organisations
looked likely to follow the ‘low’ road in a process called ‘Wal-Martisation’
whereby labour costs need to be minimised in order to assist shareholders’
needs. However, I personally believe that this is an extremely negative path
for employment relations to be taking as it gives the already dominant employer
even more power in the employment relationship.
References-
- · Bamber, GJ, Lansbury, RD & Wailes, N (2011) (eds), International and comparative employment relations: globalisation and change, Allen & Unwin, Sydney. Chapter 3.
- Dimagio, P & Powell, W (1983), ‘The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields’, American Sociological Review, 48, pp. 147-60.
- Goodwin, M & Maconachie, G (2006), ‘Wal-Mart or Costco: Australia’s 21st century choice?’ 21st Century Work: High Road or Low Road: proceedings of the 20th conference of the Association of Industrial Relations Academics of Australia and New Zealand, vol. 1. Refereed papers.
