Managing Trade Unions at the Firm Level & the Dynamics of Collective Bargaining (Communications‪)‬

Trade Unions Employees represent the human side of an organisation and trade unions serve to give them a collective voice to protect and further their interests. Of late, there has been a decline in the proportion of unionised workplaces and in the collective representation of employees on many issues predominantly due to a reassertion of managerial power in the workplace and government support to management in the face of globalisation (Sen 1997). The decline could also be attributed to the shift of jobs from the manufacturing to the service industries, and unaggressive union leadership (St. Antoine 2001). At the firm level, it is the interaction between the attitudes of management to employees and unions, the attitudes of employees to management, and the attitudes of employees to unions that determines the quality of industrial relations (Aswathappa 2001).