According to a recent survey by Associate Professor Christopher Collins of Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations, companies that hire employees who fit into their corporate culture enjoy a 23 percent annual profit growth and do not suffer from a high rate of employee turnover.
For many years, I have created hiring programs that are designed to attract pro-management employees who identify with a company’s corporate culture. In addition, I have implemented effective employee communications action plans and strategic labor relations plans that make employees feel like stakeholders, as if they are members of the corporate family.
If American corporations are to succeed and be internationally competitive, they need the most productive workforces in the world.
When companies hire employees who share their values, everybody wins, and employees are committed to doing the best they can, to taking pride in what they do, and are not motivated solely by money.
Organized labor and some religious groups are fed up with President Bush and the
National Labor Relations Board. They recently shut down the Board for two hours
as more than 1,500 union members and their supporters blocked traffic and chanted
their derision and disapproval on the street in front of the Board’s DC headquarters.
They were protesting the anticipated decision by the Board of classifying some nurses
as supervisors, which means they cannot join unions.
The decision would not only affect nurses, but also supervisory personnel in a
variety of fields such as construction, warehousing and distribution, lodging,
groceries, etc.
Labor will fight hard on this issue because, if passed, it would mean that organized
labor could lose 8-million dues-paying members. That’s a lot of money for union coffers.
Ever since the rupture in the AFL-CIO, unions have grown more militant, and the
supervisory issue is just one subject about which they are up in arms. Another is
the pending Employee Free Choice Act, which would give workers a direct path to
joining a union by bypassing NLRB supervised elections.
If Corporate America does not install appropriate pro-management programs,
the new union militants will gain the upper hand, and their effect on productivity
and profitability will be negative.
It is an obvious conflict of interest for a supervisor to be a union member who supervises workers who are also union members.
Yet, that is what many nurses around the country want.
The California Nurses Association and the AFL-CIO are worried that the National Labor Relations Board will decide that many registered nurses are supervisors and cannot join unions.
Under NLRB rules, supervisors are barred from joining unions and can be subject to dismissal or other disciplinary actions if they participate in union activities.
CNA and the AFL-CIO plan to sponsor protest rallies in Los Angeles and possibly in other cities, if the NLRB rules that registered nurses who are supervisors cannot join unions.
Nurses should focus their attention on providing the best possible health care to patients who will hardly benefit from nurses carrying picket signs.
In negotiations with UPS Freight, the Teamsters union has won the right to attempt to organize the company’s workers using card checks. The president of the Teamsters, James Hoffa, has declared that those negotiations have resulted in an “historic victory.”
In elections supervised by the National Labor Relations Board, ballots are secret and workers do not have to announce their union or non-union preference. With card checks, however, workers can publicly announce their desire to be represented or not represented by a union.
For those with a pro-union agenda, card checks are the preferred route to successful organizing efforts. For those who want to remain union free, secret ballot elections, supervised by the NLRB, have been the best route for maintaining that union-free status
The UPS-Teamsters deal portends bad news not only for the trucking industry, but also for the grocery, nursing home, and hotel/motel industries. Agreeing to card checks is like letting the proverbial fox into the chicken house. The result will an increase in union membership and onerous demands placed on more and more companies.