Labor Unions In Australia

According to Webb and Webb (1898) has defined unions are as the primary mechanism that represents employees for the purpose of economic function including maintaining and improving wages and the condition of employees’ working lives. Moreover, unions involve various functions, such as democratic function, integrative function and social democratic function between the industrial relations traditions and at the workplace today. In Australia, workers has begun to establish unions in the 1830s and expanded with the growth of the industrial sectors. However, for the last two decades, the proportion of trade union membership among young graduate workers has been decreasing (Benson, 2000; Benson & Brown, 2010; Pyman, Teicher, Cooper & Holland, 2015;

As Bryson & Freeman (2007) found that “unionised workers reported more problems with management” than non-union workers (p. 84). As the result, labour unions allow the voices of individual employee to be heard and become concerns to the union’s attention. In Australia, the Federal Government and conservative state government target public sector unions which had risen from 41.9% in 2008 to 46.3% in 2009 in the quantity of the memberships and more focus on collective bargaining (Bailey & Peetz, 2015; Brigden & Cathy, 2012). Unions has concentrated on the pattern of collective bargaining with major job in the federal public service, airlines, on the waterfront and in coal mining (Brigden & Cathy, 2012). For example, the most significant dispute in 2011 was seen in Quatas. The issue of the offshoring of engineers’ work and the loss of Australian jobs were the two main negotiation problems by the time. As a result, the problems involved three sets of organization negotiations including two of these negotiations are between Quatas and ALAEA (Australian Licensed Aircraft Engineers Association) as well as AIPA (the Australian and International Pilots Association) in August 2010 and another one is between Quatas and TWU (Transport Workers Union) in

They make the labour markets less competitive between non-unionized members and unionized members. If labour markets are more competitive, higher wages will cause unemployment. Because organizations become harder to achieve higher production cost when wages go to above equilibrium level. Moreover, among collective bargaining agreements, employers are required to dismiss the most recent employees first and the seniority last. It is sometimes called “last hired, first hired”. Therefore, employees who have more seniority may gain more advantages for job opportunities while junior workers face temporary or permanent layoff. That issue creates unfair job motivation since decisions are determined by the seniority-based layoff system. The system may conflicts with the promotion of equality and encouraging diversity in the workplace. For example, as previous research provided by the Workplace Information Directorate of Human Resource Development Canada (HRDC), almost 70 percent of Canadian collective agreements mention seniority as a principle for the allocation of layoffs (Singh & Reid, 1998). As a result, seniority could be a potential source of discrimination in human resource