HR Club Meeting Minutes-4/7/10

HR games
Did not do well in the games but felt that we did well since we did not have as much time to prepare.
Recieved the Collegiality Award
Award was going to be presented to SWARMA for their support of the club.

Guest Speaker: Meredith Green

HR Manager at Iron Mountain-Generalist with focus in Employee Relations

Union Avoidance
No company is interested in having a union come into the workplace.

Strategies around union avoidance
-Some industries are targeted by unions.
-Ususally more blue collar type of workers
-Companies with drivers
-Warehouse workers

FCA Legislation will help make it easier for unions to come in and take over. It has not passed yet but it could be soon.

Unions are a business and they are looking for customers.
There is financial incentive for unions to speak with your employees.

You will have to sit down with union and discuss
-benefits
-wages
-and can discuss performance

Unions can depersonalize the workplace. If there is an issue on teh job, there is opportunity to discuss and resolve it on a one on one level. When a union is involved, it must be done through the union.

If you start to get activity in the environment. It can be very tense.
The first step is that the union has to get a certain number of cards signed.

The reasons that employees talk to unions is because of relationships with the managers, a bad supervisor/manager. Someone is not treating the employees right, being too stringent, not following up on request, they do not feel like you are helping them.

How do you guarantee that the union will not come in? The union can say that they can guaranteed such as wages, etc. But everything has to be negotiated. If the company isnt going to agree to what they are proposing, they dont have to. The employer cannot make promises and there are alot more restrictions about what the company can do e.g. they cannot make promises about what they can do once the union comes in.

Union avoidance strategy
You want to be aware of the risks of unionizing coming into the organization.
You want to be aware of the environment. What is the risk of a union coming in? Want to check to see how many other employers in the same industry are unionized. Also want to know how many union shops are in the area, etc.

If you identify that a union can come in, you need to get to know your managers and find out their management styles and then find out what the employees think of them. The front line supervisors may be the biggest problem because of levels of experience, etc.

Schedule employee roundtables regularly
-A group of 6-10 employees to sit and talk with HR about work.
-Let the employees know that you want to know how you can be of assistance for them, etc.
-You can get some credibility by catching the small issues right away. Employees are more likely to come to you because you have established relationships with the employees. Keeps employees from going outside of the org (union) for help.

Compensation is not usually the main issue even though it is the big topic its how they are being treated by their supervisors

Unions will bring people that work for the union into a company to work for them to help convince them to join the union.

Relationship tracker exercise
-your frontline supervisors go through and discuss what their relationship is with their employees.
-Helps to identify where the strong and weak relationships are at. You can know where more work needs to be done and who your strong workers who can help you spread the word about the pros and cons of unions. It will help you to determine risk if there are a few employees who have a good relationship with employees and a large number of people who dont.

You can provide labor relations training to the managers so that they know how important it is to have good relationships with their employees. Discuss the signs of unionizing. The sooner you know that there is union organizing activity happening, then you can take care of it. It is too late once you get notification about it to do anything about it.

If there is treat of unionizing you can do this before you are notified::
You need to discuss with employees what the union will or will not do for you.
You need to discuss the benefits that the company offers.
Pull reports right away with average increases of what the employees recieve each year vs what some union contracts look.
Show the employees what they are paying for benefits
Let the numbers work for you.

Ride alongs and work alongs:
-You get out and work or ride with employees
-Gives you opportunity to build a relationship with the employees
-Helps you to know what the daily challenges are of your workgroup.
-Give some take aways from it to the managers

Employees rights according to the NRLB
-HR cannot put in clauses in policies about pay secrecy.