Chapter 2: Employment Relations, Unionisation and the Future of Human Resource Management

A central focus of the field of employment relations is the collective regulation of the employment relationship. Collective regulation can be through law, institutional regulation, such as the setting of national minimum wages, and collective bargaining. The focus of employment relations is therefore both on how collective regulation is developed, established and enforced, and also on how those wider structures affect employment relationships within the organisation – what can be referred to as the management of human resources at organisational level. The past 40 years has seen significant changes in the employment relations landscape around the world, and this chapter explores how those challenges shape the collective regulation of work and employment both within and beyond the boundaries of the employing organisation. The focus here is on developments in Liberal Market Economies (LMEs) (Hall and Soskice, 2001) where markets, and in particular financial markets, have been allowed to develop an increasingly dominant role in coordinating relationships between capital and labour. The chapter argues that despite the fact that these financialised pressures are so evident in LMEs, they are part of a global dynamic of the past 20 years or so of growing influence of financial markets more generally. So the effects of increasing financial dominance in the world of workplace relations and Human Resource Management (HRM) are evident across all countries.