What I learned this semester in HR Class

Joke Blog Article titles aside, I did learn a great deal this semester. As I am planning to attend law school in the fall after I've graduated in May (Hooray!), one of the most interesting things to me was all the legal rights that employees have, and the rules and regulations that play such a big part in the relationships between the two. The last few chapters have been especially interesting to me, talking about all the laws that workers can use to the advantage regarding things like information, rights to unionize, and the rules regarding who can receive benefits, and after how many days.

I also really enjoyed the discussions in this class. Hearing people offer reasoned arguments for their opinions was a welcome change of pace from the normal "No, you're wrong because I say so" that you normally wind up hearing if people disagree. Kudos to everyone in the class for remaining civl and being able to articulately express their opinions without being rude or disrespectful to those who may have disagreed with you. Good luck to you guys in your future endeavors!

Tom

Labor-Management Relations

The nature of labor-management relations is always fragile at best. Most times, these two sides view each other as adversaries, working towards different things that the other side views a disastrous. In recent years, the two have blamed each other for many of the problems that plague companies across the country. One excellent example of this is the blame placed on the UAW in the downfall of GM, which led to the government takeover of the nation's largest car company.

With the election of a number of far-right conservatives in the November 2010 elections, the tone in many state capitals has become either covertly or overtly anti-labor, and states across the country, most notably Ohio, Wisconsin, and Indiana, having massive protests and budget fights as state Democrats fight for the unions and Republicans fight for budget cuts that they find to be necessary to keep those budgets balanced or at least closer to financial stability.

Currently, companies are using the poor economy as a reason to fight the unions, and in some cases, are winning their arguments. Last week, the National Mediation Board ruled in favor of American Airlines, and banned their flight attendants' union from going on strike because "the carrier’s fragile finances and the weakened national economy would weigh heavily on its decision". It seems that we are in a period where Labor will be taking a hit, and I, for one, am interested to see if that will change if/when the economy rebounds and if/when jobs start coming back to union companies. 


Oh yeah, here's the link to the story on American Airlines: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/americans-flight-attendants-forbidden-to-strike-2011-03-25?reflink=MW_news_stmp

Tom

Benefits...at a cost

Benefits are the second part of an employee's compensation, besides your wages. They can include health care packages, stock options, pensions, and a wide variety of other things that you get from you company at a low or no cost. Because you pay less of the cost, it falls onto your employer to pay for your medical bills, your pension, and the other financial issues that must be taken care of as part of your agreement to work for that company.
One of the biggest problems that many cities and states are having is paying for these programs and benefits as costs skyrocket and tax revenues either remain the same or decrease in this poor economy. This causes governments to borrow, leading to deficits that must eventually be dealt with, which is what we're seeing in states across the country, from our own to Ohio to Wisconsin. Here is an article about this exact problem in San Francisco, and the way that they are remedying the problem, by making the employees pay "much more" for their benefits.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/03/22/BACV1IG6IJ.DTL&feed=rss.news

This is, I fear, the way of the future, and that we will all be paying a significantly higher portion of our income to keep these benefits as the cost of just about everything goes up, and people's paychecks remain roughly the same.

Inve$tment Bank$ Compen$ation

Well, once again it appears that I am commenting on a topic that I talked about previously when Dr. Weyant said we could talk about anything. My last post was about CEO's that would take Pay Cuts to work their "dream jobs. So, here I am, talking about compensation and pay.

Investment Banks. A large factor in the financial crisis and one of the main victims of the blame game in the financial meltdown's aftermath, although most of that ire was deserved for their part in things like mortgage bundling and shady loaning practices. Also, the pay scale and bonuses of investment bank employees are very high, which leads people to think that these investment bankers are getting rich while the rest of the country suffers. This article from efinancialnews seems to back that up, as it reports that "Average compensation cost per employee at investment banks that provide comparable data was $405,777 last year, a decline of just 0.5% on the previous year. At the same time, revenues and pre-tax profits per employee fell by 7% and 8% respectively."


Articles like this will clearly not help the investment banks PR problems, as they're still seen by many as bastions of corporate greed and shady business practices. 


http://www.efinancialnews.com/story/2011-03-14/pay-and-bonuses-clear-as-mud?mod=mostread-PE

Executive Pay

The concept of executive pay is certainly one where the political ramifications can kick in. Last night, at the Oscars, the winner for Best Documentary was about the Wall Street crisis, and when the director went up to accept his award, and in his speech, roundly criticized executives in the banking industry. People on both sides of the aisle constantly go after executives and their 8 figure salaries, calling them greed mongers and similar slurs.
However, it appears that some of them DO have human bones in their body. Not to come out and demonize or sanctify them, but there are often times where we forget that these are people who have hopes and dreams. This article talks about a survey given to a number of executives who said that they would take a pay-cut of up to 50% in order to be given their "dream job." Now, "50% of what absurd salary are they making now?" is a perfectly valid question to ask, but it is kind of nice to see that these people may actually care about things other than the almighty dollar.
http://www.recruiter.co.uk/executives-would-take-pay-cut-to-get-dream-job/1008737.article

Benefits and Unions

The recent unrest in Wisconsin between the new uber-Conservative governor and the unions has caught the nation's attention. The Governor is refusing to bargain with the unions and has set that his plan is the only way that Wisconsin will be able to return to fiscal balance. The unions, after initially refusing to compromise, are now currently trying to reach out to the governor and reach some kind of deal. Protests have shut down sections of Madison, and in Milwaukee, schools had to shut down on Friday because so many teachers called in "sick" in protest.
These types of unions are "Public Unions", which negotiate their contracts with politicians, often the same politicians who just took a huge campaign donation from those unions while they were running for office. There is another kind of union, which is the type that you are probably a member of, unless you work for a government agency or a related field. These are called "Private Unions" and they deal with management in their company and have historically not come away with the lucrative deals that Public Unions have in the past. This recent article from the Washington Post talks about some of the other differences between the two, and the growing annoyance that Private Unions are beginning to develop towards Public ones.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/right-turn/2011/02/public_employee_unions_vs_the.html

Human Resource Development

One of the key components of Human Resource Development is continuing education in all fields in order to keep your workforce as productive as possible. In order to keep up with the changes in technology, it seems like employees need to be trained almost monthly to understand the latest iThing or software update. Without it, other companies who do handle technological change and Human Resource Development better will leave you in their dust.

This is also true on an international level. Countries that keep their workers educated in the coming years will gain a huge advantage as globalization continues to "shrink the globe" so to speak. As China continues to close in on the US as the world power (They passed Japan last year to become number 2, as this article from Bloomberg points out: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-02-14/japan-s-economy-shrank-at-1-1-annual-pace-gdp-surpassed-by-china-in-2010.html ), people talk about how our workforce needs to work better and work smarter. This is there Human Resource Development will play a key role if we are to remain "Number One". This article from the International News Network shows the stats behind a number of Asian nations that are improving on the global level through technology and strong training programs. http://www.onlinenews.com.pk/details.php?id=175017

Recruitment in the Digital Age

It's a bit unfortunate that this week's topic is on Recruitment, since that's what I picked to write about last week from the text on Social Media, but I'll try and make this one different. The changes in technology that have occurred in the last few years is simply staggering. If you had told someone even 5 years ago that they would be able to carry around a device the size of a picture frame that does everything their desktop did and could connect to the internet with just one push of a button, they'd more than likely be extremely skeptical, to say the least. As technology changes, so too must companies change in order to keep up in every facet of their business. A recruiting firm, such as monster.com, has to find ways to use this new technology to benefit both the companies that use their services to find employees, as well as the people who use the site to post their resumes in hopes of being discovered and recruited by employers. Speaking of monster.com, they have taken advantage of the unique features of the iPad and launched an "App" that will allow users to do a number of things they could not do on the usual mobile devices. Also, they've tailored the app to the unique perspectives that people who use the iPad come to Monster.com for. According to Vasu Nagalingam, Monster.com's senior director of product management: "People looking for a job on a mobile device, what we call seekers, all they want to do is search for jobs and apply for them," he said. "So we don't include things like articles and advice columns as part of the iPad, we just focus on helping them find job opportunities."

Using Social Media to Hire the Right People

On page 78 of the Jue, Alcalde-Marr, and Kassotakis book, Social Media at Work, the text discusses a few of the ways social media can be used in business. One of those is attracting the right (best) employees to your company. So how can you do this through Social Media? Depending on the definition of "social media", there are a number of options. If you consider websites like Monster.com or Craig's List as social media, then these are excellent places to find people to come to your company. 
If not, there are still a number of ways to use social media to hire the right people. You can use a person's already existent social media pages (facebook, Twitter) to check in on them, so to speak. You can examine these pages to see if there are any unsavory pictures, or comments about how much they hate their current place of employment. You can also see if they name names in these posts, because while "I dislike my job" isn't going to score them any points, "My boss, John Smith, is the biggest piece of garbage on Earth" is certainly going to cost them some. In this way, you can use social media to make sure you don't hire the WRONG people. 
The company can also use social media as a recruiting tool. Becoming an active presence on these sights increases your visibility, and opens your company up to a wider pool of applicants. This article from the Huffington Post was written by Kathleen E. Christensen, the Program Director of the Alfred Sloan Foundation. In it, she talks about her company and other successful companies use a number of factors, including social media to increase workplace flexibility to attract the best employees and keep them happy once they have been hired. 
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kathleen-e-christensen/how-can-you-tell-if-workp_b_816662.html

Governors Vs ObamaCare

The issue I have chosen to discuss is the idea of how a political problem can translate itself into an issue for companies, and how their HR departments will be forced to change their methods as a result. Here is the link to the Wall Street Journal article: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704754304576096151001973930.html

The passage of the “ObamaCare” Health Care plan in 2009 presented the country with many questions. How will it work? Who would be paying for it? Apart from the political firestorm created by one half of the political spectrum in this country (and one news network), companies were also faced with questions about how the new law would affect them. If the government is now providing health insurance for people, are private companies allowed to drop health care from their benefits package? Will there be some kind of tax incentive for a company to offer health care, and even so, why would they take that hit to their bottom line if their employees had a system already provided to them.

The Wall Street Journal article I’ve linked to here deals with the fact that many states, led by governors on both sides of the aisle, have joined in a lawsuit against the law, arguing for the principle of state’s rights. Governors of many of these states recently wrote a letter to the President claiming that the current language of the bill puts too many restrictions on states and forces them to pay too much of a share in health care costs without a source of revenue to cover those rising costs. This political issue will have a profound effect on how company’s structure their benefits, which will shape the way that HR departments are run in the future.