Introduction
Employment relationship is a legal framework linking employers and their employees to ensure a sustained interaction in their organizations. More specifically, ER is an economic, social and political relationship between employers and employees which provides manual and mental labor in exchange for the rewards allotted by employers.
With the rise of modernism, there has been need for inclusion of psychological element in the employment relationships to enhance better and more coherent relationship between employees and employers. It should be noted that, employment relations defines the rights and commitments made between the employers and employees.
Employers in various organizations build good relationship with their employees by creating favorable working conditions, capable of creating psychological satisfaction for them (Ackers 2002: 15). Through cordial relationship between employers and employees, facilitated a well structured legal system, high productivity in the organization is expected since the employees are highly motivated.
Traditionally, psychological contract were relied to establish cordial relationship between employers and their employees. Psychological contracts involves the understanding the understanding the people have regarding the commitments made between the employers and the employees which is initially established during the recruitment process where the employees and the employer discuss deeply their eventual relationship.
This paper will discuss the extent in which traditional theories of employment helps us in understanding the modern Australian workplace.
According to the contract of employment common law, employers have the obligatory duty to care the employees, pay wages, provide work, provide support, safe working environment and maintain relationship of trust and confidence with the employees.
As revealed by Kaufman (2008: 327), in the Modern Australian work place employers are actively engaged in providing their employees with favorable working terms regardless of the genders. It should be noted that, traditional employment patterns were characterized by lack of equity on jobs distribution between the genders. More specifically, women were given less job opportunities than men.
Conversely, the current Australian job environment has seen more chances being granted to women in the job markets as a result of the establishment of employment laws inhibiting discrimination on the basis of gender.
As revealed by Bell & Head (1994: 17), the core elements of employment relationships in Australia today are exchange, effort bargain, inequality and commodification. Through commodification, employees are usually used as means to an end, other than an end itself. Generally, the above are the main elements involved in employment relationships.
With regard to some traditional employment theories like the Marxist theory, employers and employees are brought out as having constant conflicts in terms of work conditions. Since employers are usually idle and do very little in their organizations, Marx describes this situation as creating low esteem and morale among the employees.
With employee given huge amounts of work and being paid fewer wages than the employer would get, conflict between the employers and employees seem to persist. However, the current situation in the Australian modern workplace is dominated by legal regulations governing employers and their employees in terms of the obligatory duties entrusted to each other in the employment contract.
Generally, the Marxist theory seems to be against capitalism by bringing it out as the major cause of fundamental problems between employees and employers, since employees are not psychologically satisfied when their employers who work the least and gain the most (Cooper 2010: 264).
As Cooper and Ellem (2008: 539) suggests, the adoption Unitarianism in traditional organizations is a prospective strategy meant to enhance cohesion between employees and their employer. According to unitary theory, organizations are considered as families where the employers and the employees are considered as being in harmony due to their favorable psychological contracts.
In this case, loyalty between employees and the employers forms the main emphasis in this employer-employee relationship (Todd 2010: 312). With the society becoming quite dynamic, the contemporary Australian workplace remains no more under psychological contracts.
With the establishment of employment relations in the contemporary society, employees can form unions capable of advocating for their rights. Particularly, employers in the contemporary society have no direct control of their employees, provided employment contract with their employees has been established.
Considering the Employment Standards Act of 2001, employees are directly under the cover of the employer and the workers unions. This is to mean that, it is an obligatory duty of the organizational management to ensure the treatment of the employees with high respect in order to facilitate their efficiency in their work.
Understanding the importance of a well motivated workforce has been an eminent issue in many organizations. Through unions, employees’ rights are communicated and procession of cases presented by employees.
As Hearn-Mackinnon (2009: 358) reports National Labor Relations Association enhances collective bargaining power for all the employees both in the public and the private sector over their safety in their work places/areas. More specifically, unfair labor practices in the company should be the basis for the allegation in the court against its security of employees in its environs (Cooper et al 2009: 352).
As depicted in the collective bargaining laws, the company falls guilty of having its working environment unsafe for its employees; through engaging single workers in isolated places without enough security lights
According to Peetz & Pocock (2009: 47), some of the highest priority Employee Relations areas in the currently globalized society are bargaining power in employee wages, safety in work, working hours and moral ethics. It is important to note that, an employee should be secure in his place of work by being exposed to secure work practices.
More so, the employees should be paid well in accordance to their level of performance in the company. Further, the proximity of working duration among employees should be reviewed and be incorporated in the employee unions.
In addition, the level of ethical considerations between the employees and the management should be reviewed and maintained as well. On this basis, the work place life has been found to be more liable to extrinsic factors, but not restricted to internal management practices by the HRM.
As noted by Brigden (2009: 371), the contemporary Australian workplace seems to be guided by pluralistic theory. According to pluralistic theory, employees engage in formation of welfares and unions to form a bigger bargaining power in their organizations.
As depicted by Chen et al (2008, 534), unity among employees reduces the chances of being oppressed by their employers, since they have a more unified system of actions. In this case, the psychological contract between employers and their employees should incorporate the employees’ freedom to form unions and other associations.
Through formation of employee unions and welfare associations, employees get highly motivated (Brigden 2010: 329). This makes them to become more efficient in production, which makes the organization to acquire competitive advantage in the currently competitive business environment.
Mainly, the modern employee relationship seeks to establish democratic and informal relationship between employers and employees sustainably. As a result, a long-term cordial relationship between the employees and employers would be established, since the working environment is naturally friendly.
It is important to note that, the modern Australian work place has largely employed radical pluralism. According to radical pluralism theory, management in organizations is considered as being irreconcilable with their employees in cases of differences. This is due to the tendency of the organizations to incorporate narrow range of employee demands.
As revealed by Bingham (2007: 224), the possibility of employees to reconcile with their employee when employee needs are rarely fulfilled is quite low. As a result, performance in such organizations remains low, since the psychological contract between the employers and the employees has been violated, leading to low motivation among the employees.
According to Blyton & Turnbull (2004: 74) social organizations in the modern work places are portraying high social values to their fraternity so as to enhance co-existence which would in turn result into improvement of the performance of their workforce.
In fact, Boxall & Purcell (2011: 53) links an organization’s level of performance to the welfare of its employees; who are the ultimate determinants of the performance such an organization. Certainly, ethical considerations between employers and their employees is a very important consideration in their interaction within an organization.
It should be noted that, when employees are treated with humanitarianism would feel that they are respected and be motivated in carrying out their various activities. In fact, the employees’ ability to develop positive attitude towards work would be attributed by their being accorded with high esteem by their employers.
The current new management strategies in the modern organizations have seen significant changes in the organizational structures of various organizations. Merging, acquisition and restructuring have been dominant practices among various organizations in their pursuit to establish favorable work-life for their employees. In this case, various psychological contracts are established between the employees and their employers.
As reported by Coyle-Shapiro (2005: 87), there are two main psychological contracts which include transactional and relational contracts. In transactional psychological contracts, short-run work relationships between employers and employees are established by having a certain set of obligations to be met.
Notably, Peetz & Pocock (2009: 49) considers transactional psychological contracts as being economically oriented as they are reasonably specific. This is due to their short-term nature as the employers seek to determine the reliability of their employees in terms of work commitment.
With the introduction of strategic human resources management, it has been possible for organizations to conform to the industrial relations requirements. In Australia, the introduction of scientific management practices among organizations, consistency and coherence in designing and implementing strategic human resources management has been realized.
Contingency framework of employee-employer relationships have been largely understood, making organizations comply with the requirements of the legislation and labor force acts for successful implementation of their strategic plans.
As evidenced by Cooper and Ellem (2008: 541), the rationale of using cost-efficiency and the market requirements has been the ultimate strategy of realizing quality production as a result of a highly motivated employee body.
The most critical perspective of the employee-employer relationship is taken on the basis of how the external environment, including unions and associations, are impacting management practices by HRM, where employment contracts are largely employed.
Breaching of these psychological contracts has been revealed to have large effect the overall organizational coherence between employees and the employer. Suppose the employer fails to subdue the agreement made in the employment terms, by either delaying payments or applying more strict work terms than agreed, employees are highly discouraged.
By failing to conform to the expected behavior, employers usually cause lot interference in terms of trust to their employees. Such an act would be described as breaching of psychological contract since the employer would have failed to sustain the psychological requirements agreed during the time of employment.
Brigden (2009: 375) considers the development of conflict between employers and employees as arousing from breaching of psychological contracts, but not necessarily on the basis of formal obligations.
Conclusion
With the rise of modernism, the Australian workforce has largely changed, where employers and employees are ultimately under legal formalities more than the psychological contracts previously employed in traditional organizations.
As it has been revealed, equality in jobs allocation in terms of gender has been employed in the Australian Labor Laws, resulting into high control of employment terms by the legal formalities. Generally, the establishment of employment contract between the employers and employees is largely safeguarded by the existing employment relations laws.
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