Employment Negotiations In An Australian Company

Wages and Working Hours

The following report is about the employment negotiations in an Australian company. Every organization has to make some necessary negotiations with all of their employees so that they can retain their employees and these negotiations must include the basic issues like the wages or the payments of the employees, working hours, leaves per month, training of the employees, the operating procedures of the organizations and the special provisions that the women employees must get and some important factors that are determining parts of the employment negotiations.

As the organization Miracle Products is situated in Australia and it deals with Education, Empowerment and Wellness products like the magnesium salts, transdermal magnesium gel, transdermal magnesium oil and others, the wages should be well-paid to the employees as it requires much skillful workers to work (Skudiene and Auruskeviciene 2012). The products should be very trustable to the customers and they should always buy these products. The average salary that should be paid to them is about $400, for both men and women as it is not a high wage company. The extra money for working overtime should be given at $20 per hour.

The management of Miracle Products and the Australian Workers’ Union has thought over the negotiation problems for the employees and they have decided that a new agreement has to be fixed as the previous agreement did not prove to be appropriate in terms of service breakdowns and jamming (Boxall and Macky 2014). The average working hours that should be followed in the Miracle Products, should be around 40 hours per week, just a little more than the National Employment Standard set timing 38 hours per week. It will help to get good results in the competitive market. The extra money should be paid in time for the workers who worked overtime in the organization for the success of the new venture taken by Miracle Products to invest in the new plant.

Taking a certain amount of leaves from work should be permitted so that the employees can refresh themselves and come down to work with multiple energy levels. They should be allowed at least three casual leaves per month for doing their personal works and other works.

Employees should be trained in a proper process so that they do not face much difficulty when they would be performing their works (Jehanzeb and Bashir 2013). The trainers should keep an eye on the development of their skills and give special effort to train the weaker employees. The employees who were trained to be hired specifically for this plant would have to be provided with proper training in handling their niche market as well so that they can grow in the future (Jehanzeb and Bashir 2013).

Leaves and Training

All the operating procedures should be carried out smoothly by the authority (Bodie 2013). They should focus on all types of the operational practices like the accounting practices, financial procedures, computer and IT services, human resource procedures, sales and marketing of the products and the employee security should be looked after properly. Miracle Products should held interviews from time to time for seeking the best employees that would best fit into their organization. All the compensations and benefits should be provided to the employees as well. Employee health insurance should also be covered by Miracle Products (Janicki 2013).The organization did not assess the new plant measures that would be ‘lightweight’ under the contract at the time.  

All the women employees should be better looked after if they want to keep up their reputation in the competitive market (Madsen and Walker 2015).  As the half of their staffs was women, they should be served better facilities in cases of emergencies and their pregnancy cases. A pregnant employee should be allowed to take a leave of at least three months with full payment and there should not be any unjustified terminations for the women employees.

All these issues of the collective bargaining as mentioned above should be followed properly by Miracle Products. This organization must be aware of the fact that there are multiple rivals in the market who can challenge them to take their places. So, they should abide by the norms and the values that are set between the management of the company and the employers (Balassa 2014). This collective bargaining would in future help to develop a good relationship between the employers and the management. There should be no misconceptions and the mismanagements between them because that will prevent the growth of the organization (Bodie 2013).

In case of the new plant agreement in Miracle Products, it can be said that the preparation of each team was not adequate. The reason for this was the organization did not assess the working powers of the plant in terms of the specialty packaging they wanted to undertake (Therivel 2012). It is, therefore, very much understandable that the participating teams were not aware of the problems that may arise for not selecting a proper tool for working.

Though team roles were allocated, they did not work properly to solve the issues that were raised during their works. They were not ready for the outcomes that came their way. Their assessment about the new plant for growth strategy was completely false (Bodie 2013).

Operating Procedures and Collective Bargaining

The positions of each of the teams were put to manage the disputes that may arise. The teams had used some strategies like the creative problem solving (Proctor 2014). If they had used the analytical problem solving, they could not have grounded to such a failure. Some tactics like misplaced commitment, complacency and compression were noticed in their working styles (Proctor 2014).

These tactics were used but they did not give the fruits that were desired for the success of the venture (Therivel 2012).

The focus was actually on the substantive issues because the personalities did not play their respective roles properly. Had it been the case, this venture should not have failed because it was a good growth strategy but it lacked the execution it needed. The organizational leaders should have put more stress on the target based performances of the employees by evaluating them (Vaccaro et al. 2012).

Some key aspects of interest bargaining that were present were the goal setting is the wise decision, focusing on the interests and not positions and look for ‘win-win’ opportunities.

The organization was very much enthusiastic about the new settlement programs regarding the major growth strategy by expanding the lower end large run packaging products (Shaw 2012). Their targets were focused on this and they were successful in making a contract with the major distributor of the grocery products. Thus, they had reached the point of agreement with them for the new plant that was equipped to suit the task.

The teams involved there tried to reach their target points by working overtime for the organization that would help to resolve their problems (Burke 2017). They offered extra money to the experienced employees to cut down expense of the new staffs. Thus, they had faltered on their way to reach the organizational objectives because of the proper execution of their strategies (Rothaermel 2015). The needed workforce was not there and they had to slow down the speed of the new plant to get better results. This is why they had suffered a setback. The teams could not reach their target points.

If I was a part of the negotiation, I would do the following things. After reading the entire case, I must say that if I had got the chance to restart the work once again, I would start it differently and making both the creative problem solving and analytical problem solving. I would have analyzed the situations properly to know what things could be done to avoid further problems. I would also allocate special roles to special persons to achieve their targets. Their performance would have been reviewed and the way the work was progressing, I would review that as well.  The management and the workers’ union would have to keep better relation between themselves and I would have taken up the initiative to do so. I would provide the women employees with proper wages so that they can be retained as I would need the experience of the longer working staffs.

I would also look to fulfill all the aspects of the interest-based bargaining. The collective bargaining and the employment relations that have been talked about will have been tried to be solved by me. Thus I would look to succeed in the venture if I was a part of this negotiation.

Conclusion

In the concluding part of the report, it can be said that this report has looked to point out the different aspects of business undertakings and the implications of growth strategies of Miracle Products. The company had taken some bold growth strategy measures but failed due to its executive farsightedness. The ways the scenario could have been improved have been recommended through a reflective portion as well after the issues of collective issues of business negotiation.

References

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Bodie, Z., 2013. Investments. McGraw-Hill.

Boxall, P. and Macky, K., 2014. High-involvement work processes, work intensification and employee well-being. Work, Employment and Society, 28(6), pp.963-984.

Burke, W.W., 2017. Organization change: Theory and practice. Sage publications.

Cutcher-Gershenfeld, J., 2014. Interest-Based Bargaining. The Oxford Handbook of Conflict Management in Organizations, p.150.

Janicki, H., 2013. Employment-based health insurance: 2010.

Jehanzeb, K. and Bashir, N.A., 2013. Training and development program and its benefits to employee and organization: A conceptual study. Training and Development, 5(2).

Madsen, T.L. and Walker, G., 2015. Modern competitive strategy. McGraw Hill.

Proctor, T., 2014. Creative problem solving for managers: developing skills for decision making and innovation. Routledge.

Rothaermel, F.T., 2015. Strategic management. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.

Shaw, E.H., 2012. Marketing strategy: From the origin of the concept to the development of a conceptual framework. Journal of Historical Research in Marketing, 4(1), pp.30-55.

Skudiene, V. and Auruskeviciene, V., 2012. The contribution of corporate social responsibility to internal employee motivation. Baltic journal of management, 7(1), pp.49-67.

Therivel, R., 2012. Strategic environmental assessment in action. Routledge.

Vaccaro, I.G., Jansen, J.J., Van Den Bosch, F.A. and Volberda, H.W., 2012. Management innovation and leadership: The moderating role of organizational size. Journal of Management Studies, 49(1), pp.28-51.