To me, the union's role is to ensure that workers are not
unfairly exploited. By that it can mean either unreasonable low
salary or unreasonable firing or retrenchment of worker. As
Singapore is a mature economy, these things seldom happen
now.
One thing that we need to be catious about is not to push the above
principal to the extreme, where instead of the employee being
exploited, the employer becomes the victim. In a ideal environment,
all parties should gain from the employee-employer relationship,
where the employee gets to earn a living with a reasonable pay for
his effort and the employer gets a profit from running the
business.
Currently, the business environment works in such a way that
companies generally do not fire any one when they are still
profitable, even when some workers are unproductive. And when the
company goes into reds (usually during crisis), they frantically
find ways to cut cost. Usually this means retrechment since labour
is usually the biggest cost for most companies. For the union, they
do not have good reason to stop that since if the company goes
bust, all workers are affected rather than just those who are
retreched. Alternatively, everyone gets a pay cut. This was done in
some companies during the crisis period, which is usually more
humane.
The above scenario really leaves us little choice during crisis.
This creates a very unhealthy situation of having the market being
swarm by high unemployment during this period, making it difficult
for those who are retreched to find another job.
Ideally, I think firing of unproductive worker should take place
during even good years. The benefits are (1) They can find another
job easily since it is in a good year; (2) They learn earlier in
their working life that they are unproductive and needs retraining
and not after they get comfortable. Then in the bad years, the
company should just cut the salary of workers to get by those
years, keeping all workers and getting themselves ready for the
good years to come. This way, the impact of bad economy is shared
equally by all rather than hitting it hard on the unproductive
workers who were never told that they need retraining, until the
economy goes bad.
Just my view of how things should really work. The problem now is
that unions and companies do not tell unproductive worker they need
to improve themselves until it is too late and in a situation where
these unproductive worker has no alternative employment.
