History
As commercial organizations grew in size and complexity, there was a tendency to standardize rather than individualize the treatment of labor. Trade unions emerged to offer protection to ever larger groups of employees. The result was collective bargaining to define pay and conditions by reference to grades across industries and trades, and in public service. More recently, unions have lost some of their significance, leaving employees in more direct control. But societies have developed expectations of a better work-life balance, reinforced by legislation, and employers have found it in their own best interests to develop practices that respect equal opportunities and employment rights through professionalized human resource services because:
- the workforce has become more feminized;
- the workforce is better educated, less deferential to authority and less likely to remain loyal;
- the workforce is required to be more flexible to meet new challenges quickly and effectively, but this need to change can be a source of insecurity;
- the use of temporary workers as well as outsourcing of projects and whole business functions also changes workers' expectations as to what they want to get out of their psychological contracts (e.g., transferable skills now vs. life-time employment before); and
- automation has both empowered a greater percentage of the workforce and allowed the emergence of teleworking which fragments the old social orders of a single location workplace and generates greater freedom and flexibility in an ever increasing global workforce.
Read more about this topic: Psychological Contract
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.”
—Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956)
“Modern Western thought will pass into history and be incorporated in it, will have its influence and its place, just as our body will pass into the composition of grass, of sheep, of cutlets, and of men. We do not like that kind of immortality, but what is to be done about it?”
—Alexander Herzen (1812–1870)
“Let us not underrate the value of a fact; it will one day flower in a truth. It is astonishing how few facts of importance are added in a century to the natural history of any animal. The natural history of man himself is still being gradually written.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)