The impact of government policies on the role of labor unions; a case of public sector organizations of Pakistan

Abstract

The main aim and purpose behind righting this thesis report is to explore the new aspects of human resource management and go beyond the concepts of recruitment, selection, training and development. The aim of this thesis report was to explore the role of labor unions in human resource management in public sector organizations of Pakistan especially in case of worker welfare, productivity, worker welfare, policy making and financial benefits. Labor unions are an important forum especially for the workers to protect their rights and act as a voice of employees. To analyze the role of labor unions in public sector organizations of Pakistan questionnaires were designed on the five point likert scale from strongly agree to strongly disagree. The study was carried in seven (07) unionized organizations from public sector of Pakistan and 150 questionnaires were distributed amongst their employees. All the major stakeholders’ employees, management and union members were consulted so that we could collect information on the role of labor unions in protecting the rights of their workers, introducing worker welfare policies, securing financial benefits, policy making and enhancing the output of organizations. The major scales to assess the performance of the labor unions were their role in securing the benefits for the workers mainly including financial benefits and worker welfare, their role in organizational and national level policy making and their role in enhancing the productivity of the workers. The main issues that were discussed in measuring the role of labor unions were wages, benefits, cost of livings, worker welfare, rights of families, training and development, duty timings, post retirement benefits, organizational policy making, role of unions in decision making, workers and management alignment, output, work place peace and harmony, organizational goals, national policy making, privatization, downsizing, corruption and effectiveness of labor unions in performing the assigned duties to them. All the major stakeholders, management, employees and unions members were involved in that process so that we can have the inputs from all of them. This will be very helpful in knowing the opinions of the people from different levels of organization. The success of unions in terms of stakeholder’s interests was enhancing the productivity of the organization. The result of the study proves that the unions were proved successful in defending the rights of the workers and all the stakeholders. The collection of information from different organizations and different level of organization prove it to be more authentic and it increases the reliability of the information