Initial Views:
Getting straight to the point of discussion I would like to say that it is very evident to anyone like me who has worked in the IT industry for two years that there is an unequal bargaining power between employer and employee. From whatever professional environment I have worked in I can say that the reason for this is simply that the employer has thousands of employee working for him .The loss of a single employee is of little annoyance to the employer and is, in fact, we can say as an anticipated cost of doing business in today’s world.But if you take the case of the employee I belief that he or she is at the receiving end. His job is usually the only source of income .Losing his job means losing 100% of his livelihood. Furthermore, because of the typical Indian way of living it not only puts financial pressure on him but also psychological where his peers and families have a great role to play. Moving on it is again very difficult to find a new employer than vice-versa. Normally when a person loses a job he is put of work for weeks before he ends up with a new job and furthermore being fired from a job tends to be a black mark upon the resume of the employee, but the fact that an employer has mistreated its employees in the past never seems to prevent it from finding new workers.
The labor market is not a true free market:
· A great deal of effort is required for the employee to find a new job. Even the employer incurs significant costs in hiring a new employee.
· The employer has insufficient knowledge of an employee’s true worth.
· There is the unequal bargaining power problem.
OBSERVATIONS:
Background:
The Australian cricket umpire Darrel Hair, resident in the United Kingdom is a person who seems to love controversy. He began by no-balling Sri Lanka's ace spinner Muttiah Muralitharan seven times for 'throwing' in the Melbourne Test in 1995. Umpire Darrel Hair described the spinner's action as diabolical, prompting the Sri Lankans to complain to the ICC that he had brought the game into disrepute. The Spinner Murali was later cleared by the ICC using sophisticated technology. Umpire Darrel Hair also said in his autobiography that he would not hesitate to 'no-ball' Murali at any future matches. ICC said it was unprecedented that a serving umpire would make public comments on current players.
As if this was not enough, in the fourth Test England verses Pakistan, Hair accused the Pakistani's to have tampered with the ball and penalized them by awarding five runs to England. Pakistanis did not agree and refused to take the field after Tea resulting in the forfeiture of the Match. This is another first in the long history of Test Cricket.
While the issue was raging Umpire Darrel Hair sent an e mail on Tuesday 22nd August 2006, to Doug Cowie under the heading "The way forward" making a "non-negotiable" offer demanding five hundred thousand dollars to retire from International Umpiring. An email was leaked to the press and the motives of Umpire Hair's decisions on the field were questioned.
ICC's Chief Match Referee Ranjan Madugalle did not back Umpire Darrel Hair's ruling on the ball tempering allegation and exonerated the Pakistanis from such wrong doing.
Pakistan have stated officially that they do not want Umpire Hair to officiate in any of their matches, India have asked for him not to be considered for the Champions Trophy and Sri Lanka have long held grievances against him.
The ICC restored Hair to the Elite Umpiring Panel on 12 March 2008 while Hair resigned on August 2008 in pursuance of a coaching career.
Sources: http://articles.smashits.com/articles/sports/150430/sports-team-darrel-hair.html
Views:
Now my views on individual organizational relationship after going through the email was that the employee relationship game does not take place in vaccum.It generally takes place in an organizational setting, which operates under constraints imposed by factors which are external to the organization. This internal and external scenario clubs together a force that influences the relative balance of bargaining power between employers and employees. Whether the outcome of this employee relations game is biased towards employer or employee is based on the relative balance in the bargaining power.
Now the seeing Darell Hair directly demanding a non negotiable offer from the ICC brings to our mind two key level factors that influence this:
Macroeconomic Scenario:
The factors external to the environment which influences the relative balance of bargaining power between individual and organization are the economic, legal and technological factors.
Economic policies which are directed towards creating full employment and maximizing growth
Can shift the balance in the favor of the employees.
Microeconomic Scenario:
Now since I have worked in the IT industry, I could like to state some points which can lead to a scenario as it happened in case of Darrell Hair.
§ Whether employees have become key resources and can inflict cost on the organization.
§ Whether there’s alternate resource available to the employer.
§ Whether employee is aware of his/her potential capabilities.
§ Whether the employee has previously exercised his/her potential capabilities to initiate a non negotiable offer and whether it has been successful or not.
Now going through his terms of negotiation it is very clear to him what he wants from the ICC.
Now he was in a position to make this statement because of the status he had in the cricketing world as being one of the best in his field and also because of the contract that he had with
ICC till March 2008.
Frankly to me what transpired during the series was nothing more than a power game. Earlier it was Pakistan vs. Hair for the most part. Then it was also Hair vs. ICC, Hair vs. media, ECB vs. Pakistan (as they are looking for teams to replace Pakistan), Asian media vs. Australian media, white vs. brown, Elite vs. Asian and what not. Racism was brought in to context then Hair responded that he of all people was being racially discriminated so on and so forth.
Not only this after this letter was made public Darrell Hair exact comments where “This correspondence was composed at a very difficult time and was REVOKED by myself two days after a period of serious consideration”.
Now this happened after the letter was made public and comments by Malcolm speed.So I smell big time politics here where he may have been influenced by the ICC itself to draft a letter so that everyone comes out clean but unfortunately the letter got leaked and the entire plan boomeranged on them.
Would you be able to make similar non-negotiable offer to your employer in any point of time in your career?
Now making a non negotiable offer depends on the place the position and the situation where I will be in my career at the time of making this offer. Now if I have become a critical resource in my organization and I think that my leaving the organization would definitely have cost implications on the company then I would certainly go ahead and make a non-negotiable offer. Apart from that if I see any new opportunity knocking on my door with better benefits than the current job then I would again make a similar offer. If I am not able to build myself as a competent resource and do not have the talent to get new and better job offers than the idea of making a non-negotiable offer to the employer goes out of the window.
Handle the issue from an employer’s perspective:
o Now if I get a similar offer from the employee then I would first check the dependencies on the concerned employee, whether he in any way affect my production flow or services that will affect my bottom line.
o Then the next viable thing to do would be to check the terms and conditions of the concerned employee’s contract and see whether he is on firm grounds for determining a non negotiable contract.
Now there is a view point that in an IT organization creating a back up resource would make the concerned the employee lose some ground on his demands for a non-negotiable offer .Now generally when people become critical resources in an IT organization it is through years of hard work and experience in his concerned domain. Now from what I have seen in my organization is that resources leave the company within a notice of 15 days plus additional money that he has to give back to the organization for not serving a notice period of 2 months (which was in my organization). Now this situation gets interesting when the concerned competitor organization agrees to pay for the amount of money due by him to his current organization. Now most people in an IT organization seldom serve a notice period because immediately when an employee submits his resignation paper, then he is looked skepticism and disloyalty even though he is trustworthy, competent and dependant. The fear of being side-lined or alienated also comes into the picture. Similarly, there is a tendency to ignore suggestions and inputs of employees who resign from the organization. Now generally most of the employees feel that serving a shorter notice period is much better which in turn leads to the fact that building back up resources takes time and reaching to the level of competency is much for difficult for the backup resource. Even if a back up resource is engaged for the past two months with the concerned person to learn the skill set the he possesses, the backup is more often than not gets engaged in other project related activities and when the time finally comes to take up the vacant position he is not fully prepared to do it. This is how events normally pan out. Hence building back-up is one way to tackle the situation but it doesn’t always pay full dividends.
Now I would like to leave you all with the idea that no offer is non-negotiable. Every offer is negotiable in one way or the other
Kindly provide comments and feedback on my viewpoints and do correct me if I have gone wrong somewhere.
Thanks a lot for reading..
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