Activity 4 Week 6

Jessica Hummel
Union Avoidance and Union Substitution

I feel that high-performance work practices, non-union employee

representation, and nonstandard work practices are designed to be forms of

union substitution and union avoidance. First of all, high-performance work

practices can be found in all aspects of a business environment that are

aiming to achieve great success, but can also be used in union substitution.

High-performance work practices (HPWP) are comprehensive human

resources practices designed to improve organizational performance (Brown,

2016). This can be used to substitute union activity for the reason that it is a

different practice than what a union may implement. HPWPs can be a way for

unions to move away from the typical union issues that are commonly

regarding labour, and more towards improve the knowledge and skills of

employees, motivate employee performance, and encourage employees who

are not performing up to par to leave the business. HPWPs is a good form of

union substitution because rather than having to go through many obstacles

with terminating a nonperforming employee as seen in a union, it aims to

look for the best performers, and easily encourage bad performers to just

leave, without as many obstacles.

Non-union employee representation and nonstandard work practices

are both forms of union avoidance. These activities both eliminate the

regular activities of unions by removing union practices associated with

dispute resolutions (e.g., grievances), conditions of employment, etc. The

nonstandard work practices also provide more lenience toward work week

schedules. For example, unionized workers generally had less access to a

variable work week (Brown, 2016), but with nonstandard work practices,

flexitime and other types of contingent work are available. Therefore, these

two practices aim to avoid any type of relation to union activity to allow more

flexibility.
 References

Brown, H. (2016). Industrial Relations in Canada (Third ed.). Toronto: Nelson

Education Ltd.