HRMT 386 Study Guide - Spring 2018, Comprehensive Midterm Notes - Job Analysis, Human Rights, Social Reproduction
12 Oct 2018
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Department
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HRMT 386
MIDTERM EXAM
STUDY GUIDE
Fall 2018
Unit 1
Review Your Progress
You should now be ready to write two- to three-paragraph answers to these
questions:
1. Why do organizations and individuals enter into an employment relationship?
Employers hire workers to accomplish tasks. In this way, employment is an
economic relationship: there is an exchange of value between the worker and
the employer. Specifically, workers agree to provide their time and skills (i.e.,
their labour) to the employer in exchange for remuneration (i.e., wages and
benefits). Workers enter into this relationship, in part, because they must
exchange their labour with someone to acquire money by which to purchase the
necessities of life. The agreement that workers strike with employers is called
the wage-rate bargain.
In terms of employment, this typically means the following:
o The duties and obligations of the employer and employee are asymmetrical: the
employer issues orders, and the employee obeys them.
o Employers must profit or fail; thus, employers face pressure to cheapen and
intensify labour as one means to increase their profitability.
o Employers’ interests lie in maximizing profits, while workers’ interests lie in
maximizing wages and controlling their conditions of work.
2. What does the word resource in the term human resource management
suggest about the nature of the employment relationship?
The concept of “Human Resource Management” implies that employees are
resources of the employer. As a type of resource, human capital means the
organization’s employees, described in terms of their training, experience,
judgement, intelligence, relationships, and insight – the employee characteristics
that can add economic value to the organization. In other words, whether it
assembles vehicles or forecasts the weather, for an organization to succeed at what
it does, it needs employees with certain qualities, such as particular kinds of skills
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and experience. This view means employees in today’s organizations are not
interchangeable, easily replaced parts of a system but the source of the company’s
success or failure. By influencing who works for the organization and how those
people work, human resource management therefore contributes to such basic
measures of a organizations success as quality, profitability, and customer
satisfaction.
Human resource management is critical to the success of organizations, because
human capital has certain qualities that make it valuable. In terms of business
strategy, an organization can succeed if it has a sustainable competitive advantage.
We can conclude that organizations need that kind of resources that will give them
such advantage. Human resources have these necessary qualities:
- Are valuable
- Are rare
- Cannot be imitated
- Have no good substitutes
3. What explains the persistent wage gap between men and women?
Among the consequences of this allocation of work is that women have more
difficulty meeting the expectations of employers in terms of availability for work
and overtime. The demands of child care and eldercare, for example, can be
difficult to schedule into a 40-hour work week. As such, one could say that most
jobs are designed on a “male” model, whereby paid employment is the primary
task of the employee, and social reproduction is handled by someone else. This
often results in women “choosing” part-time or flexible positions in order to
accommodate their other responsibilities. This contributes to the lower salaries
received by women and to lesser access to benefits, training, and promotion. It
also makes them financially vulnerable and potentially more dependent upon a
partner or social programs.
The move away from government-provided social programs has intensified the
domestic load borne by women. For example, when a hospital frees up a bed by
sending an unwell person home to recover, women typically do the work
associated with caring for that unwell person. Similarly, reductions in public-
sector employment (where a significant number of women are employed) may
also intensify the employment expectations on women.
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