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Case Study: Gingrich Woodcraft Inc.

841 Words4 Pages

This article is from tbnewswatch.com. The owners of Gingrich Woodcraft Inc. closed their business after the majority of workers voted in favour of joining the Unifor union. Unifor is Canada’s private sector union, which has more than 305,000 members across Canada. The Gingrich Woodcraft’s owners, instead of conducting business with union, decided to shut down their business and relieved all workers from their work and decided to sell their business. Business owners’ religious beliefs did not allow them to permit union settings in their factory (Based on organized labour theory). In favour of their members, Unifor union filed a case against the company with the Ontario Labour Relations Board. “The Ontario Labour Relations Board is an independent, …show more content…

To understand all functions of labour relations, the framework of labour relations system is necessary. With the help of framework, we can understand the bigger picture of labour relations. The framework has five elements: Actors, Processes and Activities, the Environment, Outputs or Results, and Feedback. Actors mean the parties involved in the labour relations. Typically, there are three main parties involved in the labour relations process: employers, union and government. In The Gingrich Woodcraft Inc. case, we can consider the owners, Unifor union (the employees) and the Labour Relation Board (Government Agency) as main actors or parties. The actors or parties have major influence in decision making process or feedback loop. Their activities and/or processes can change the output or result of the labour relations process. The Unifor union’s objective is to get justice for its members and get approval for unionized work environment for The Gingrich Woodcraft’s workers. The Labour Relations Board follows legislation to reach a decision. The Owner’s objective is to convince the Labour Relations Board and Unifor union on basis of religious grounds. As part of processes, we can identify the activities such as employees started organizing the union and as result of that owners decided to lockout the factory. For the rights of its members, the Unifor union filed a case against the organization based on legislative rights. In this case, as results or outcomes, settlement of negotiation came in favour of the Unifor union and workers. Here we can see feedback loop 1 (from processes to actors), indicates that one party was seeking a change due to the environmental change and another party was violating legislation by opposing that. Feedback loop 2 (from output/s to processes) indicates that lockout can be prevented by

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