On Thursday, October 12, 2017 I had a chance to interview Brian Adams, a former Human Resources Representative at ISG Steel Mill. I got to know Mr. Adams this semester through Kelley School of Business Z302 Organizational Behavior class. Mr. Adams teaches this class on Wednesdays evenings in addition to his Human Resources career. For the interview, we met at Starbucks and had a 30-minute conversation about Mr. Adams’ work experience at ISG Steel Mill. From this interview, I learned that ISG Steel Mill had over 1,000 employees that were represented by United Steelworkers Union. This company had a closed shop system, so employees were required to join the union in order to work there. From Mr. Adams’ words, in the first place, United Steelworkers …show more content…
Adam witnessed a steelworker’s strike. The dispute was over working conditions. The outcome of this strike was a negotiation of a new contract that included better working conditions as well as increase in wages. Since I do not have an experience of working in unionized environment I was curious how HR stuff feels about unions and what positive and negative effects unions have on the workplace. Mr. Adams saw union being respected by employees and was an effective voice for its members. Union would speak up on employees behave if they feel like management is taking advantage of its members. Union helped to secure higher wages and better benefits for the steelworkers. The negative side that Mr. Adams saw was employees’ restriction to do work in the most efficient way because of the work rules that was part of their contract. If the company found the way to complete tasks in more effectively, the steelworkers were not able to change their task flow due to established contract that they had to …show more content…
Mr. Adams answer aligned with my observation. He shared that statistics show that the unions are no longer play an important role in today’s workplace. The percentage of unionized employees decreases each year. The America workers became comfortable without unions to the extent where employees vote against letting unions in their workforce. Mr. Adams thinks that unions might have outlived their purpose and meaningfulness. In his workplace, Mr. Adams observed that union early on advocated for employees’ certain rights and rules that has been codified into US labor law. Therefore, from this side, unions played an important role in creating safer and more desirable work environment that we have today. Employees feel like they don’t need a union to represent them any longer because management treats their workers well as if they are members of the union with rules and benefits that would be negotiated for them by the