Week One Reflection
The following paper is a reflection of weeks one’s discussion questions topics. Week one’s topics were fair employment laws and unions and nonunion organizations. With each of the topics came comforts and struggles for each of the team members. In addition to the comforts and struggles the team discussed how the topics relate to the workplace.
Struggled Team Topics
After the discussion that was completed in Learning Team C’s main forum, there were two topics that was somewhat a struggle but yet learning experience as well. The two topics were: the amazement of just how many employment laws there are for a human resource manager to understand and implement and some of the points of views from classmates referring to the subject of union membership.
Chapter 3 discussed many employment laws. From the equal pay act, the family and medical leave act, the American disabilities act, to the age discrimination act, the human resource management, as well as the employee, must understand how each act pertains to the organization. Some of the teammates were concerned with the subject of downsizing and how it seems like the first employees to get laid off are the ones who are middle-age or higher. The chapter explained the act thoroughly. “This act prohibits discrimination in pay, benefits or continued employment for employees age 40 and over. A key objective of the law is to prevent financially troubled companies from singling out older employees when there are cutbacks. If a company claims the layoffs were based on factors other than age, such as performance criteria, the employer bears the burden of proving that its policy was in fact based on those non-age factors.”(Cascio, W. 2010). This provided some comfort as there needs to be proof before a company can just lay-off someone 40 or over.
Such statements used to describe Unions such as “scams”