Strategic Human Resource Management

Section Five

study found that elections retaining the union produced higher
shareholder returns:

This study finds that firms that retained union

representation in decertification cases actually

outperformed those that ousted the bargaining

agent in a partitioned sample comparison.^39

Positive Labor Relations

The manner in which firms handle relations with their unions
and the workers they represent can have a number of effects.
Such labor relations practices can affect the productivity of the
workforce and financial performance. More specifically, it has
been well established in the industrial relations or labor
relations literature that unionism can have both positive and
negative impacts on productivity. One explanation of the effects
of unions is that through their representation of workers in
grievance procedures and collective bargaining, unions provide
workers with a means of expressing their concerns to
management about workplace conditions. This means that
unions provide a voice mechanism, which in some situations
can have a positive impact on firm performance. For example,
in situations in which management is unreceptive to the
concerns of individual workers and there is no union to provide
a voice, the only other alternative for dissatisfied workers is an