Spolight Industrial Conflict

Spotlights actions represent a hard approach to human resource management (HRM). The employees in spotlight were offered reduced conditions with no fair trade off for the reduction in working conditions.
The workers in Coffs Harbour were offered 2 cents extra to their base rate in exchange for penalty rates, overtime, leave loading and etc. (Coorey, 2006). This represents the imbalance in power in the worker employer relationship, it shows the power spotlight has over its employees and how it can take a hard approach to HRM as to reduce labour costs and increase efficiency. With Spotlights hard approach with HRM, covert conflict is very likely to manifest as a protest to management policies. Covert actions such absenteeism may be one of the first things to take place as it is very easy to transact and very difficult to dispute. This can cause a lot of disruption as multiple employees being absent at the same time could jeopardise the stores sales activities. Other methods of protest include labour turnover, where employees get fed up with policies and leave and new employees must be hired and retrained, this can be very costly and time consuming for management. Employees can also work with lack of enthusiasm and cooperation and make things very stressful.
The most extreme action that can be taken is sabotage, purposely taking actions to hamper store activities, such as damaging property and equipment, this can happen when employees are very disgruntled, and with a hard HRM policy it is more likely to happen.
Management also have options to take against difficult or disgruntled employees such as being very strict with discipline and policy, and linking this with the threat of demotion or even dismissal. A good example of this is where 99 workers were docked four hours pay for a stop work meeting. Management docked 4 hours of pay as a consequence of not following policy (The Australian 2006). Another good example of this in practice is the case of a company where...