Union Imperatives from Unionized White Collar Employees’ Perspective: The Case of Tata Employees Union

Abstract

The paper examines the attitude of white collar unionized employees’ towards their union and management under three key themes – work related dimensions, union related dimensions and staff members’ loyalty towards union and management. The investigation is based on survey and informal interviews of white collar employees of Tata Centre, the corporate head-office of Tata Steel, India. The analysis suggests the existence of dual loyalty amongst those surveyed. For work related dimensions (e.g. job assignments, recruitment, salary determination, training, career) this aspiring segment believe that management has more influential role to play than the union. Management increasingly is curbing the power distance between unionized members and the officers to reinforce the loyalty of this white collar segment. However, staff members are still loyal towards the union, since union performs an important role of job security provider, which members’ value. The paper also captures changing role of union over its sixty-one years of existence and the areas of improvement, based on its members’ perception.