Redundancy Rights – Rights for Whom?
The 1965 Redundancy Payments Act was amended by the 1975 Employment Protection Act to give substantial rights to trade unions to challenge managerial decisions on redundancies. These included advance warning of impending redundancies, the right to make representations to the employer, and to receive the employer′s reply. Cabinet ministers, introducing the legislation, felt that it would generate negotiations either to quash the redundancies or to provide alternative solutions to impending job losses. In investigating 74 incidences of redundancy, covering 10,500 workers, it was found that these rights have, for the most part, merely oiled the process of managerial decisions over redundancies, by enjoining trade unions to such decisions; decisions on which they have no real impact. Rights for trade unions, then, in practice translate to gains for employers. An important caveat to this situation occurs where an agreement on redundancies exists, generally giving workers substantial benefits, although there ar...
The Knowledge Worker and the Knowledge Age
Historically, new forms of journeyman emerge to suit new forms of work. The form of work is often defined by the materials and tools of the journeyman’s trade and the environment in which they ply their trade (Howell, 1999; Howell and Gammack, 1997). The Knowledge Worker, a term first coined by Drucker (1959), now generally refers to a worker associated with a form of work which we might meaningfully categorise as “knowledge work” (Drucker, 1991; Collins, 1998, Nomikos, 1989). The importance of the social context of problem solving in knowledge work has been identified (Hagglund, 1989; Ngwenyama and Klein, 1994; Suchman 1983,Suchman 1987; West 1990,West 1992). If recognition of the social context is important at the individual level, then this is also true at the group level. At the group level of the business, businesses require to realize that knowledge is the new competitive resource to which value is added to enable the successful business to peddle in the free marketplace, and value can be translated into helping the organisation or individual to achieve some form of competitive advantage (Despres and Hiltrop, 1995). The value of most products and services will depend on how knowledge-based intangibles can be developed (Quinn, 1992). The Knowledge Worker is often associated with a technological skill set and access to technology that allows him/her to access a “data repository” (Kappes and Thomas, 1993). Generally, the knowledge worker is associated with information rich business environments and the networked organization (Coulson-Thomas, 1991).
Data Driven Policy: The Case for Certification Research
This article describes the program of research being implemented to investigate the outcomes of certification in the U.S. and Canadian workforce and its relevance to the goal of providing policy makers with pragmatic, action-oriented recommendations. Such recommendations encompass policy issues of workforce production, regulation, distribution, financing, and oversight of credentialing organizations. Few studies exist to substantiate the association between certification credentialing and practice outcomes, thereby leaving policy makers, consumers, and nurses in a vacuum when pushed to protect the public through the credentialing vehicles. The Nursing Credentialing Research Coalition (NCRC) has embarked on a research program that will reveal the relationship between certification and its influence on a nurse’s personal, professional, and practice characteristics as well as those judged by consumers and employers. Selected findings and implications for policy are described. Certified nurses’ reports of early interventions for complications are important quality measures for policy.