l are those that mediate the relationship between workers, employing entities, trade unions, and the government. Collective law relates to the tripartite relationship between employee, employer, and union.
Employment is a relationship between two parties regulating the provision of paid labour services. Usually based on a contract, one party, the employer, which might be a corporation, a not-for-profit organization, a co-operative, or any other entity, pays the other, the employee, in return for carrying out assigned work. Employees work in return for wages, which can be paid on the basis of an hourly rate, by piecework or an annual salary, depending on the type of work an employee does, the prevailing conditions of the sector and the bargaining power between the parties. Employees in some sectors may receive gratuities, bonus payments or stock options. In some types of employment, employees may receive benefits in addition to payment. Benefits may include health insurance, housing, disability insurance. Employment is typically governed by employment laws, organisation or legal contracts.
Temporary work or temporary employment refers to an employment situation where the working arrangement is limited to a certain period of time based on the needs of the employing organization. Temporary employees are sometimes called "contractual", "seasonal", "interim", "casual staff", "outsourcing", "freelance"; or the words may be shortened to "temps". In some instances, temporary, highly skilled professionals refer to themselves as consultants. Increasingly, executive-level positions are also filled with Interim Executives or Fractional Executives.
A layoff or downsizing is the temporary suspension or permanent termination of employment of an employee or, more commonly, a group of employees for business reasons, such as personnel management or downsizing an organization. Originally, layoff referred exclusively to a temporary interruption in work, or employment but this has evolved to a permanent elimination of a position in both British and US English, requiring the addition of "temporary" to specify the original meaning of the word. A layoff is not to be confused with wrongful termination. Laid off workers or displaced workers are workers who have lost or left their jobs because their employer has closed or moved, there was insufficient work for them to do, or their position or shift was abolished. Downsizing in a company is defined to involve the reduction of employees in a workforce. Downsizing in companies became a popular practice in the 1980s and early 1990s as it was seen as a way to deliver better shareholder value as it helps to reduce the costs of employers. Research on downsizing in the US, UK, and Japan suggests that downsizing is being regarded by management as one of the preferred routes to help declining organizations, cutting unnecessary costs, and improve organizational performance. Usually a layoff occurs as a cost-cutting measure.
A pre-entry closed shop is a form of union security agreement under which the employer agrees to hire union members only, and employees must remain members of the union at all times to remain employed. This is different from a post-entry closed shop, which is an agreement requiring all employees to join the union if they are not already members. In a union shop, the union must accept as a member any person hired by the employer. By comparison, an open shop does not require union membership of potential and current employees.
A union security agreement is a contractual agreement, usually part of a union collective bargaining agreement, in which an employer and a trade or labor union agree on the extent to which the union may compel employees to join the union, and/or whether the employer will collect dues, fees, and assessments on behalf of the union.
An employment contract or contract of employment is a kind of contract used in labour law to attribute rights and responsibilities between parties to a bargain. The contract is between an "employee" and an "employer". It has arisen out of the old master-servant law, used before the 20th century. Employment contracts relies on the concept of authority, in which the employee agrees to accept the authority of the employer and in exchange, the employer agrees to pay the employee a stated wage.
Permatemp is a U.S. term for a temporary employee who works for an extended period for a single staffing client. The word is a portmanteau of the words permanent and temporary.
Job security is the probability that an individual will keep their job; a job with a high level of security is such that a person with the job would have a small chance of losing it. Many factors threaten job security: globalization, outsourcing, downsizing, recession, and new technology, to name a few.
Contingent work, casual work, or contract work, is an employment relationship with limited job security, payment on a piece work basis, typically part-time that is considered non-permanent. Although there is less job security, freelancers often report incomes higher than their former traditional jobs.
An employment agency is an organization which matches employers to employees. In developed countries, there are multiple private businesses which act as employment agencies and a publicly-funded employment agency.
In Australia, labour hire is referred to by the legal term of art labour hire arrangement, and refers to the employment practice of an employer supplying its employees to another workplace, for profit.
United Kingdom agency worker law refers to the law which regulates people's work through employment agencies in the United Kingdom. Though statistics are disputed, there are currently between half a million and one and a half million agency workers in the UK, and probably over 17,000 agencies. As a result of judge made law and absence of statutory protection, agency workers have more flexible pay and working conditions than permanent staff covered under the Employment Rights Act 1996.
Agency worker law refers to a body of law which regulates the conduct of employment agencies and the labour law rights of people who get jobs through them. The typical situation involves the person going to an employment agency and then the employment agency sending the person to an actual employer for proper work.
Workplace privacy is related with various ways of accessing, controlling, and monitoring employees' information in a working environment. Employees typically must relinquish some of their privacy while in the workplace, but how much they must do can be a contentious issue. The debate rages on as to whether it is moral, ethical and legal for employers to monitor the actions of their employees. Employers believe that monitoring is necessary both to discourage illicit activity and to limit liability. With this problem of monitoring employees, many are experiencing a negative effect on emotional and physical stress including fatigue, lowered employee morale and lack of motivation within the workplace. Employers might choose to monitor employee activities using surveillance cameras, or may wish to record employees activities while using company-owned computers or telephones. Courts are finding that disputes between workplace privacy and freedom are being complicated with the advancement of technology as traditional rules that govern areas of privacy law are debatable and becoming less important.
European labour law regulates basic transnational standards of employment and partnership at work in the European Union and countries adhering to the European Convention on Human Rights. In setting regulatory floors to competition for job-creating investment within the Union, and in promoting a degree of employee consultation in the workplace, European labour law is viewed as a pillar of the "European social model". Despite wide variation in employment protection and related welfare provision between member states, a contrast is typically drawn with conditions in the United States.
Labour brokering is a South African term for a form outsourcing practiced in which companies contract labour brokers to provide them with casual labour. Labour brokers are different from recruitment agencies in that labour brokers handle almost all aspects of the worker's employment, whereas recruitment agencies are only responsible for sourcing candidates for employment. In essence, rather than a company hiring a worker, it hires a labour broker who hires the worker in its stead. In other jurisdictions, labour brokering is referred to as Labour hire, Permatemp, or Employment agency.
Haken is the Japanese term for temporary employees dispatched to companies by staffing agencies.
In Namibia, the issue of labor hire remains a controversy between the government, unions and labor brokering companies. The ILO categorizes two forms of subcontracting, namely job contracting and labor-only contracting. Most of Namibia’s labor hire companies fall into the second category as they merely supply labor to their clients.
Dispatched labor refers to an atypical employment relationship. Dispatch work agencies receive requests from businesses to have them hire and manage labor on the business' behalf. This type of labor is known as "dispatched labor". There is in fact no direct contract between dispatched laborers and the enterprise which uses the agency's services, so in this way, dispatched employment follows a triangle structure. As dispatch agencies are often highly adept in hiring and managing workforces, businesses are more than happy to use an agency to manage part of their workforce as it saves time, money, and if you are a foreign enterprise, the hassle of quickly understanding the legal workings of a local labor force.
