REALITY OF HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT: DECIPHERING LABOUR UNREST (IJMSS Book 3)

Despite a brief period of lull from late 1980s to early 1990s in the labor unrest in India, the last few years have seen unprecedented growth in it, with some cases even leading to the death of people. The growing incidence of labor unrest is indicative of the fact that all is not well with the Indian organizations. The present text is aimed at exploring the possible causes of the major labour unrest in the past three years (2008-2011). The text is also aimed at critically analyzing the main assumptions of HRM vis-à-vis these labour unrests.

Secondary data resources such as print media, internet, electronics media etc. have been used in this paper. Some of the causes of the unrests were-rigid and archaic laws, inequity in wages, lack of trust, crisis of leadership etc. Most of the assumptions of HRM such as congruence, commitment, collaboration, trust, transformational leadership etc was found missing. Some were not even in sync with the realities of contemporary organizations and people. Like many critics of HRM, we too found the presence of the hard variant of HRM and HRM assumptions were appeared to be more “rhetoric” than reality.