Where Will EEO Laws Fit in Outsourced Economies?

The near guaranteed availability of employment opportunities in the U.S. has been wrapped up by off-shored and/or outsourced economies of modern times, resulting in higher unemployment rate and financial security uncertainties. But many believe that this isn’t the end of the game. Employers may optimistically look for ways to attract motivated workers whose time and energy could profitably be mobilized around business processes afresh. And employees may equally put excessive hours of work in production for the simple promise of getting paid latter. This situation, coupled with fierce competition and dwindled unionism, may result in an unobserved EEO laws. So the question is this: Where will EEO laws fit in outsourced economies?

 Logically, employers’ angry vision of mobilizing talented workforce and the intensified need for overproduction and efficiency might lead to a worrying trend—long hours at work and less defense for workers. If this happens, very huge majority of workers would have to make choices between long hours of work with disused EEO principles and global market reality: qualifications warfare in developed world economies and cheap labor availability in the emerging world such as BRICs. In fact, as Gomez-Mejia, Balkin, and Cardy argued in their book, Managing Human Resources, that the first decade of this century has shown an unhealthy environment for these trends.

Even though such situation may not favor employers, per se, it will tremendously decrease employees’ moral which, in turn, can inexplicably accelerate employees’ lack of motivation and enthusiasm in the company. This will force employers to compromise their long-term business bottom lines. The notorious employment-at-will would be buried down the process, for instance.

Worse, to counterbalance businesses and other stakeholders, the Affirmative Action might see itself expanding from its current jurisdiction to an indefinite applicability, covering every employee regardless of their employer. But such policy has first to undergo the typical filibustering talk on Capitol Hill. On his part, though, President Obama made it loud and clear during his presidential campaign, “As the pace of globalization has picked up, though, it’s not just unions that are worrying about the long-term prospects for U.S. workers”.

Moreover, making the popular “do-the-right-thing” adage really obsolete requires the government to become the primary watchdog for workers. And this isn’t a bad thing. The government was already at the forefront of defending workers, though with loose appetite for globally-backed market initiatives. The only thing here is that everybody should get their share of the pie. A common ground is highly necessary but with realistic yet progressive fight.

The first wave of such battle is going to be an extreme anxiety both for employers and the government. For starters, as of right now, the laws concerning HR practices are divided into two: EEO laws and everything else. Both of these laws will inevitably settle down for interpreted court and other statues actions in relation to market standards. Previously, employers used to have a leeway in areas such as hiring, discharging, performance, among other things; so long they had a business related policy in place to fight against law suits.  

The problem now would spell out differently. Employers can now avoid expensive litigation by producing in countries where EEO laws are nonexistent. To go around this, a free-market-based concept that favors a win-win scenario in everything would have to be forged. But as Kelliher and Anderson proposed in International Journal of Human Resource Management, that such strategy requires participants to bravely change course. Of course, organizations must standardize their objectives strategically to suite the situational bargaining in business-human capital relations.

Knowledge Management: Critical Aspect to Organizational Success

             With 21^st century’s financial meltdown and the growing uncertainty of job insecurity and the supervisory frustration among employees at any level in organizations, managers and those who communicate downwardly should not overlook the knowledge employees have acquired. In truth, managing employee knowledge is very critical to organizational success. Scoring high in knowledge management practices is, therefore, the surest recipe for effectiveness and greater productivity.

 Assuming that knowledge is already somewhere in the organization, the chief important decision an organization faces during functionality is to carefully handle its knowledge management processes. Ideally though, this task consists of two related parts: The first one is the demand-side of knowledge management, locating where the knowledge lies in the hierarchy of organization’s employee chains and managing it to superior performance. This is to first know who owns the knowledge that the organization needs the most and transforming it into a successful organizational asset. In other words, since the fuel of any business is the know-how and those who host it, organizations must do a good bid in establishing a pool of talented yet educated workers for their own survival.

The second part, and the next most important task, is the delivery-side of knowledge management. In securing the owners of the knowledge, the task of managing the knowledge itself comes into play. This is where managers either fail or succeed. But in a perfect world, this isn’t that difficult. It is as simple as the process of keeping knowledge secure, integrating it into an organizational asset, and sharing it with those other stakeholders down the chain. After all, this can form the organization’s intellectual asset in the making. And as Steyn and de Toit argued in their article published in South African Journal of Business Management, a competent organization does this by codifying the knowledge and putting it into repositories for future retrieval. In sum, before managing knowledge workers and the knowledge itself, organizations should accentuate the value of knowledge management processes.

Eventually, organizations exploit knowledge and manage it innovatively to generate efficiency and effectiveness. However, managing knowledge requires knowledgeable personnel and technologically innovative ways to facilitate the process of knowledge management. In short, to better manage its human capital and resources, an organization should skillfully handle its knowledge management strategy thoroughly carefully because knowledge contains in people’s heads.

What's more, it seems that the linear relationship between managing human capital and knowledge management has stronger correlation with organization’s strategic ambition. But the difficulty is how organizations generate, transition, and share information that was already in someone else’s head. This presents magnificent challenges and prospects to businesses wanting to compete in a global arena. In their study, Felin and his colleagues, summarized the concept straightforwardly, “To understand knowledge governance and the associated implications for human capital management fully, we must explore the complementary and seemingly contradictory features of these trends.” This is why the role of managing employees’ knowledge played significantly in producing the best innovations throughout history.

            In conclusion, knowledge management has increasingly been part of every sound business success and economic growth. And organizations, whose market segment relates to information technology, must put special emphasis on both demand- and delivery-side of knowledge management. They should go well beyond acquiring information and sharing it with stakeholders; they must filter and classify information time and again for future dependability and reliability. There should be an aggregated system that hosts organization’s information. To put it succinctly, knowledge management is the process through which organizations generate value from their intellectual and knowledge-based asset.                  

About me

Abdiqani is a Liberty University Business School graduate with Master of Science in Management. He is practicing/ consulting human resource management with an ultimate objective of enhancing and maximizing human capital. The very mission that drives Abdiqani is to aid and empower clients (businesses and jobseekers) with most up to date HR management practices and concepts so they can survive in today’s changing and technology-driven business environments