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More about Employee Relations

It is not a secret that traditionally women were in a deprived position compared to men and this is it is necessary to find out whether this problem is still relevant as well as to attempt to trace the basic causes of the existing difference between men and women in the labour market.
In such a way, it will be possibly to eventually define the basic components that constitute the gap between men and women employees in the modern economy.

The current women's position in the labour market

Speaking about the current situation in the labour market, it should be pointed out that it has really changed compared to the situation that could be observed a few decades ago. First of all, the labour market demands and its structure are changing and what is more the gender difference has a trend to gradually decrease that, though, does not necessarily mean that they have already disappeared. In fact, nowadays the growth of new industries stimulated by the rapid development of new technologies, especially in the sphere of IT, creates the situation when the labour market demand on physical semi-qualified or non-qualified labour force gradually decreases.
As a result, the role of information and knowledge is growing and in the future this trend may become dominant. Naturally, in such a situation, some economic theories concerning labour need to be improved or précised. In this respect, it is worthy of note the human capital theory which traditionally defines human capital as a way of defining and categorizing peoples skills and abilities as used in employment and as they otherwise contribute to the economy (Walby and Olsen 102).

Briefly speaking, it is possible to say that, according to this theory, labour is one of the highest value the employees possess and, to a certain extent, labour is a cornerstone of employee relations. This is why it is very important for an employee to be competitive in the labour market that can be archived only through the high level of his/her skills and abilities he/she can offer to the market, or literally to employees.

In fact, it is hardly possible to underestimate the role of human capital in employees relations since human capital is a stock of assets one owns, which allows one to receive a flow of income, which is like interests earned. On the other hand, it is necessary to emphasize that human capital is substitutable though it does not mean that it will replace land, labour or capital totally, but "it can be substituted for them to various degrees and be included as a separate variable in a production function" (Allen 233).

In such a way, nowadays, actually as always, the relations of employees are defined by their skills and abilities which actually form human capital. On the other hand, there is another component of human capital that substantially differs modern employees relations from those of the past and this component is knowledge. Objectively speaking, knowledge can hardly be referred to human capital as a kind of standard skills or abilities of an employee. Knowledge is really unique and it is substantially different from the physical labour that used to dominate in the past and, to a significant extent, contributed to the domination of men in the labour market, while knowledge creates opportunities for women to gain better position in the labour market and really benefit from employee relations. actually, knowledge reveal certain limitations of the human capital theory exactly because of the uniqueness of knowledge which cannot be really standardized and classified by this theory.

Basically, the uniqueness of knowledge and its difference from the physical labour may be explained by...