ACTIVITY 3 - RASPBERRY

Professional Networks and Human Resources

1. Nowadays, Jobs are scarce and technology has changed work environments.
Sometimes it may seem labor relations is a quite old-fashioned expression.
During this time of crisis, the world is going through, is the time to change the way
people used to work in order to increase productivity and effectiveness because of the
competitiveness. So its the time to apply new technics and tools to beat the
competence. Obviously, new technologies are being really important in this change but I
do not agree with the statement of labor relations are disappearing. For some sort of
jobs its still important to deal with people every day and for others are not important
but new technologies came to do their work easier or more efficient.
* Do you think Labor Relations are still meaningful in the current context?
Lots of professionals still work on this issue in order to be in touch and take care with
the workers of the company dealing with their problems and solving questions related to
their work. For me the Human Resources Department is getting more important because
in order to find the right person to the required job position is being studied deeply to
find the best psychological profile. The relationship between employer and employee is
getting more important as new job profiles are coming up as Team leader, Team group
or Manager, because to deal with a group of people and know how to take the best from
them is important to increase productivity.
2. Will technology make workers obsolete? Are workers abundant in the new
economy? Do you agree with Paul Krugman: "when something becomes abundant,
it also becomes cheap"?
From my point of view in some kind of jobs, new technologies can make workers
obsolete but we do not have to talk about the future because it has happened yet. For the
majority of the work positions technology helps the work to be more efficient and in the
possibility to reduce the number of workers comes up. In my opinion technology can
reduce the number of employees to do the same work but work made by workers never
will disappear.
I am totally agree with the statement of Paul Krugman. Another statement is Quality is
served in small quantity just because something abundant makes it cheap so you can
get as much as you want. If something is everywhere and everybody can get it or made
it so the competence will be so aggressive as the price of the product will go down to be
competitive.

ACTIVITY EM

3. A flexicurity policy is characterized by a strategy to enhance the flexibility of

organizations, labour markets and labour relations on the one hand, and
employment and social security on the other.
* Is flexicurity the answer for the reconciliation of work and family life? Review
the Spanish (or any other country) current regulations on employment to support
your answers.
Due to the situation of crisis Spain is going through during these years ago, it is being
really difficult to deploy new labor laws in order to deal with no investments and
creation of job positions or Labor security. So, new programs are being developed in
Spain by organizations to improve the situation of workers. Some examples to improve
in Spain are:
Reduce Labor Segmentation
Modernize collective negotiation
Investments in social protection
Withdrawal of inefficient public investments
Promotion of productivity and training
* Point out any measure of the Spanish recent legal provisions that favour
flexicurity. Can you provide any example from your internship company practices
on the subject?
The last labor reform was set to create more job positions, social protection to the
unemployed people and also make easier to the employer fire workers from a
company. To resume, it pretends to a company completely lose the fear to hire/fire
workers.
In the way to flexicurity we find in this reform the follow consequences:
- Decrease the amount of money of firing people
- Stimulating entrepreneur, keeping talent and training of the workers
- Modification of the integral collective negotiation in order to get it closer to the
enterprise
You can be agreed with this new rules or not but nobody can deny we are facing a big
reform.

ACTIVITY EM

In flexicurity is very important. There are just a few of job positions in the company and
depends of the importance of the job positions its easy to be hired/fired. Going to the
top level of job positions in the company and as it get more importance is more
important to take care about being hired or fired because is a IT company where a
normal worker can deal with a lot of very important information. For interns like me,
flexicurity and the reforms made by the government are very important because they
can decide my future in the company.

ACTIVITY EM