Understanding Globalisation and Its Impact on Employment Relations

Globalisation and its consequences for employment relations sit at the heart of this video, which is aimed at practitioners and students working at CIPD Level 7 within unit 7HR01 – Strategic Employment Relations. The video addresses Assessment Criterion 2.1 directly, building a critically evaluative account of how globalisation has shaped and transformed employment relationships within organisations. It does so through the lens of economic integration, the internationalisation of labour markets, and the cross-border diffusion of management practices, treating these not as background context but as forces with concrete structural implications for how work is organised and how the employment relationship is constituted.

A substantial portion of the video is concerned with the specific ways in which organisational structures and employment arrangements have shifted under global competitive pressures. The growth of non-standard employment — including temporary contracts, agency work, zero-hours arrangements, and outsourcing — is examined alongside the restructuring of organisational boundaries through global supply chains. The video considers what these developments mean for questions of employer responsibility, collective representation, and the distribution of risk between organisations and workers. It also addresses the uneven nature of wage and working condition pressures, distinguishing between the experiences of highly skilled workers in globally competitive sectors and those in more easily relocatable industries.

Three theoretical perspectives are brought into direct contrast to fulfil the critical evaluation demanded by AC 2.1: the neo-liberal position, critical political economy, and institutionalism. The institutionalist strand draws on comparative evidence to examine how national institutions — including trade union strength and employment regulation — mediate global pressures rather than simply absorbing them uniformly. This comparative dimension allows the video to engage with the long-running convergence versus divergence debate in employment relations, arguing against both the assumption that globalisation produces identical outcomes across national systems and the counter-assumption that domestic institutions remain wholly insulated from international forces.