Carter Cleaning Company Questions, business & finance homework help
I need the following 7 case questions answered. Short answers, Its for human resource managementCARTER CLEANING COMPANY Introduction A main theme of this book is that human resource management activities like recruiting, selecting, training, and rewarding employees is not just the job of a central HR group but rather a job in which every manager must engage. Perhaps nowhere is this more apparent than in the typical small service business. Here the owner/manager usually has no HR staff to rely on. However, the success of his or her enterprise (not to mention his or her family s peace of mind) often depends largely on the effectiveness through which workers are recruited, hired, trained, evaluated, and rewarded. Therefore, to help illustrate and emphasize the front-line managers HR role, throughout this book we will use a continuing case based on an actual small business in the southeastern United States. Each chapter’s segment of the case will illustrate how the case s main player owner/manager Jennifer Carter confronts and solves personnel problems each day at work by applying the concepts and techniques of that particular chapter. Here is background information that you will need to answer questions that arise in subsequent chapters. (We also present a second, unrelated application case case incident in each chapter.) Carter Cleaning Centers Jennifer Carter graduated from State University in June 2005, and, after considering several job offers, decided to do what she always planned to do go into business with her father, Jack Carter. Jack Carter opened his first laundromat in 1995 and his second in 1998. The main attraction of these coin laundry businesses for him was that they were capital- rather than labor-intensive. Thus, once the investment in machinery was made, the stores could be run with just one unskilled attendant and none of the labor problems one normally expects from being in the retail service business. The attractiveness of operating with virtually no skilled labor notwithstanding, Jack had decided by 1999 to expand the services in each of his stores to include the dry cleaning and pressing of clothes. He embarked, in other words, on a strategy of related diversification by adding new services that were related to and consistent with his existing coin laundry activities. He added these for several reasons. He wanted to better utilize the unused space in the rather large stores he currently had under lease. Furthermore, he was, as he put it, tired of sending out the dry cleaning and pressing work that came in from our coin laundry clients to a dry cleaner 5 miles away, who then took most of what should have been our profits. To reflect the new, expanded line of services, he renamed each of his two stores Carter Cleaning Centers and was sufficiently satisfied with their performance to open four more of the same type of stores over the next 5 years. Each store had its own on-site manager and, on average, about seven employees and annual revenues of about $500,000. It was this six-store chain that Jennifer joined after graduating. Her understanding with her father was that she would serve as a troubleshooter/consultant to the elder Carter with the aim of both learning the business and bringing to it modern management concepts and techniques for solving the business problems and facilitating its growth. 1. Make a list of five specifics HR problems you think Cater Cleaning will have to grapple with.2. What would you do first if you were JenniferCLEANING COMPANY A Question of Discrimination One of the first problems Jennifer faced at her father s Carter Cleaning Centers concerned the inadequacies of the firm s current HR management practices and procedures. One problem that particularly concerned her was the lack of attention to equal employment matters. Each store manager independently handled virtually all hiring; the managers had received no training regarding such fundamental matters as the types of questions they should not ask of job applicants. It was therefore not unusual in fact, it was routine for female applicants to be asked questions such as Who s going to take care of your children while you are at work? and for minority applicants to be asked questions about arrest records and credit histories. Nonminority applicants three store managers were white males and three were white females were not asked these questions, as Jennifer discerned from her interviews with the managers. Based on discussions with her father, Jennifer deduced two reasons for the laid-back attitude toward equal employment: (1) her father s lack of sophistication regarding the legal requirements and (2) the fact that, as Jack Carter put it, Virtually all our workers are women or minority members anyway, so no one can really come in here and accuse us of being discriminatory, can they? Jennifer decided to mull that question over, but before she could, she was faced with two serious equal rights problems. Two women in one of her stores privately confided to her that their manager was making unwelcome sexual advances toward them, and one claimed he had threatened to fire her unless she socialized with him after hours. And during a fact-finding trip to another store, an older gentleman he was 73 years old complained of the fact that although he had almost 50 years of experience in the business, he was being paid less than people half his age who were doing the very same job. Jennifer s review of the stores resulted in the following questions. Questions 3. Is it true, as Jack Carter claims, that we can t be accused of being discriminatory because we hire mostly women and minorities anyway ? 4. How should Jennifer and her company address the sexual harassment charges and problems? 5. How should she and her company address the possible problems of age discrimination? 6. Given the fact that each of its stores has only a handful of employees, is her company covered by equal rights legislation? 7. And finally, aside from the specific problems, what other personnel management matters (application forms, training, and so on) have to be reviewed given the need to bring them into compliance with equal rights laws?
