ELi5: What are unions and why are people so for it or so against it?
In: 6
It’s the early 1900’s. In previous centuries you’d probably work on a small family farm or shop. But due to various technological and economic changes from railroads / factories / electricity, you work in a mine owned by a large company.
Everyone in your mine works 80 hours a week. Most employees are poorly paid, and you lose your job if you take any time off. Workers die all the time because management won’t pay for railings in certain places. Having small flexible bodies means your age 11 and under coworkers are often sent into the most dangerous parts of the mine.
You and some of your buddies have some ideas for how the company can improve things:
– Everyone gets two days off per week.
– Everyone is paid 50% more for anything over 40 hours a week
– Install railings and all necessary safety equipment
– Stop hiring children for dangerous jobs
A few of your friends have actually suggested these ideas to management in the past; some have even said they would leave their job until the company changed its ways. The response is always either (a) “No,” or (b) “No, and you’re fired.”
If one person leaves their job, the company doesn’t care, they can be replaced. If everyone leaves their jobs all at once, the company is in trouble, they can’t all be replaced fast enough to save the company.
So if everyone gets together and says “Improve things, or we’ll all leave our jobs until you do,” the company has to listen. So you and your friends make an organization; the organization is called a “labor union,” or simply a “union” for short.
– If the company doesn’t agree, and you leave your jobs (“going on strike”), you all protest outside the company (a “picket line”), telling people how crappy the company is and what you want them to change.
– You hope the company’s customers / suppliers / employees who come to the company’s building will see your picket line and join you in your effort (“solidarity”), refusing to do business with the company until it makes things better. If they go into the company anyway (“crossing the picket line”) it will negatively affect their reputation with your group and others who care about the same issues.
– Everybody puts 10% of their paycheck into a pot. After 1 year the pot will have enough to give everyone their normal paychecks for 5.2 weeks of protests; hopefully the company will give you what you’re asking for by then.
– All employees will benefit from improvements, so all employees should pay into the pot. If some employees don’t want to contribute, send a couple of your largest friends to “encourage” them to either pay up, or quit.
Instead of negotiating with the striking workers, companies often try to replace the workers with other current employees (“blacklegs”) or hired new employees (“scabs”). Before the 1900’s, unions were mostly viewed as some flavor of illegal by authorities: Obstruction of business, trespassing, racketeering, or even insurrection. The police, [private “security contractors”](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinkerton_%28detective_agency%29), or in some cases even [the military](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_Labor_Wars) were sent in to disperse, intimidate, beat up, and/or arrest workers on strike.
Over time society as a whole becomes more accepting of the need to limit the power of large companies, agrees with many of the reforms, and eventually politicians and courts decide to make unions legal.
Some pro-union points:
– Unions are one of the few true checks and balances against the power of large companies
– Most people view things like the 40-hour workweek and child labor laws positively, we have unions to thank for those
– A lot of companies could still greatly improve their safety, pay, and fairness to workers, unions are a good way to help our society achieve that
Some anti-union points:
– If my company has a union, I’ll lose my job if I refuse to join the union, or I want to quit the union. The union interferes with my freedom of association and pursuit of honorable personal financial gain through honest labor. I have a “right to work” that’s denied by being forced into a union.
– The union dues are not wisely spent. Union representatives say they’re going to Washington to ask politicians to improve the laws to favor workers. It seems very easy for those union leaders to have a lot of fancy flights and hotels, hob-nob with famous politicians, and tell the union members how to vote. But the laws change slowly, and the “facts on the ground” seem to be getting worse if they’re changing at all. Maybe those union reps are a big waste of the money that’s taken out everyone’s paycheck?
– Union leadership is too big on seniority. They focus on improving things for workers who have been there for decades, at a cost of making them worse for newer employees. Those employees feel “stuck” because changing companies would be “throwing away” their seniority.
– Union rules make it too hard for companies to fire people who should be fired because they are incompetent, technologically obsolete, or even safety risks.
– Unions make US companies less competitive. From the company’s point of view, the union’s always making unreasonably expensive, tedious and unceasing demands for better pay, benefits and safety. In the modern age of cheap international shipping and open trade borders, a lot of money can be saved by moving the factories and mines to countries with pro-business governments. That is, governments that allow, encourage and participate in the beatings, arrestings, and shootings of people who dare to disrupt the business of business.
– Unions are one of the main steps on the road to Communism. Communism is a form of government that claims to be about empowering workers, but it’s really a means for the USSR evil empire to take over the world. Any country that tries Communism inevitably wrecks its economy and ends up with a nightmare dictatorship for a government. We should be very cautious about giving those unions any amount of political power.
– Unions aren’t needed for government organizations like police / firefighters / schoolteachers. The government doesn’t have a for-profit motive so it’s not facing the same kinds of pressures to screw workers. The government already has checks and balances in the form of the voters and all the government stuff you learn about in school. Unions make it too easy for the workers / management of government organizations to get together to waste taxpayer money on extremely high pay, benefits, and job stability for government workers.
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