ELi5: What are unions and why are people so for it or so against it?
In: 6
Back in the late 1800’s / early 1900’s things were so bad, and governments universally protected companies rights to abuse workers, so people were felt the only way to deal with this was to band together unto unions and strike everyone at once to force industrialists to treat them better and pay them living wages. These new unions were illegal from the get go, so was striking. Police brutality got ugly when they broke picketing, and many newspapers reported these events claiming workers attacked police. Can you imagine how bad their lives must have been when possibly seeing their family go hungry a while and face police brutality was seen as a better option than obeying meekly and keep working?
However, in order to win these early battles, they had to force strict discipline into the “troops”, and sometimes acted like a mafia towards dissenting voices. It wasn’t completely unheard of for bosses to hire hit men to make union bosses disappear, so the position attracted many thugs who weren’t afraid due to being as bad as hit men. Often, the only way to get protection was to pay protection money to mafia in exchange for services.
At the start, unions were pretty much all good, because they fought people who were literally evil, whose riches allowed them to buy favorable media coverage and lobby politicians into writing laws they liked. The whole “Ford gave employees a 5 days work week and 40 hours because of market forces, not unions” fantasy was born out of this, and is still repeated to this day. It took many uprisings, riots, strikes, public campaigns and peaceful protests to gain us the rights we have today to a 40 hours work week, paid leave if we get injured at work, minimum safety standards.
Then, things got uglier. To win, they sometimes had to work trade unions, which unionizes every employees of a specific sector (carpentry. mechanics, or crane operators for example) for their strikes to hurt rich people and governments enough to agree to their demand. Then once they started winning, they never learned when to stop campaigning and when to just say “mission accomplished, let’s preserve what we’ve got”. This resulted in two main things:
They got powerful enough that they don’t need workers’ permission to speak in their name or do anything they want with union fees. Technically there’s voting on big issues, but more often than not the votes are pretty much fixed indirectly. People arguing against the union’s favored options often find meetings packed too full of union sympathizers to get in the assemblies and make a public argument. Even if you get in the door, the guys arguing the “good” option can make a 15 minutes speech, and after 3 minutes you’ll be told “time’s up, many people want to make their voice heard”. The bag of tricks is endless, in some cases it includes intimidating union members who are “talking out of turn”. In the end votes always go the way union bosses want. We went from having bosses so rich and powerful, they could do whatever they want, whenever they want to their workers as if they were owned serfs in everything but name to empowering unions whose power over their members isn’t all that much weaker.
They also got big enough that now even when some union’s workers are very well paid and treated, they still routinely threaten to strike to get more benefits, paralyzing large sections of the economy. France, and some parts of Canada are perfect examples of this. When a union causes all the wheels of bureacracy, plus the front line medical, police, firefighting, garbage removal workforce to strike at once, often entire governments cry uncle, even if the strike was illegal as the cops are unionized and don’t feel like breaking their own union.
I remember in the 70’s, in Montreal, police lit fires (yes literally) right as firefighters went on an illegal strike to support the bureaucrats negotiating for a bigger municipal government paid pension plan. a day or two of this and the city caved in on every single demand for decades without even before negotiations opened up. Future mayors heard the message loud and clear even decades later.
I always like saying that being a necessary evil doesn’t make unions any less of a kind of evil. “Right to work” states in the USA, where union power has been broken with many laws see their people earning nearly 10k less a year in average on top of people having less job security. Even today, if unions waver or disappear, we could see a return to the bad old days of exploitation. Thankfully, it’s not all or nothing. Democracy gives us means to entice leaders to put limits to what unions can do, and make them more accountable to their members. Even within a given union, when the members pay more attention to union politics and vote on every issue, it forces them to be more accountable.
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