ELi5: What are unions and why are people so for it or so against it?
In: 6
Usually the employees have to do what the company says or they’re fired.
Unions allow employees to have some collective bargaining power against the bosses.
Companies don’t want to upset unions because unions can cause more trouble for the company than a single worker. The union can all leave at once, strike together, protest, work with the media, try to prevent new employees from being hired, etc.
If someone is against unions, it is usually because they value efficiency and profit over the rights and happiness of workers.
Usually the employees have to do what the company says or they’re fired.
Unions allow employees to have some collective bargaining power against the bosses.
Companies don’t want to upset unions because unions can cause more trouble for the company than a single worker. The union can all leave at once, strike together, protest, work with the media, try to prevent new employees from being hired, etc.
If someone is against unions, it is usually because they value efficiency and profit over the rights and happiness of workers.
Usually the employees have to do what the company says or they’re fired.
Unions allow employees to have some collective bargaining power against the bosses.
Companies don’t want to upset unions because unions can cause more trouble for the company than a single worker. The union can all leave at once, strike together, protest, work with the media, try to prevent new employees from being hired, etc.
If someone is against unions, it is usually because they value efficiency and profit over the rights and happiness of workers.
A union is when a group of employees band together to protect their interests. An employer can fire one person for asking for a raise, but if every other employee agrees to walk off the job until they all get raises, the company will soon find themselves unable to do business. The union will negotiate with the employer to make a contract with standards for pay, training, benefits, and sick leave among other things.
There are a lot of reasons to be pro- or anti-union. A major positive that they allow workers to negotiate for better treatment more effectively than they could on their own. A negative is that they can sometimes protect bad employees or make it harder for someone to get a promotion or better work schedule if there is an employee who “deserves” it more due to seniority.
All the other answers are pretty good, but here’s a much simpler version: a union is a group of workers working together (ie forming a *union*) to protect themselves. If they all act together instead of as individuals, then they can achieve much more. Pro-unionists want workers to have this power, anti-unionists don’t.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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