What does it mean for employees to want to start a union? What’s a union? What does it do? Why do people want it and why do company’s fire you over it?
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Normal when you apply for a job you bargain with your employer for pay and benefits. Your employer is far richer and more powerful than you are so they have a huge advantage in this kind of negotiation. A union is when a group of workers agree to bargain with the company collectively instead of individually. By bargaining collectively the employees can exert a lot more leverage on the company to extract more pay and benefits. The company and the union sign a legally binding contract that dictates the rights and responsibilities of each party. The union can then take the company to court if they violate that agreement.
Your parents give you and your friends a job to rake the leaves and mow the lawn in the backyard. Your parents though can see one of your friends is struggling. They can tell your friend who is struggling ” you’re fired” or “we aren’t going to pay you as much because you aren’t doing a good job”.
So you and your friends decide to start a group. And in this group you are a tightly knit bunch in terms of guidelines and rules. Such as you all get to vote on things like how much pay you get among other terms… And how you can’t just fire one of us if our friend is struggling. That’s my brother/sister/friend and we will protect him/her
It is basically a group of workers who’s purpose is to prevents a company from doing whatever it wants, violating worker rights and taking advantage. And give the workers a right to negotiate what would be fair wage and make sure everyone gets paid and not fired if they get hurt, sick, disability etc…
So your parents now can’t fire your friend who was struggling or pay them less because you determined and negotiated you all get paid the same.
Companies don’t like unions and will fire people trying to start one cuz it’s a huge hassle for them and they lose some leverage.
It’s not all roses tho there are cons. Such as having a bad union leader and bad negotiation skills. And having to pay into a union.
Example:
You and your friends get paid from your parents. You all got 20 dollars each. Each of you puts 5 dollars each into your “union” and continue to do so with each pay. This ensures that if one of you gets hurt and can’t work (not getting paid from your parents) your group of friends/union will pay your hurt friend a couple bucks out from the union dues they paid into so they still get paid something until they can work again. (Again it’s a bit more complicated than that, you will run out of money you paid into the union and thus not get anymore subpay, but you’re 5).
So in big boy world, if you get laid off from a company you get paid still on top of unemployment. Your union dues in which you paid gets you sub pay. which is 80 percent(was in my union) I think of what you were making while you worked. So you can get some of that back if you were to get laid off.
If you don’t get laid off well then you just pay union dues. Kinda like insurance. Lol
So my friend belongs to a union with poor management at a college cafeteria. They had to renegotiate their new contract. Management wanted to take away their ability to cash out vacation at the end of the year. That amounted to something like 3,000 dollars all at once. Most of the workers hated that, and wanted to keep it.
Their union heads argued to keep that vacation payout, but at the cost of a low pay increase, and 0 Covid pay. It wasn’t really a big win, though, as many of them risked their lives daily during the pandemic, and some definitely got sick. If they had striked right as the school year started, they would have had the school over a brine barrel, and the school would have been forced to capitulate. Instead, the school “let them” keep a supposed benefit and got them to give up the promised covid pay and accept a small raise of only 25 cents.
The point is that a stronger union leadership could have gotten them everything. Unions are only as strong as the leadership heading them. However, without the union they would have been lucky to get even the 25 cents, as the company could have just taken the cash out option with 0 replacement, and the workers would have just had to accept it. Only the union prevented this from taking place.
The ELI5 version –
A union is like a club of all the people who work for the same company. The members of the club agree to work together to talk with and negotiate with the company for things like pay, benefits, and working conditions. The company’s priority is making a profit. The union’s priority is benefits for union members. If one person asks for a raise then the company can easily say no and the person can leave if they want to. If all of the employees as for a raise at once, via the union, then the company can’t simply ignore it or say no, because the union (the club of all the employees together) can tell the company they will stop working and then the company can’t make any money.
Employees want to start unions so they can increase their negotiating power to get better compensation. Companies don’t want employees to start unions because they don’t want to have to give pay raises to employees.
There are complex laws about relationships between employers, employees, and unions. In very general terms employees have legal protections to start unions, but companies discourage it.
Unions are “collective bargaining.”
When you are hired at a place without a union, you can negotiate your salary and working conditions individually. This often leads to wild pay discrepancies between workers, even workers doing the same work. It also leaves employees vulnerable to an employer’s bad mood or the company’s financial status.
Employees solve this by “unionizing,” or forming a union. When they do so, the employees elect a certain group of people to represent them in negotiations with their employer, and all the employees agree to abide by the results of those negotiations. This means that when you’re arguing against one employee, you’re arguing against them all.
Normally, the employer has the ability to financially ruin you by firing you… pretty much whenever they want. There are a few exceptions, but not very many. Firing an individual employee is devastating to that employee, but not very devastating to the company. In that way, the company ownership or leadership holds much more power than the employees.
Unions solve this, because they have the ultimate trump card of striking. When a union decides to strike, all the workers that are part of the union just stop working. This hurts the company, and thus brings the employer/employee power balance back in line.
But having a lot of power over your employees is really good for business, because you can force them to tolerate a lot of stuff they shouldn’t have to, because individual people take the risk and individual people aren’t likely to resist. So employers don’t like unions, and many of them will actively try to stop unionization efforts.
So, say you want to go work for a company. To make it easier, we’ll use a huge company to highlight what a union really does – Starbucks, because they’ve been in the news for this. The numbers I use will be made up and probably exaggerated – this is just to make it easier to see the point of it all.
You go to apply to work at Starbucks. They offer you a job, but at $10 an hour. You think that’s not enough, because you know that your hour of labor will make the company $200 in profits. So you ask them for more money.
They say no. When you ask why, they say that there are 200 more people almost exactly like you that *will* take the job for $10/hour, so why should they pay you any more? At that point your options are to take the job at $10 (knowing that the value of your labor is being horrifically exploited) or leave it.
Many places, especially retail businesses, operate this way. Workers are forced to work for a pittance of what their work brings the company, because none of them are powerful enough to force the company to pay any more.
But – what if all of those other 200 people that could take the job (and all of whom would like to get paid more than $10/hour) banded together? Starbucks *needs* baristas. They can’t make money without them. There’s nothing particularly special about any given barista, so there’s nothing to force them to pay any particular barista more than $10/hour. But if all the baristas are working together, then they can demand that Starbucks gives *any* barista a fair wage, or else Starbucks gets *no* baristas.
Now Starbucks is forced to pay more to any barista that gets hired.
At the most basic level, that’s what a union is. It’s employees banding together so that businesses have to negotiate with entities that are powerful enough to force them to make concessions, instead of simply being able to dictate terms to workers who are individually weak.
There’s a lot more that goes into it, of course, like union officers and union dues, closed shops and open shops, but that’s what unions are (organizations for workers), what they do (negotiate on behalf of the workers for better wages and benefits) and why people want it (people like getting more for their labor). That’s also why companies don’t want it (because they want to pay people as little as possible, and because unions generally make it more difficult for employers to treat their employees exploitatively).
A union is a collective bargaining agreement. A union is a legally protected entity. A union represents the interests of the workers at a factory (or mine or whatever industrial setting) so they will do things like negotiate pay for all hourly workers on their behalf. This leads to higher wages. Union wages, on average, are 20% higher than non union wages. Union members have to pay dues to the union. This varies union to union but on average it’s 5% of your salary goes to the union. So for the union member it works out to roughly 15% more pay.
If union contract negotiations fail with the company, or the company violates the contract, the union may strike. This is where all union members do not go to work. The union will pay the union members a portion of their pay during this time from the dues collected during normal operation. Typically it’s only 1/2 or 1/4 pay during a strike. So it can be pretty rough on the strikers too. Although the company is getting 0 work done. So it hurts the company a lot as well. Typically this gets the company to capitulate and give in to the union demands. Typically if a work environment is a union facility, then you must join the union to work there.
Anyway unions are disliked by companies specifically because the union has so much control over the operation of a facility. As well as raising the cost of doing business.
There’s also “right to work” states. That provide legal protection to workers who want to work at a facility without joining the union. This is obviously really bad for the unions as it takes away a lot of their bargaining power. Sure they can still strike, but the non union members can’t, so the business will still be getting work done as well.
Anyway the whole thing is such a headache that for smaller or even medium sized operations it’s frequently cheaper for a company to shut down a facility and set up in the next city/state over. Which obviously means everyone who works there loses their jobs.
If you work at a large company as a regular worker, your voice means very little. If you have problems with your working conditions, payments or anything else, its much easier to bargain with your higher ups when you have a bunch of fellow workers at your side. Unions are such workers united, standing up for their fair treatment.
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