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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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).
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