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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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.
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