How do unions work? How did they get in power and give us rights?
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If your employer wanted to lower your pay you can accept or you can quit. If you’re an average worker there you quitting will have minimal impact.
If your employer wanted to lower your pay, but that would make you *and all of the other workers* quit, that would be very disruptive and lead to losses in sales, productivity, customer satisfaction, etc.
In the first example you are on your own. In the second example the work force united behind you. You are benefiting from their union.
Unions give leverage to regular workers against the company. This situation leads to companies trying to stop unions from forming and regular workers voting for politicians who strengthen these rights.
Unions can form when more than half of a work force agrees to unionize and there are firms that specialize in creating unions out of work forces.
There are some tricks to breaking/making unions. Anti Union efforts that had success are “right to work” labor laws. People read the title and assume it expands their rights when it doesn’t. It makes Union dues voluntary which has the effect of financially crippling a Union. They have less resources, they perform worse, more people opt out and repeate. This law also allows you the “freedom” to quit on the spot (you will not be rehired if you do this but you can). This also allows an employer to terminate *you* on the spot for any non protected reason (race=no, don’t like you = yes). Pro-union efforts have been changes to expand what a legal Union is. Instead of 50% of all employees a sub group (like maintenance) can unionize with 50% of that group agreeing.
So a union has the leverage to *ask* for better wages, healthcare or working conditions. They also pool resources to know *what* to ask for, *how much* to ask for and *how to respond* in these negotiations.
All of this doesn’t mean all unions are good. They are as susceptible to incompitance and corruption as anything else.
I see a lot of anti union talk on this sub, and that’s sad. A union is a first world solution to a first world problem. Namely, the accumulation of capital that happens as a business grow gives the employer an amount of power that makes it impossible for employees to bargain for a fair deal. A union accumulates the bargaining power of individual employees so that they can negotiate with the employer on equal terms.
Anyone that tells you something different than this has a vested interest in destabilizing the power that unions bring employees. Employers lobby heavily to do this, and in shitty states like mine, they enact what they call “right to work” laws, which give employees a “right to work” without being a union employee.
Employers love to do this, because they return to the position where they can bargain unilaterally with their employees.
TLDR
Unions help employees get better deals from their employers. Employers give unions a bad rap so that employees will be more vulnerable to their employers’s will.
Consider how businesses work in general. The boss scrapes the surplus value from his employees and pays them some percentage of what they actually provide, the lower the wage the better the margin for the boss.
This works because you alone have very little negotiating power against employers. But what if all of their employees banded together and demanded fair treatment? Pretty hard to fire *everyone* right?
Unions are the recourse of the working class against exploitation of the capitalist class.
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A union is a group of people.
Imagine you want a build a big cabin. You have to carry logs and move big things around. These are too heavy for you to move around on your own. So you call friends, and they help you lifting and assembling the elements needed to build a cabin. You got the help of a group of people.
Now imagine that instead of a cabin, you want to get things that are related to the work you do. For instance, you know that you create valuable products using dangerous tools in a company, and you want some of the money from selling the products to be used to pay you money even when you can’t work because you got hurt when using the tools. If you ask for it on your own, you might be laughed at. But if you call your colleagues and you ask for it as a group, you can be taken more seriously.
The group resulting from your calling your colleagues in order to demand something related to your work is called a union. As time goes on, some groups turn into organisations with a strong structure. When unions started to go to governments instead of companies, some of the things they got granted were written into laws, that we call rights.
The thing that moves people to help someone do something they wouldn’t be able to do on their own is called solidarity. It is one of the things that make us human.
Unions work by collective bargaining power. If all the workers (in Union) agree to strike or walk out on a company, they have a much larger affect on the business than single people striking without organisation. Using this you can use this power to change your working conditions for you and others.
The power comes from the power of the strike. If one employee gets fed up and threatens to walk out, so what? He will be replaced. But, if the entire crew walks out, it shuts down the operation. If all the employees in other operations within the company join in solidarity with their union brothers and also walk off the job, the entire corporation can be brought to a standstill. If the company wants to run its operations, it will have to make an equitable deal with the union and get them to go back to work. Strikes are not to be taken lightly, and there is always pain on both sides, but it is the only power a union has.
In a system without unions, companies are often able to use their size and power to take advantage of their workers. Those workers feel powerless and alone and unable to negotiate better conditions.
A union is a way that the workers say that they want to use their numbers to negotiate as one collective unit. This restores some balance to the equation. The workers agree that the union will represent them in negotiations, and they will all accept the terms that the union is able to agree.
This is very simplistic, but this is ELI5:
> How did they get in power and give us rights?
An employee only really has 1 thing of interest to an employer – their labour. So when a group of people gets together who have all agreed to stop providing that labour to the employer, they have to listen to what the workers want. Strike action has been a huge force in getting governments to put worker protections in place.
While the normal employees are on strike, the employer can bring in outside workers, but if it’s skilled work this is difficult to find people with the right skills, in the right area, who are willing to do this. These outside workers will usually also charge a LOT of money because they know the employer needs them.
It’s not normally in an employer’s interests to let strike action go ahead, which is why unions have quite a lot of power.
People working within an industry or industries decide to make common cause with each other for the purpose of bargaining with their bosses as a collective group as opposed to as a series of disunited individuals. They believe by doing that they will get a better deal than the individuals would on their own.
At its base, that’s all there is to it. However much more has been built on those foundations, like the idea of levying a membership fee which can be used to hire professional organisers and lawyers for members who get into trouble, or to fund protest tactics such as strikes. Then you have the whole idea of union recognition where certain companies will agree that certain unions represent their workers and so have certain rights when it comes to consultation and decisionmaking. At its most extreme there’s even the “closed shop” model where you have to be a union member to work at the company and the union effectively takes over the day to day running of the company.
Each country has different laws that regulate trade union behaviour and this has a big influence on how they operate. British and American unions are very different for example.
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