But someone please help me out 😅 it’s come up in my life enough, but never with much depth apparently. Everyone always seemed to assume we were all on the same page.
In: Other
Your boss can probably replace you. If you’re lucky, it might take a month or two, but they can. They’ll be a little bit grumpy about it but they’re not going to miss rent because you’re gone.
Workers, however, usually rely a lot more on their employer. You have one employer; they have tens to hundreds of employees.
The result is an imbalance of power. Your employer has a lot more leverage over you than you have over them. Unions are a strategy to change that – if you *and your coworkers* agree to cooperate then it becomes way harder because replacing *all of you at once* is way harder.
Teaming up with a lot of your coworkers to gain some bargaining power over your employer is a union.
Imagine you have a bunch of toy boxes, each with different toys inside. The union of these toy boxes is like putting all the toys from all the boxes together into one big box. So, if you have a toy car in one box and a teddy bear in another, in the union, you have both the car and the bear in the same box.
As far as the bare bones go, unions are just groups of workers for some specific job or industry coming together to harness collective bargaining to achieve better working conditions.
Take, for example, the steel industry. There are a bunch of companies (Nucor Corp, Cleveland Cliffs, U.S. Steel, and tons more), and they need workers. Now, working in a steel mill takes some training and skill, so while the companies can theoretically just hire anyone, whoever they hire will need to be trained at the company and will take a while before they are doing the job as well as someone already in the job.
A major cost of making steel is the labor that goes into said process. So there’s an incentive for the company to drive down the wages as much as they can, to make their products cheaper and more competitive. If they can lower effective wages (or otherwise deteriorate working conditions to make things more cost-effective), 9/10 times the company will do it. The company’s job is to make the most money possible. If one individual person says “hey, I won’t work for this lower wage”, but everyone else will, well, it’s way cheaper for the company to just let that one individual quit and hire their replacement for cheaper than keep everyone on for higher pay.
That is *unless* all the employees, or at least a lot of them, come together and say, as a collective, “We won’t work for this wage” or “we won’t work in these conditions”. Now, the company is facing down either laying off *all* of those employees, many of whom possess the knowledge and skills necessary to train any new hires to do the job effectively, and then having to hire and train an entire company’s worth of employees (shutting down production and losing tons of money), or negotiating with the employees as a unit. That collective of employees *is* a union, and when they collectively refuse to work for some reason, that’s called “going on strike”. The idea is that by banding together, laborers possess significantly more negotiating power than they do as individuals.
I mention steel specifically because United Steel Workers (USW) is one of the most famous unions in the US, and it’s a great example of a traditional industry-union model. Stuff like Starbucks, where branches are owned by franchisees, or SAG-AFTA, which are almost more like bunches of independent contractors, still work on the same principle, but who they’re actually negotiating with isn’t as simple as “*the* company”.
You work for a boss, your boss comes in on Monday and says “You have to hop around on one foot all day and cluck like a chicken or I’ll fire you.” Without a union it’s up to you to argue with the boss and possibly get fired.
With a union all your coworkers go “Wow, that’s messed up, if you make OP hop on one foot and cluck like a chicken then we’ll stop working until you stop being so ridiculous.” And they can also help out like you may be bad at arguing with your boss, but Bill over there has a way with words so he’ll be the one to talk to the boss for you.
If you’re US you probably heard a lot about the actor strike and writer’s strike recently. The actors and writers had a long list of “you’re being seriously messed up here” for the bosses, the film studios, and the thing is that these things never affect everyone equally. Ryan Reynolds doesn’t have to worry if studios say they don’t want to pay actors for streaming TV shows, but for Bob the small time TV actor it can make the difference between being able to afford ramen or being able to afford hamburger helper. But! Ryan Reynolds also agrees to refuse to work until everyone’s treated well, because if the film studios tried to say they didn’t have to pay any actor named Ryan then Bob’s also going on strike for Ryan Reynolds.
In addition to getting you and all the other workers much higher wages and benefits packages, and making sure you get fair breaks and safe working conditions, Unions also provide support if the company doesn’t follow the terms of the contract. So if the company tries to make you do work that’s not a part of the deal or if they try to skip your breaks or treat you unfairly, you can go to a union representative and tell them about it and they will fight for you. They go to the company and let them know what’s going on and get it worked out. It’s awesome to have that kind of advocacy so you can relax and know you’re protected.
In simple terms, a union is just a group of employees in a business who, as a group, advocate for their interests in the workplace. Typically, this means they all, as a group, ask for and advocate for things like better wages, better benefits, better work schedules, and safer workplaces.
The power of unions is that all the employees do this together. If one employee asks for a raise, they can be fired or replaced. A business, especially a big one, isn’t going to miss one employee. Individuals are easy to dismiss and easy to replace. If all the employees ask for a raise at once, the boss can’t fire them because it would cripple the company. 1 person is weak, but a group of people is powerful, and unions leverage their collective power to force management to negotiate with them on even terms. The post potent weapon in a union’s arsenal is a strike, which is when all the workers agree to stop working until they reach an agreement with the management.
Unions are also democratic. That is, they have regular elections from among their members to choose leaders, representatives who will talk to the bosses on their behalf, and various other positions. This is important because it ensures will of the union as a whole is represented
In most countries, all of this is established in a legal framework that lays out how unions have to form, how they are regulated, when they can strike, what obligations employees have towards the unions, and other things. There’s also typically a government process to mediate disputes between unions and their employers and holds both sides accountable if the violate that legal framework.
[removed]
In the most basic form you get together with the other workers at the job and form a pact to say that if the company does bad things to one of us we will all stop doing overtime, or go on strike, or do some other thing that would harm the company. This threat should discourage the company from treating its workers badly.
For large companies the unions will have some people employed as a go-between the managers and all the workers to bring up issues with managers, as having a meeting with every employee present wouldn’t be practical and individuals might not want to go to their bosses directly for fear of punishment.
That’s why you often have to pay a union at your work.
If one worker is mad because the company pays too little and says “pay me more or I refuse to work”, the company can easily say “ok well if you don’t work, you’re fired”, and they can follow through and it’ll likely hurt that worker WAY more than the company
If ALL workers say “pay us more or we refuse to work”, the company can’t really get away with just firing them all, it’d absolutely cripple their ability to run the business and they’d be losing tons of money daily from having to shut down. Replacing an entire workforce would be really hard, especially without anyone left that’s experienced and can train new hires, so this may make this company more likely to give in to demands. Yes workers still don’t get paid during that time, so they also want to come to a deal and negotiate, but the company can’t really afford to just say “you’re all fired” and start anew, or rather, it’d be cheaper to just give them a pay raise
Of course it gets more complicated, but that’s the gist
Let’s say I am a rich boss running a factory. I make the employees work 7 days a week. One worker refuses and demands 2 days off. I fire him, no problems. One person is easy to replace.
However then all of my workers got together and agreed that they would all stop work until I let them have 2 days off each week. Crap, if they don’t work then I lose a lot of money. If I fire all of my staff I will have to replace them all at the same time with people who don’t know how to work the equipment and my factory will fail. So I agree to create the concept of a weekend and give everybody 2 days off each week, in exchange for them continuing to work.
What just happened is that these workers formed a union, threatened to strike, and I had to give in to their demands. The year is 1929 and the weekend was born.
Latest Answers