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.
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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.
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