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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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”.
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