What are worker unions, and why is there opposition?
In: Economics
Suppose as an individual worker, you feel unhappy about the pay and conditions your employer is offering. You feel they are exploiting you, paying you poorly, forcing you to work ridiculous hours, do unsafe or unqualified work, etc.
If you as an individual try to take this up with the employer, they can just tell you to piss off. They can hire someone else to do the job. You the individual worker have no power versus the employer.
Instead, suppose *every* worker at the company takes a stand against the employer. Now if the employer still wanted to tell them to piss off, they would be forced to sack their entire workforce and replace them. This is much harder for them to do, so now the employees have more power. The employer is pretty much forced to listen to their demands for better pay and conditions. Strength in numbers.
Now suppose that in addition to this, *every worker in the industry* makes the same demands. So now ALL employers in the industry need to provide a minimum level of pay, conditions, safety, etc for all of the workers in the industry.
This industry-wide collective is a ‘union’. It is an organisation committed to help guarantee basic conditions for everyone in the industry. Employees pay a union fee, and in exchange they have this organisation to represent them and their interests.
Sounds great! So why is there opposition to unions? Basically there are three main streams
1) In the US especially, some unions were traditionally infiltrated by the Mafia and other criminal elements. They would then leverage the union’s power to use strike threats to extort companies, and/or directly steal union money set aside for employee pensions and benefits. This has led to a negative reputation in some quarters, of unions as being corrupt criminal organisations hell-bent on exploiting employers.
2) In the era of globalisation, it’s been argued that having strong unions simply drives industries overseas. Instead of meeting the union demands in a developed country, it’s cheaper for industries to set up in South American or Asian countries where labour laws are weaker.
3) If a union protects workers, the downside is that they can protect *bad* workers. There’s a perception that having a strong union can make it much harder to weed out the bad apples from an industry ( e.g. corrupt cops, incompetent teachers, lazy/jaded doctors, etc).
Because unions are strongly associated with the political Left, there is also often a heavy partisan slant to people’s view of unions. You’ll get people claiming the unions are a perfect utopian necessity to fight back against evil corporations, and others claiming unions are a horrible commie scourge that are destroying the economy. As is usually the case in politics, the truth is somewhere in between the two extremes.
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