A common rationale for this indifference is the claim that although unions were once important, they are no longer necessary. This is a bizarre notion given the gilded age of inequality in which we find ourselves. Are capitalists less greedy? Are bosses more generous and humane? Are corporations no longer obsessed with squeezing labor costs?
Can you trust politicians to maintain worker protections when they rely on the investor class to finance their campaigns? A non-union America will be of course a low-wage America. Most people will work harder for less.
Employer contributions to pensions and health care will be a thing of the past. People will spend their working lives patching together a marginal income with constantly changing temporary and part time jobs- with the predictable increase in personal and family stress. Few workers will have vacations and paid sick-days, and even fewer a forty-hour week. Unions, after all, are the people that brought us the weekend.
Employer-employee relations will increasingly resemble what they were before the New Deal. Laws against discrimination and employee protection may remain on the books, but without pressure from unions they will be harder to enforce.
More people will get their jobs through employment contractors, making it even harder to identify who is responsible for abuse of employees. Was it the company at whose office you worked? The agency that had the contract to supply labor? Or the subcontractor who actually sent you there? These conditions will rise up the ladder of skills and education. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
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Unions and Negotiations. Do Unions Work? The Bottom Line. Key Takeaways Unions are organizations that negotiate with businesses and other entities on the behalf of union members. Unions come in all shapes and sizes, from trade unions focusing on specific jobs to industry unions focusing on entire industries. The objectives of unions are to ensure fair wages, benefits, and better working conditions for their members.
Industry deregulation, increased competition, and labor mobility have made it more difficult for traditional unions to operate. Bureau of Labor Statistics, union members have higher wages and salaries than non-union members.
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At the state level, the study found that right-to-work laws also shifted policy to the right on labor issues, and led to different policy outcomes regarding, for example, prevailing wage and minimum wage laws — the kinds of policies that can help close income inequality. Hertel-Fernandez told me that this is an underappreciated aspect of unions, but an important one: Just as unions balance out the workplace to help workers, they also help balance politics by creating a powerful set of organizations that can counter economic elites and corporate interests that often have a big say in Washington, DC, or state capitals.
Hertel-Fernandez compared what unions do for the left to what gun clubs and evangelical churches do on the right — mobilizing voters, educating them about issues, and even creating pathways to running for office.
I relate to this. But my policy interests by and large lie in other areas — including criminal justice issues, guns, and drug policy. Since joining a union, I have spent a lot more time reading about unions and labor issues.
I had little need for these skills before. Some unions, like those for police or coal companies, may not advocate for progressive policies.
And some workers may not like it when a union gets too political; Republican members of a union, for example, may not be too happy if their union endorses Elizabeth Warren over Donald Trump. Those on the right know this. This is a common argument from critics of unions: Once wages go up, employers cut back on overall hiring and work hours to make up for the higher costs.
In one of the better versions of these studies , looking at unionization efforts in nursing homes, Frandsen and his colleagues found unionization did appear to reduce employment for some workers, particularly those with higher incomes, even as they led to higher wages, particularly for lower-paid workers.
But the effect seems small, so hard to detect in studies that it may not exist at all. Besides, some countries with strong unions still have really strong economies.
Experts pointed out that Norway has much higher union membership than the US, with more than half of workers in unions , but still a lower unemployment rate 3. Norway is also a far more economically egalitarian country than the US.
But how unions deal with their worst members really falls on individual unions and their members to decide. Unions can be democratic, and they can determine what they value and create agreements that reflect that.
It has the potential to create a great deal of good if we steer it toward diversity and equality. But like any organization, it can be captured by bias, captured by special interests. If the United States were to see more unions, some of them would undoubtedly be bad, just as some governments, politicians, and corporations are corrupt. Historically, economist Richard Freeman found in , unions have grown in spurts. He argued that there needed to be a push from the bottom up to a certain level of density or membership, at which point unions would rapidly expand as they gain more members and resources to mobilize.
For this to happen again, there needs to be more interest in unions. There need to be more workers like those of Vox Media and other digital media outlets , but in all sectors, willing to organize and with the ability to actually do it. By and large, for the same reason that unions collapsed in the first place, experts told me: Union-unfriendly laws and regulations made it easy for employers to shut down unions. Kate Andrias, a legal scholar focused on labor law at the University of Michigan, described current federal labor laws as heavily tilted against unions.
Imagine that an employee manages to win an unfair labor practice claim in front of the National Labor Relations Board, which is already a difficult challenge. A lot of anti-union conduct is also legal, such as replacing striking workers. Among the union-friendly experts I spoke to, they generally echoed the same goal for labor policy: create a system of sectoral bargaining.
This kind of system, used in some countries in Europe, essentially creates unions for entire industries. This would help address concerns about how unions can work in a more fractured economy and lead to universal or near-universal union density. In the meantime, Andrias said, there are some smaller ways that unions could get a policy boost at the federal level: increase penalties for violating the law, bar employers from permanently replacing workers who strike, eliminate prohibitions on secondary boycotts , and shorten time periods for representation elections to prevent employers from stalling the process , among other fixes.
Short of that, people could start today by trying to organize their own workplaces. It is definitely risky. June 7, After a marathon hour bargaining session, we finally reached a tentative agreement with Vox Media.
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