Before unions were a thing, effective negotiations with management often looked something like this:
hey boss, me and the boys have decided that we enjoy being able to give our families dinner every night, so you’re going to give us a raise, or we’ll burn your fucking factory to the ground.
You forgot the last bit. “With you and yours in it.”
It’s basically a club defending worker rights. In big companies you have to elect worker representative who are supported by unions.
HR have to meet these represertative a few time a year. They have the right to say fuck off to them, but listening what employee wants work better. Union rep are also involved in investigating work accidents and in some countries (Germany) even sit at the company board
The official term is collective bargaining, usually it’s performed by a union, but it can take other forms.
The modern implementation is that either you meet our demands/come to an acceptable compromise with us, or we all will, as a group, not do the thing that makes you money (aka, we will go on strike).
Companies either play ball or lose productivity.
Collective bargaining is lawfully protected in most first world countries, so retaliation against the workers or even a single worker can result in legal action and/or fines against the company.
The bottom line for any company is to make money, so when all the workers stop doing their jobs at once, money stops coming in. So companies tend to listen to unions because they have the power to significantly damage the companies ability to generate profit.
They try. They hire temp workers known as scabs to try and continue producing. These individuals are looked upon as scum. Scabs are looked down on and become pariah of there town so not many people are willing to become scabs. Without workers willing to become scabs the company is forced to come to the table out of necessity.
Got a real stupid follow-up question: besides asking in an interview or discovering the fact in the news or a web search, is there a way to know if the reason a company is hiring because the union members left?
What is stopping the company from hiding this fact? I want to believe it works but every time I am hopeful about something like this working there is something I am missing that makes things business as usual.
It would be pretty obvious as you would most likely be walking through a picket line if you where hired as a scab. This is known as crossing the line and is a sure way to get labeled a scab.
Thank you for answering my stupid question, that makes a lot of sense.
I mainly wanted to make sure I wouldn’t inadvertently weaken a union. I recognize I miss a LOT of things that are obvious to others but I am trying to learn. Being autistic and raised in a very conservative household has necessitated me having to think carefully about the life lessons I was taught and to logically work through cognitive shortcuts as I identify them.
well its all dependent on negotiating power of the union to cost the company profits if they strike and the trust in union that the company will not violate any contract they sign. The whole thing is dependent on the ability of the union to effectively strike and it doesnt always work and companies are willing to take a loss sometimes
A workers union is an organization made up of workers who have decided to work together to try and force a company/employer to give in to the demands of the workers.
The reason why it works is that the union have several actions they can take if the demands are not met.
First of all, all union members pay a membership fee, most of that money goes into a fund to enable the workers to actually take the actions required.
So what actions can a union take against the employer?
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Striking, all workers down tools and stop working, this harms the employer as no money is being made from their workers, the buildings still costs money for upkeep and power, naturally an epmloyer wont pay their employees on strike, this is when the union themselves pay ther members from the fund set up.
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Lockout, a union can prevent other workers from entering a place of work when they are striking, this stops the employer from hiring strike breakers.
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Legal action can also be taken.
Oh wow, so during a strike the union pays employees? Never realized this happened but it makes so much sense now, so the employees can strike without having to worry about going broke. Would be cool if that funding were extended so that if an employer decides to give strikers the middle finger, those people can ride that funding until another job is found. Reducing the hold companies have on employees.
Well, depending on the union, you may not get the full ammount, but they have money to give to members while on strike.
Also yes, here in Sweden all Unions have a separate fund, called Arbetslöshetskassa, it is ment to supplement your income when you get let go from a job and are looking for a new job.
Finally, here in Sweden, there are very few Unions that are workplace dependant, they are industry dependant.
You have a union for normal laborers, a union for civil engineers, transport workers, nurses, builders, IT workers and more.
They are large and it is very common to be a member of one of them.
Right now, Tesls is trying to skip out on signing a collective bargning agreement with IF Metall, the metal workers union, who’s members are doing servicing of Tesla cars, so they are on strike, not every union worker is on strike, just the ones working for Tesla.
Tesla has brought in scabs as a counter to the strike, but what they probably have not considered is that sympathy strikes are legal and used here, so the dockworkers union have stated that they will not unload Tesla cars arriving at the docks for deliver, unless a collective bargning agreement is signed on monday.
Toys ‘R’ Us tried this shit decades ago, and the trasport workers union refused their deliveries, the finance workers union regused to process their payments, the builders union refused to do any work to their stores.
They signed, as will Tesla.
You didn’t know unions pay employees during a strike because they almost never do…
Unions are funded by members. The money you’d get while striking would have to be money you yourself paid into union dues. In order for you to be paid while striking, you’d either have had to have been paying very steep dues, or had to have been paying in for a very long time into a very old and established union.
Further, said ancient union would have had to have been collecting dues for a considerable length of time and not been spending anything. Let’s say I make 50k/year and I pay 2%, or $1k/yr. In order to go on strike for a month, I need 6 years of dues stored up. If there’s 100 members, your talking about $100k/yr that goes completely untouched the entire time. What agency have you ever heard of that would sit on that amount of money? They would spend a large portion on something. Invariably.
It’s not the reality of unions. Its a fairy tale. Ask Google if a union pays workers wages when they strike… Don’t take people’s word on shit like that (including mine) when you can Google.
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