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Labor union

General subfields within the Labor movement

Child labor

Labor in economics

Labor history

Labor law

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Labor union

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Table of contents

1 History 2 Unions not guilds 3 Shop types 4 The Problem of International Comparison 5 Trade unions in Britain 6 Labor Unions in the US 7 Other 8 News 9 See also

History

Unions were illegal for many years in most countries. There were severe penalties for attempting to organize unions, up to and including execution. Despite this, unions were formed and began to acquire political power, eventually resulting in a body of labour law which not only legalized organizing efforts, but codified the relationship between employers and those employees organized into unions. Many consider it an issue of fairness that workers be allowed to pool their resources in a special legal entity in a similar way to the pooling of capital resources in the form of corporations.

Today a government-imposed ban on joining a union is generally considered a human rights abuse. Most democratic countries have many unions, while most authoritarian regimes do not.

Unions not guilds

A union, in sharp contrast, is an organisation of hired workers who, generally speaking, own and control only their own ability to labour, not the tools or materials they work on. While industrial era unions could and often did consist of highly skilled factory workers, one of the radical breaks with the past was that unions could be constituted for essentially unskilled workers, even poor agricultural labourers.

Shop types

In addition, unions have very different relationships with political parties in different countries. In many countries unions have formed long-term relationships with a political party which is intended to represent the interests of working people. Typically this is a left-wing or socialist party, but there have been many exceptions. In the United States, by contrast, while the labor movement is historically aligned with the Democratic Party, the labor movement is by no means monolithic on that point; the International Brotherhood of Teamsters has supported Republican Party candidates on a number of occasions and the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization endorsed Ronald Reagan in 1980, shortly before he destroyed it and banned all of its striking members from employment as air traffic controllers in 1981. In the United Kingdom the labour movement's relationship with the Labour Party is fraying as party leadership embarks on privatization plans at odds with what some perceive as workers' interests.

Finally, the structure of employment laws affects unions' roles. In many western European countries wages and benefits are largely set by governmental action. The United States takes a more laissez faire approach, setting some minimum standards but leaving most workers' wages and benefits to collective bargaining and market forces.

Trade unions in Britain

Labor Unions in the US

Most importantly, the bill provided the executive branch of the Federal government with the ability to obtain legal strikebreaking injunctions if an actual or impending strike "imperiled the national health or safety", a test that has been in practice interpreted loosely by the courts.

Many US unions lost much of their prestige when links to organized crime were discovered. Union membership has been steadily declining for the past decade or so in all but the public sector (that is, unions of government employees).

Right-to-work statutes forbid unions and companies privately agreeing to contracts with one another. The government gets involved in the negotiation process, making contracts where a business agrees to let a union be its sole provider of labor illegal.

Other

News

See also

• List of labor unions
• Salting
• Strike