Why unions are good

Union substitution techniques are the carrots designed to increase worker loyalty to the employer, thus making employees less likely to identify with the union.

Some non-union companies operating in highly unionized sectors try to keep wages and working conditions in line with those of unionized workers in an effort to dissuade their own workforces from considering a union. If union substitution represents the carrot, union suppression techniques are the stick.

Suppression techniques often include targeting pro-union employees for discipline and dismissal. In recent years, retail giants Target and Home Depot had their slick anti-union videos leaked on social media, providing insight into how much money and effort employers are willing to pour into such initiatives. Read more: Despite Foodora ruling, app-based workers face uphill union battle. Despite these aggressive union avoidance tactics, public opinion polls indicate that, if given the choice, many non-union workers would opt to unionize.

Organizing small workplaces is generally cost-prohibitive for unions and rarely results in broader bargaining power for workers in a particular sector. The lack of union supply, labour relations power dynamics and the union avoidance strategies of employers all work together to dissuade workers from exercising their right to unionize.

Idaho 2 No comprehensive bargaining laws. Illinois 1 Laws provide collective bargaining rights to a majority of public employees. Indiana 2 No comprehensive bargaining laws. Iowa 2 No comprehensive bargaining laws. Kansas 3 Kansas law covers local governments only if they opt in. Kentucky 2 No comprehensive bargaining laws. Louisiana 2 No comprehensive bargaining laws. Maine 1 Laws provide collective bargaining rights to a majority of public employees. Maryland 3 Maryland has no state law covering local employees.

The largest local jurisdictions have their own laws. Massachusetts 1 Laws provide collective bargaining rights to a majority of public employees. Michigan 1 Laws provide collective bargaining rights to a majority of public employees. Minnesota 1 Laws provide collective bargaining rights to a majority of public employees.

Mississippi 2 No comprehensive bargaining laws. Missouri 2 No comprehensive bargaining laws. Montana 1 Laws provide collective bargaining rights to a majority of public employees. Nebraska 1 Laws provide collective bargaining rights to a majority of public employees. Nevada 1 Laws provide collective bargaining rights to a majority of public employees. New Hampshire 1 Laws provide collective bargaining rights to a majority of public employees.

New Jersey 1 Laws provide collective bargaining rights to a majority of public employees. New Mexico 1 Laws provide collective bargaining rights to a majority of public employees. New York 1 Laws provide collective bargaining rights to a majority of public employees. North Carolina 2 No comprehensive bargaining laws. North Dakota 2 No comprehensive bargaining laws. Ohio 1 Laws provide collective bargaining rights to a majority of public employees.

Oklahoma 2 No comprehensive bargaining laws. Oregon 1 Laws provide collective bargaining rights to a majority of public employees.

Pennsylvania 1 Laws provide collective bargaining rights to a majority of public employees. Rhode Island 1 Laws provide collective bargaining rights to a majority of public employees.

South Carolina 2 No comprehensive bargaining laws. South Dakota 2 No comprehensive bargaining laws. Tennessee 2 No comprehensive bargaining laws. Texas 2 No comprehensive bargaining laws. Utah 2 No comprehensive bargaining laws. Vermont 1 Laws provide collective bargaining rights to a majority of public employees. Virginia 2 No comprehensive bargaining laws.

Washington 1 Laws provide collective bargaining rights to a majority of public employees. West Virginia 2 No comprehensive bargaining laws.

Wisconsin 2 No comprehensive bargaining laws. Wyoming 2 No comprehensive bargaining laws. While federal laws provide most private-sector workers and federal government workers with the right to unionize and bargain collectively, there is as of yet no federal law guaranteeing that right for state and local government workers like teachers.

A patchwork of state laws provides inconsistent rights for these public workers. Promoting and encouraging organizing and collective bargaining was the purpose and goal of the original Wagner Act the NLRA.

However, after the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act, employers have argued that the law is not pro-union but is neutral. The statutory language must be strengthened to provide that NLRB actions that do not meet the statutory standard of promoting organizing and collective bargaining could be invalidated by a reviewing court as contrary to the governing law under the Administrative Procedures Act.

This approach is similar to that taken under the Occupational Safety and Health Act, which states that health standards must provide the maximum level of protection to workers that is technologically feasible, and standards that fall short of this level of protection can be invalidated by the courts.

Workers need a fair chance to hear from union representatives about the benefits of unionization, including the ways in which unions help strengthen health and safety protections at the workplace. Currently, employers are able to deliver their anti-union messages at the workplace and on work time, because the employer controls the workplace and directs how work time is spent.

Nine out of 10 employers require workers to attend captive-audience meetings during organizing campaigns Bronfenbrenner Workers have only a limited ability to hear from union supporters at the workplace, and their access has been further curtailed by the Trump NLRB, which has restricted the ability of workers and organizers to organize at their workplace McNicholas et al. This imbalance undermines the ability of workers to organize together.

The law should be amended to require employers to grant reasonable access to union organizers, off-duty employees, and off-duty contractor employees to nonworking areas to talk with workers on their nonworking time. In addition, workers who have not yet organized a union should be able to designate a union representative as their representative during an OSHA inspection and related proceedings.

The COVID crisis shows that workers with union representation have fared better than nonunion workers in terms of advocating for safety equipment and protocols. Workers should not have to go through the formal NLRB election process to gain the benefit of union advocacy and expertise when it comes to their health and safety on the job. Specifically, employers should be required to recognize and bargain with a union if a majority of workers indicate their support for the union as their representative.

The law should not allow employers to determine whether workers have a formal election—that choice should be left up to workers, not the employer. This method of forming unions has been recognized and used by employers in the United States for decades.

In addition, the NLRB should be directed to allow electronic voting in representation elections. Electronic voting has been used by the National Mediation Board for years, and it should be allowed and encouraged—particularly given the health risks associated with large gatherings Muller Employers try to gerrymander the bargaining unit by adding workers they think will vote against the union or removing those who support representation.

Similarly, workers should be able to designate a multi-employer bargaining arrangement, and their proposed arrangement should be certified unless the employer can make a compelling case as to why its participation in a multi-employer bargaining unit is unworkable Rhinehart and McNicholas At the beginning of the COVID pandemic, essential workers in health care, food service, warehouses, grocery stores, meatpacking plants, and other settings raised concerns about the risk of workplace exposure to COVID and the lack of personal protective equipment and other safety protections.

Too often, these workers were fired or faced other retaliation for raising these concerns Hiltzik ; Kruzel ; Davenport, Bhattarai, and McGregor In other places, workers were called back to work at workplaces that did not have sufficient health and safety protections and were faced with the prospect of working at an unsafe job and risking contracting a deadly disease, or refusing to work and risking losing their unemployment benefits. Workers should not be faced with choosing between their health and their livelihood.

The law must be strengthened to explicitly protect workers who refuse to perform hazardous work from being fired or retaliated against. These protections exist to some extent now under the Occupational Safety and Health Act and the NLRA, but the protections are weak and the enforcement is up to the government agency.

And because strikes have shown themselves to be effective and often necessary to force action on safety and health, states should be required to provide unemployment insurance for strikers Block and Sachs The NLRA should be amended to expand coverage to agricultural, domestic, and student workers so these workers can form unions and fight for health and safety protections on the job.

Workers who have spoken out about the lack of protections at grocery stores have been raising issues of importance to both workers and consumers who shop at these stores. Workers who have been raising concerns about a lack of protective equipment in health care settings have been concerned about their own safety and also that of patients and family members visiting patients. Meatpacking workers who have raised concerns about a lack of protections at their plants have raised issues that are also of concern to their communities, because workers who contract COVID on the job carry the disease home with them to their communities.

Similarly, when workers speak out about corporate practices—such as the Google workers who petitioned their employer about contracting with ICE, or employees urging stronger action by Google on climate change Wong —they are using their voice as workers to try to bring about better corporate practices.

Workers form unions because they want to bargain with their employers and reach agreement about issues that matter to them—issues like health and safety, wages, protections against sexual harassment, and dignity on the job.

The PRO Act establishes an important mediation and arbitration process for ensuring that newly organized workers reach a first agreement. Relatedly, workers should not need to start from scratch when bargaining a contract with a newly organized employer. Where a union has a significant presence at an employer, in an industry, or in a geographic area, the law should provide a process for the union to extend the contract standards for wages and benefits that the union has achieved through bargaining with these employers to newly organized groups.

The PRO Act establishes a mediation and arbitration process for achieving initial collective bargaining agreements for newly organized workers. That process should default to the contract standards the union has been able to achieve with other employers in the industry or area, or such higher standards as the union demonstrates are appropriate Rhinehart and McNicholas Health and safety is consistently cited as one of the most important issues to working people, and the COVID crisis has only elevated its importance.

Unions routinely bargain with employers over health and safety protections, and collective bargaining gives workers a stronger voice for addressing these critical issues than they would have individually.

This artificially narrows the joint-employer inquiry and excludes an issue of extreme importance to working people Becker and Berner Legislation should make clear that health and safety is an essential term of employment. Starting in the mids, Black workers began to be more likely to be in unions and to have a larger union premium than white workers. Further, these numbers are not seasonally adjusted. The other unemployment rates listed in this paragraph, and the overall unemployment rate, peaked in April.

Essential workers in this data set include workers in food and agriculture; emergency services; transportation, warehouse, and delivery; industrial, commercial, residential facilities and services; health care; government and community-based services; communications and IT; financial sector; energy sector; water and wastewater management; chemical sector; and critical manufacturing.

See Table 3 in McNicholas and Poydock a. Front-line industries in this data set include grocery, convenience, and drugstore workers; public transit workers; trucking, warehouse, and postal service workers; building cleaning service workers; health care workers; and child care and social services workers.

The United Food and Commercial Workers secured increased pay and benefits for workers in more than a dozen meatpacking and food-processing companies. As of July , all stores had eliminated premium pay for front-line workers. The United Auto Workers persuaded General Motors, Ford, and Fiat Chrysler to shut down operations for two weeks to slow the spread of the virus, and they negotiated with the companies to provide all workers with protective gear, including masks.

See UAW and Engdahl The Communications Workers of America secured additional paid sick and family leave for unionized Verizon workers. The agreement includes 26 weeks of paid sick leave for individuals diagnosed with COVID and eight weeks of paid leave for those caring for an individual medically diagnosed with COVID See CWA The Teamsters reached an agreement with DHL Express that relaxes rules pertaining to vacation use by workers for the shipping company if shipping volumes drop.

See Teamsters In this analysis, the unionized public-sector workforce 7. So, for example, education and health services workers who work in the public sector are included in this tally, not in the private-sector education and health services industries tallies.

Specifically, we report the coefficient on union status from a regression of the log of the hourly wage on union status and a quintic polynomial in age used as a measure of experience , and dummies for race and ethnicity, education, citizenship, major industry, major occupation, state, and year. We exclude observations with imputed wages because the imputation process does not take union status into account and therefore biases the union premium toward zero. This analysis does not account for nonwage benefits.

Unions are responsible for securing and improving maternity, paternal and carer leave for millions of workers. In the UK, unionised workplaces are much more likely to have parental and carer leave policies in place that are more generous than the statutory minimum. Trade union members are more likely to stay in their jobs longer, on average five years more than non-unionised workers.

The pandemic saw high street brands cancelling orders or demanding huge discounts, forcing factories to close, or operate with reduced numbers of workers.

Free Trade Zones have eroded rights for workers around the globe. In Sri Lanka, as elsewhere, it is mainly women who are exploited by their reduced regulations and minimal protection for labourers. Despite this, they were refusing to pay the whole bonus for December that workers had expected — and for workers in this sector, bonuses pay for essentials, they are not luxuries. It was the collective power of workers who walked out and refused to accept the denial of their bonus that led management to finally agree to pay their full December bonus.

By being a union member, you have someone on your side when you need them. You become part of something bigger and have the support of the union when you need it. Trade unions are part of an international movement — global solidarity is key in highlighting some of the worst atrocities faced by working people. War on Want asked our affiliates from the UK trade union movement if they would stand in solidarity with the hundreds of thousands of farmers and the wider trade union movement in India, and of course they joined and issued a powerful statement to show our solidarity with those who are standing up to protect their livelihoods and their right to organise.

Unions fight for equal opportunities in the workplace. Trade unions have fought for laws that give rights to workers: the minimum wage, maximum working time, paid holidays, equal pay for work of equal value as well as anti-discrimination laws. Workers in the USA have even been on strike about it. In situations such as including at disciplinary and grievance hearings, your union representative can give you expert advice, support and representation from start to finish.

Anyone who has been treated illegally or unfairly at work will no longer have to pay to take their employers to court. The Covid pandemic has shone a light on those workplaces and sectors where poor pay and conditions had become almost normalised, where the gap between rich and poor has grown exponentially and where wealth is rewarded while poverty is punished.

Across the globe, it is the labour movement that has stepped up to the challenge to give working people a voice. Here in the UK, it was the union movement, not the government who fought for the furlough scheme which has helped so many workers to keep their heads above water.

We know that around the world, organised workers achieve more collectively than they can as individuals.