Labor Unions

Organizations of hourly or salaried employees intent on improving both the at-work and off-work lives of actual and prospective members, labor unions often make up the largest social movement in a country. Able often to successfully bargain for better wages, hours, and working conditions than those afforded their matched counterparts in nonunion workplaces, labor unions raise the bar and show the way. Critics, not surprisingly, rush to charge this wage differential comes at a high cost to other stakeholders in a unionized firm, such as investors, nonunion jobholders, managers and executives, and possibly even consumers. Pro-union academics, however, contend that the higher morale, and thereby possibly the higher productivity of unionized employees, compensates for the union's “tax” on company profits; this is one of many such endless economic arguments concerning unions.

Labor unions can trace their origins back to medieval or even Roman guilds, though nowadays they no longer produce products or services or attempt to control prices and product standards. Found in almost every country, especially since the mid-20th century, labor unions' existence fundamentally hinges on their acceptance, or at least countenance, by government. Totalitarian countries either outlaw them or subvert them and turn them into ersatz meaningless puppets of the regime (as may be true at present in Mainland China and several Middle Eastern countries). Generally, the more democratic the political scene is, the greater is the union density (the percentage of eligible members who have joined a union).

A union consists of many worksite-based operations, known in the United States as locals. A local is the smallest unit and the one in which most members actually “experience” unionism, warts and all. It generally operates out of an office (or union hall), complete with a meeting room and the equipment necessary to house an election phone bank program, large rallies, celebrations, holiday parties, and the like. In large measure, whatever union members think and feel about unionism is derivative from the strengths and weaknesses of their local rather than from any other aspect of the union apparatus or the labor movement per se.

Locals connect to one another in a union's city-wide, statewide, and regionwide organizations. Their union may also enroll them in a sector organization (as when the locals whose employers make this product or that one are grouped together in a niche organization by this or that product line). A local may be also a member of citywide, statewide, and regional organizations along with locals of other unions. These bodies that mix locals of different unions are especially strategic for making consequential endorsements, for getting out the vote, and in many other ways, for boosting labor's political clout.

Contrary to misleading stereotypes as predominantly blue-collar domains, labor unions, especially in advanced industrial nations, attract a wide range of members: Actors, artists, clergy, dancers, engineers, musicians, nurses, pilots, prison guards, professors, secretaries, and social workers are unionized, as are auto, factory, mine, and steel workers. This diversity helps explain the preoccupation of unions with legislative matters, as almost every proposed piece of legislation can touch on some aspect of the life of this or that union member. Likewise, the diversity of dues payers prompts unions to vigorously participate in electoral contests, commonly on the side of populist candidates.

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