Why do labor unions exist

Benefits also include unique assistance for workers facing financial hardship due to disability , layoff , strike and more. Working America defends the interests of working people who do not belong to a union. If for some reason you can't join a union but want to support your fellow working Americans and fight for good jobs and a just economy. Working America has more than 3 million members — workers without the benefit of a workplace union.

They use their collective power and resources to demand that politicians address the priorities that matter most to working people — not just wealthy special interests. Working America also provides its members with benefits and discounts for day-to-day life. Learn More about Working America. Log In Mobile Nav Toggle. What is a Union? Learn more about what labor unions do and why you should join one.

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. Federal law gives federal employees the right to unionize and bargain. As Kochan et al. Workers who are locked out by their employers should also be eligible for unemployment benefits. See Block and Sachs The state of Virginia recently adopted emergency regulations to protect workers from COVID exposure, including provisions banning retaliation against workers for raising safety concerns to the public.

Becker, Craig, and Nicole Berner. Law , April 20, Berkowitz, Deborah, and Paul K. National Employment Law Project, April Bhattarai, Abha.

Biasi, Barbara, and Heather Sarsons. To form a union, a locally based group of employees obtains a charter from a national-level labor organization.

Two large organizations oversee most of the labor unions in the U. Nearly all unions are structured and work in similar ways. However, the employer is not required to agree to any specific terms. A collective bargaining agreement CBA is eventually agreed upon and signed. The CBA outlines pay scales and includes other terms of employment, such as vacation and sick days, benefits, working hours, and working conditions. However, CBAs eventually expire, at which time the labor union and management must negotiate and sign a new agreement.

Despite being a boon to workers, labor unions have seen membership decrease significantly since their heyday in the midth century. The National Education Association NEA represents teachers and other education professionals and is the largest labor union in the United States, with nearly 3 million members. It represents public school teachers, substitute teachers, higher education faculty members, education support workers, administrators, retired teachers, and students working to become teachers.

The NEA works with local and state educational systems to set adequate wages and working conditions for its members, among other activities.

Refusal to admit Black people, women, and immigrant groups was common in labor unions in the 19th and early 20th century , and excluded groups formed their own unions. Today, labor union membership is very diverse, including more women and Black and Latinx workers than ever before, though Asian workers are underrepresented.

It gave unionized employees the right to strike and bargain jointly for working conditions. The act encouraged collective bargaining, stopped unfair tactics by employers, and set up enforcement in a new independent agency, the National Labor Relations Board.

In recent years, legislation and court decisions have weakened the ability of unions to organize. Today, right-to-work laws in 27 states prohibit contracts that require workers to join a labor union to get or keep a job. Public employees cannot be required to pay dues to a union to support its collective-bargaining activities on their behalf, according to a U.

Supreme Court decision in Janus v. The pro-union legislation aims to make it easier to form unions and overrides right-to-work laws. As of August , the legislation was stalled in a divided Senate, with most Republicans opposing it. The number of U. Some business owners, industry associations, and think tanks support right-to-work laws on the grounds that requiring union membership to obtain a job reduces competition in the free-market economy. Some labor union contracts—such as those of the teacher and police unions—have been criticized for making it too difficult to fire incompetent, abusive, and violent employees.

The result is that many disciplinary actions and firings of abusive police officers have been overturned. Some in the labor movement have called for the expulsion of police unions on the grounds that they protect violent officers.

At times, labor unions have been found complicit in organized criminal activity. The U. The Supreme Court decision banning mandatory dues for public workers protected by unions undermined the unions' ability to fund political advocacy. The Democratic Party expresses support for the labor movement in its platform and generally wins labor union endorsements.

Some unions, such as law enforcement groups, support Republican candidates. Union-negotiated wages and benefits are generally superior to what non-union workers receive. Most union contracts provide far more protections than state and federal laws. For example, in many states there is no legal right for workers to take a break. Unions also work to establish laws improving job conditions for their members through legislation at the national, state and local level.

This ultimately benefits all workers. The 8-hour work day is an example of a positive change won by unions that affects everyone. Unions are more important today than they ever were.

It is no secret that in a global economy, the nature of work is changing and some employers resist unions. Misinformation and intimidation — including firing union supporters — are routine responses when workers try to form unions. Workers have less power when they act individually, but acting together as a group they can effect real change. Unions are the collective voice of workers.