Unions brought about many major improvements for union workers that are now widespread among union and non-union jobs alike, such as paid vacations, weekends, sick leave, minimum wage, the eight-hour day, child labor laws, overtime pay, pensions, worker's compensation, health insurance, holiday pay, parental leave, workplace safety regulations, lunch breaks, and much more.
Unions have served workers well by improving working conditions and helping workers avoid being exploited by employers. Even today, unions have a strong impact. And unions have helped push through legislation in recent years, too -- for example, they supported the Affordable Care Act. Why unions are problematic As much as I'd rather not accept it, while unions have done a lot of good and have helped workers avoid exploitation, they can also help workers exploit employers sometimes.
Unions can have the power to impede a company's ability to compete and thrive. A firm might be in desperate trouble, yet its unions may be unwilling to bend or compromise in order to help the company survive. Many employers find themselves left very inflexible when they have union contracts to abide by.
Meanwhile, if a union negotiates high wages for workers at a company, it may lead the company to charge higher prices for its offerings, which can make it less competitive with rivals. Some argue that unions have led to a decline in the value of merit. In many union settings, workers can't advance much or at all on their merits, but rather they must generally progress within the limits defined by union contracts where advances might be based on seniority, for example.
Employers may have trouble weeding out ineffective employees if they belong to unions. In theory, at least, unionized workers might become so comfortable and protected that they lose the incentive to work hard for their employer.
And outstanding employees might lose their get-up-and-go if there's no incentive to excel -- or worse, if they're pressured by the union not to go the extra mile.
Is there a problem? So there's both good and bad associated with unions. I suspect that most businesses -- and even many or most investors in said businesses -- would prefer that the businesses be union-free. But that's easier said than done.
Many workers, meanwhile, are intent on keeping their unions, and they occasionally organize to form new ones. Just this year, football players at Northwestern University have been petitioning to form one. Meanwhile, domestic workers long denied by law the right to unionize have formed the National Domestic Workers Alliance and have been endorsed by existing unions.
Workers at Wal-Mart , too, have been pursuing a union and have even conducted strikes. Currently more than half of the states lack comprehensive collective bargaining laws for public-service workers like teachers.
Public-service workers deserve the right to join together in unions to fight for stronger safety and health protections, better pay, and better working conditions. Map Status of collective bargaining rights for state and local public workers, by state State Status code Status of collective bargaining laws Alabama 2 No comprehensive bargaining laws.
Some of these states have laws covering various groups of employees. In some states, local jurisdictions have passed laws. Alaska 1 Laws provide collective bargaining rights to a majority of public employees. Arizona 2 No comprehensive bargaining laws.
Arkansas 2 No comprehensive bargaining laws. California 1 Laws provide collective bargaining rights to a majority of public employees. Colorado 2 No comprehensive bargaining laws.
Connecticut 1 Laws provide collective bargaining rights to a majority of public employees. Washington D. Delaware 1 Laws provide collective bargaining rights to a majority of public employees. Florida 1 Laws provide collective bargaining rights to a majority of public employees. Georgia 2 No comprehensive bargaining laws. Hawaii 1 Laws provide collective bargaining rights to a majority of public employees. 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.
Unions tend to put a lot of influence on seniority. That can be a good thing for creating a steady career path, but it can also make it hard for superstars to advance up the hierarchy. It can also make it hard to demote or dismiss workers who are consistently under-performing. And because unions have their own internal leadership structures, favoritism and cronyism can impede progress toward a meritocracy. Some workplaces are closed shops, which means you must be a union member to apply to work there.
Still others are agency shops, where you can work there as a non-union-member but you have to pay agency fees to contribute to the work the union does on your behalf contract negotiations, etc. Other critics of unions work to pass right-to-work laws that limit the power of unions to collect dues and engage in collective bargaining. Some unions can be tough to break into. This is particularly true of some of the older, more homogeneous unions. The closed cultures of some unions can make it hard for outsiders e.
The closed culture and strong sense of solidarity can also lead union members to protect each other from scrutiny or cover up member misconduct. The flip side of unions providing higher wages for workers is that labor costs are higher.
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