Labor Unions

LABOR UNIONS

A labor union has been defined as "a group of workers who have banded together to achieve common goals in the key areas of wages, hours, and working conditions" (Boone and Kurtz, 2005). Originally, labor unions were primarily made up of male, blue-collar workers, but as the economy of the United States evolved from production industries to service industries, union membership has seen a dramatic increase in white-collar and female workers.

HISTORY AND EVOLUTION

Labor unions began to evolve in the United States in the 1700s and 1800s because of the need for safety and security for workers. Workers formed labor unions in response to intolerable working conditions, low wages, and long hours. In the wake of the Industrial Revolution, men, women, and even children worked in unsafe factories from dawn to dark every day of the week for only pennies a day. These oppressive conditions forced workers to look for ways to improve their situation. They gradually learned that by banding together and bargaining as a group, they could pressure employers to respond to their demands.

The progression of the Industrial Revolution and the formation of labor unions go hand in hand. The Industrial Revolution brought about specialization of employees in the workplace and a dramatic increase in production. This factory system, which developed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, brought to workers both prosperity (steady employment in good economic times) and hardship (bad working conditions and unemployment) during depressions. Thus, the Industrial Revolution changed the American class structure, turning skilled tradesmen into the working class, who found it very difficult to escape factory life.

As more and more workers united to improve their situation, two types of labor unions emerged. Craft unions were made up of workers who were skilled in a specific trade. Many craft unions were organized in the 1790s, such as the Philadelphia shoemakers in 1792, the Boston carpenters in 1793, and the New York printers in 1794.

Beginning in 1827, laborers who worked in the same industry, regardless of their specific job, formed industrial unions, such as the United Steel Workers and the Teamsters. The 1837 depression nearly wiped out these unions, but they were reborn shortly before the Civil War (1861–1865) and became strong enough to survive recessions.

Five major labor organizations emerged between 1866 and 1936. The National Labor Union was organized in 1866. Though it became a political party and collapsed within six years, it did successfully bring together into a

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national federation both craft unions and reform groups. The Noble Order of the Knights of Labor, founded in 1869, sought to unite all workers, both skilled and unskilled. In 1886, when its membership had reached more than 700,000, it split into two groups. The revolutionary socialist group wanted the government to take over production; the traditional group wanted to remain focused on the economic well-being of its members.

This second group merged with a group of individual craft unions in 1886 to become the American Federation of Labor (AFL). This was the beginning of modern union structure. The AFL's first president, Samuel Gompers (1850–1924), kept the improvement of wages, hours, and working conditions as the objectives of the union. AFL membership grew rapidly until the 1920s, when there were few skilled craftworkers yet to be organized. By that time, three-fourths of the organized workers in the United States were members of the AFL.

In 1905 an organization called the Industrial Workers of the World was established. Though it was short-lived, this union introduced the sit-down strike and mass picketing. In the early 1920s, workers in the steel, aluminum, auto, and rubber industries formed many individual industrial unions (groups of employees working in the same industry, yet not using the same skills). These unions did not agree with the craft union concept (grouping workers with the same specific skill), which was the organizational structure of the AFL. Therefore, in 1936 they split with the AFL and became a new group of affiliated unions called the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Organizing complete industries instead of individual crafts proved a successful way to deal with mass-production industries, and the CIO's membership soon grew to nearly that of the AFL.

GROWTH

Even with so much union organization activity going on, there were fewer than 1 million union members in the United States in 1900. Membership in labor unions grew slowly from 1920 to 1935, but the modern labor movement was born in the decade between 1933 and 1944. The combination of New Deal labor legislation, competition between the AFL and the CIO, and World War II (1939–1945) quadrupled union membership, which by 1937 was more than 5 million. Union membership continued to increase from 1943 through 1956, reaching more than 15 million in 1950. One-fourth of the labor force were union members at that time, when the government officially sanctioned unions.

In 1955 the AFL and CIO settled their differences and merged into one extremely large labor organization. All the major national unions in the United States today except the National Education Association are affiliated with the AFL-CIO.

Union membership declined from 1956 to 1961, when white-collar workers outnumbered blue-collar workers for the first time, women were entering the workforce in large numbers, and the economy was changing from a production to a service industry orientation. In 1961 growth resumed; from 1964 to 1974, especially during the time of the Vietnam War, unions gained 4 million members, largely public-sector employees and professionals.

DECLINE

The percentage of U.S. workers who are union members has fallen since the 1980s. This decline is largely due to the decrease in the number of blue-collar jobs, labor legislation protecting workers, better employee-management relationships, and the shift from a manufacturing to a service economy (bringing into the workforce more women and young people, who are not easily organized). During the 1990s and the early years of the twenty-first century, despite the decline in the percent of workers who were unionized, nearly 16 million U.S. workers, between one-eighth and one-sixth of the labor force, belonged to labor unions.

ORGANIZATION

Labor unions are organized on several different levels. Local unions represent members in a specific geographic area, such as a city, state, or region. These local unions make up the base of a national union, which unites all its affiliated local unions under one constitution. The Teamsters and the United Steel Workers of America are two examples of large national unions, each uniting many local unions. The decision-making process of national unions is decentralized, which allows decisions to be made at the local level, by those best qualified to make them. Thus, the national union recognizes the autonomy of each local union yet unites them under one set of rules and grants each local union its charter.

Some unions have an international level. These international unions have members both inside and outside the United States, such as in Canada. Their organization is similar to national unions, with local unions being the base of the union structure. The primary emphasis of national unions is economic. Their main function is collective bargaining, though much of the negotiation process occurs at the local union level. Bargaining labormanagement contracts, which deal with wages, hours, and working conditions, and settling labor-management disputes are the primary roles of the local and national union leadership.

The top level of labor union organization is the federation, such as the AFL-CIO. Such a federation is made up of many national and/or international unions. The purpose of the federation level is to coordinate its affiliated unions, settle disputes between them, and serve as the political representative of the union members.

MEMBERSHIP POLICIES

Various employment policies have been used in business and industry to determine union membership. The closed-shop policy, which was outlawed by the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947, forced workers to join the union in order to be hired at a company and to remain a union member in order to continue employment. The union-shop policy requires all current employees of a company to join the union when it is certified as their bargaining agent (voted in by the majority of the workers). New employees must also join the union under the union-shop policy. The Taft-Hartley Act, however, allows individual states to outlaw the union-shop policy. Most union contracts negotiated in the 1990s operated under the union-shop policy.

The agency-shop policy allows both union and nonunion workers to be employed by an organization, but the nonunion employees must pay a union fee equal to union dues. This policy requires nonunion workers to pay their "fair share" of the expenses of the union's representing them in negotiations, but none of the cost of the union's political activities. The open-shop policy allows voluntary union membership or nonmembership for all workers. It does not require nonunion workers to pay any union dues or fees.

LABOR LEGISLATION

Both labor unions and management have been affected by federal legislation since 1932, when the Norris-LaGuardia Act was passed. This law protects union activities such as strikes and picketing by making it difficult for management to obtain injunctions against them. In 1935 the Wagner Act (also known as the National Labor Relations Act) made collective bargaining legal and forced employers to negotiate with union officials. The National Labor Relations Board was established by this act. The board oversees union elections and guards against unfair labor practices.

The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 set a maximum of forty hours for a basic workweek, outlawed child labor, and set a minimum wage. The Taft-Hartley Act limited the power of unions by prohibiting unions from such activities as coercing employees to join unions, charging excessive fees, refusing to bargain collectively with an employer, and using union dues for political contributions. The Taft-Hartley Act was amended in 1959 by the Landrum-Griffin Act, which requires a union to have a constitution and bylaws, secret-ballot elections of officers, and a financial reporting procedure. Management procedures are also regulated by legislation, such as the Plant-Closing Notification Act of 1988, which requires employers to give workers a sixty-day warning of mass layoffs or plant closings.

OUTLOOK

Labor unions were born out of necessity, to protect the health and well-being of American workers. Through the years, they have provided a unified voice for workers and obtained fair treatment of them in the workplace. During the twentieth century, however, laws were passed that guarantee employees many of the rights that once had to be negotiated in labor-management contracts. An increase in employee-management teamwork and communication has also reduced the need for workers to be represented by labor unions. Thus, labor unions no longer play the vital role they once did in American labor-management relations.

see also Collective Bargaining ; Negotiation

bibliography

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Chaison, Gary N. (2006). Unions in America. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Estey, Marten (1981). The unions: Structure, development, and management (3rd ed.). New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Masters, Marick F. (1997). Unions at the crossroads. Westport, CT: Quorum.

Wray, Ralph D., Luft, Robert L., and Highland, Patrick J. (1996). Fundamentals of human relations. Cincinnati: South-Western.

G. W. Maxwell