Labor Unions Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Labor unions are collective workers’ organizations, and their central purpose is to represent employee interests vis-à-vis employers and the state through collective bargaining and political action. While the earliest unions were formed to protect the interest of skilled trades and craft workers in the eighteenth century, these organizations enjoyed no formal legal status. Technological advancements in the late nineteenth century radically altered the mode of economic production and gave birth to industrial-based labor unions representing primarily blue-collar workers. The growing popularity and discontent of labor unions during this period forced governments to afford legal recognition to unions in exchange for labor’s acceptance of a highly regulated system of labor relations. The subsequent recognition and growth of public sector unions changed the predominantly male, blue-collar character of organized labor by dramatically increasing the proportion of women and white-collar workers belonging to labor unions. Thanks in part to the state’s legal recognition of labor unions, organized labor reached its peak in terms of union density, the percentage of the nonagricultural workforce belonging to unions, in the years following World War II (1939–1945).

Labor unions are generally organized along industry lines with affiliated union locals representing workers at individual workplaces or in specific geographic locations. Unions typically work together as part of the broader labor movement to promote the political aims and objectives of the working class. In most advanced capitalist countries—with the exception of the United States—unions share close ties to socialist or social democratic political parties. This party-union relationship is premised on the belief that unions have a direct stake in influencing broad areas of public policy to achieve a degree of social justice and economic equality for the benefit of the working class. Labor unions are credited with playing a key role in welfare state expansion and progressive labor law reform, including the enactment of a minimum wage, a reduced workday, and workers’ compensation.

Collective bargaining is the central function of labor unions. Through this process, unions and employers negotiate legally binding employment contracts, known as collective agreements, which protect union members in a particular workplace or industry. Collective agreements typically outline wages, working conditions, grievance procedures, benefit entitlements, and other rules governing the employment relationship.

To exert greater pressure on employers in collective bargaining, members of labor unions sometimes will vote to engage in strike action by withdrawing their labor, thereby disrupting business production or the provision of services. Strikes are the most powerful form of leverage available to unions. Labor unions are charged also with representing union members in grievance disputes with management over adherence to the collective agreement.

The value and desirability of labor unions is highly contested. Unsympathetic neoclassical accounts of organized labor primarily focus on unions’ ability to develop labor monopolies that drive up wages and interfere with the functioning of the free market. From this perspective, labor unions are essentially viewed as businesses charged with protecting the economic welfare of union members at the expense of nonunion workers and corporate profits. On the other hand, Marxist accounts of organized labor view the development of workers’ organizations as the inevitable outgrowth of capitalist class divisions. Although theoretically well positioned to spread class consciousness and advance the cause of socialism, the Marxist view generally argues that most labor unions in advanced capitalist societies have accepted the logic and desirability of capitalism and therefore have lost any serious revolutionary potential. Institutionalist scholars view the growth and development of labor unions as a response to harsh and often unsafe working conditions that accompanied the introduction of the Industrial Revolution. From this perspective, labor unions are seen as a counterweight to the dominant power of business and an important agent of workplace democracy. In other words, labor unions assist in humanizing capitalist employment relations without necessarily questioning the legitimacy of the system.

Union membership in most advanced capitalist democracies has been in decline since the 1970s, corresponding with the ascent of neoliberalism and the new right. This decline is largely due to structural shifts in political economy, deindustrialization, globalization, trade liberalization, strong employer resistance to unionization, and unsympathetic government policy in labor law.

Bibliography:

Bennett, James T., and Bruce E. Kaufman, eds. What Do Unions Do? A Twenty Year Perspective. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 2007.
Larson, Simeon, and Bruce Nissen, eds. Theories of the Labor Movement. Detroit:Wayne State University Press, 1987.
Lichtenstein, Nelson. State of the Union: A Century of American Labor. Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002.
Panitch, Leo, and Donald Swartz. From Consent to Coercion: The Assault on Trade Union Freedoms. 3rd ed. Aurora, Ont.: Garamond, 2003.
Silver, Beverly J. Forces of Labor: Worker’s Movements and Globalization since 1870. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Yates, Michael D. Why Unions Matter. 2nd ed. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2009.

This example Labor Unions Essay is published for educational and informational purposes only. If you need a custom essay or research paper on this topic please use our writing services. EssayEmpire.com offers reliable custom essay writing services that can help you to receive high grades and impress your professors with the quality of each essay or research paper you hand in.