Jamie Solomon
Professor Miller
English 1000
February 19, 2011
After looking through many definitions, I came to the conclusion that collective bargaining is the negotiation accompanied between employees and employers to determine wages, hours, rules and working conditions. After reaching this negotiation, they then make a collective agreement, which was their original purpose, and this lays out all of the working conditions. Collective bargaining becomes centralized when the national union confederation and the national employers’ organization can influence and control wage levels and patterns across the economy. In order for this to occur, a few factors need to take place. These include the level at which bargaining primarily takes place and whether or not the national organization can control the behavior of their constituent organizations and avoid wage drift-the change in the amount by which actual earnings exceed negotiated earnings.
There is obviously a ton of information about the history of unions in the U.S., but it primarily began before the Civil War, but most importantly, in the past one hundred and twenty years when the American Federation of Labour(AFL) and the railroad of brotherhoods built strong permanent unions.
The first unions formed in the late eighteenth century. The first federation of the U.S unions was the National Labour Union that was founded in 1866, but was dissolved in 1873. It paved the way for another federation, Knights of Labour, which was the largest and one of the most important American labour organizations of the 1880’s. Following that was the establishment of the American Federation of Labour, founded in 1886, by Samuel Gompers.
The next big international union was the Workers of the World, or the Wobblies. It hit its peak in 1923, where it claimed around 100,000 members in good standing, and could marshal the support of about 300,000 workers. The membership declined dramatically after a split in 1924 because of an internal conflict.
Then there was the industrial unionism pushed by John L. Lewis’ Committee for Industrial Organizations(CIO) founded in 1933. Following was the Second Red Scare after World War II which pushed the AFL and CIO into a 1955 merger as the AFL-CIO.
It has been said that in the twenty first century, American Union membership has fallen under eight percent. Reasons being are that workers don’t seem interested in joining, and activity to strike had almost completely diminished. There has been big numbers in decline, for example, construction trades suddenly went from seventy-five percent unionized to under twenty-five percent. As a result from the decline of unions, income equity is increasing dramatically.
In my opinion, collective bargaining seems very crucial, but not so much unions. I think collective bargaining is important because if we didn’t have rules and negotiations laid out, then the economy would crumble into complete disaster. Structure is very important, and with structure comes rules and consensus’, and if there were no agreements on wages and hours and all of that, then everything would be a mess and I just can’t even picture what the world would be like except chaotic.
I know that unions perform a vital function in the lives of working families, but after reading and seeing that union rate has declined a good amount over the past decades, I feel they are not necessary because we have been functioning without them. They are important for our society since they promote wages, fair taxes, and justice throughout our society, but I just don’t think they are really necessary, and we could do just fine with what we have now. I don’t really know much about unions other than what I read so I can be completely misinterpreting their importance, but that’s just my take on them.
No comments:
Post a Comment