History of Organized Labor

Modern unions in the Western Hemisphere trace their origins to preindustrial labor organizations such as guilds for master craftsmen and journeymen organizations like the compagnonngages in France. The first nationwide unions in the United States arose in the second half of the 19th century.

In many advanced industrial countries, unions have close, even institutional ties with political parties. The Trade Union Conference and the Labour Party in Britain, the CGT and the French Communist Party in France, and the New Democratic Party and the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) in Canada are examples of the close connections between unions and political parties on the left. In the United States, most unions have been strong supporters of the Democratic Party since the 1930s. Unions were a key component of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal coalition and remain one of the Democratic Party's most loyal constituencies. Union members vote in high percentages.

A labor union is an organization dedicated to representing the interests of workers in a particular industry or group of industries. Labor unions typically negotiate with employers to seek higher wages, more manageable schedules, safer workplace conditions, and other measures that benefit its members. This form of negotiation, in which a group of workers comes together to advocate on behalf of the individual rights of its constituents, is known as collective bargaining. Unions are typically associated with particular sectors of the economy, such as steel manufacturing, transportation, mining, or the service industry. Prominent labor unions in the United States include the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, the United Farm Workers, and the United Auto Workers.

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.

Unions are organizations of wage earners designed to better working conditions and give laborers a collective voice in the contract bargaining procedure.

Unions emerged from the early trade associations built by workers confronting the effects of the industrial revolution. In 1790, New York City was a center of commerce, but not yet an industrial city. It was also a city divided by class, property, and power. On the one hand, a wealthy class of traders and financiers had developed during the pre-revolutionary period and controlled the city’s international commerce. They were merchant capitalists who made their money through import and export, buying commodities cheaply in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas, and selling them dearly in the United States; or they bought native-made products and exported them for profit to the rest of the world. Through this process they accumulated wealth, or capital, that they then reinvested in their businesses.

Collective bargaining is the process through which a labor union and an employer negotiate the scope of the employment relationship.

A COLLECTIVE BARGAINING AGREEMENT is the ultimate goal of the COLLECTIVE BARGAINING process. Typically, the agreement establishes wages, hours, promotions, benefits, and other
employment terms, as well as procedures for handling disputes arising under it. Because the collective bargaining agreement cannot address every workplace issue that might arise in the future, unwritten customs and past practices, external law, and informal agreements are as important to the collective bargaining agreement as the written instrument itself.

Collective bargaining allows workers and employers to reach voluntary agreement on a wide range of topics. Even so, it is limited to some extent by federal and state laws. A collective bargaining agreement cannot accomplish by contract what the law prohibits. For example, a union and an employer cannot use collective bargaining to deprive employees of rights they would otherwise enjoy under laws such as the CIVIL RIGHTS statutes (Alexander v. Gardner-Denver Co., 415 U.S. 36, 94 S. Ct. 1011, 39 L. Ed. 2d 147 [1974]). Collective bargaining also cannot be used to WAIVE rights or obligations that laws impose on either party. For example, an employer may not use collective bargaining to reduce the level of safety standards it must follow under the Occupational Safety and Health Act (29 U.S.C.A. § 651 et seq.). Furthermore, the collective bargaining agreement is not purely voluntary. One party’s failure to reach agreement entitles the other to resort to certain legal tactics, such as strikes and lockouts, to apply economic pressure and force agreement. Moreover, unlike commercial contracts governed by state law, the collective bargaining agreement is governed almost exclusively by federal LABOR LAW , which determines the issues that require collective bargaining, the timing and method of bargaining, and the consequences of a failure to bargain properly or to adhere to a collective bargaining agreement.

Although each has roots going back as far as the mid-nineteenth century, the two largest unions in the United States, the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), did not flourish until the early 1960s. Until that time, public employee unions were restricted and did not have the right to bargain collectively. After President Kennedy issued Executive Order 10988 in 1962 that granted federal employees the right, many states followed suit and enacted legislation that allowed their public employees, including teachers, to organize.

The teachers’ unions were modeled on the industrial labor unions that won their rights to organize in the 1930s. The early days of the labor movement were contentious and even violent, and industrial employers had the upper hand. Passage of the Norris-LaGuardia Act of 1932 and the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) of 1935 ensured that labor unions and their members were protected and their First Amendment constitutional right to peaceable assembly was assured.

By the early twenty-first century, the power of industrial unions had waned and employees in public sector unions outnumbered those in the private; 35.9 percent of public employees belonged to unions in 2012 while only 6.6 percent of private employees did ( U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2013 ). In 2010–11, the nation's two largest teachers’ unions boasted a combined membership of 4.6 million ( Winkler, Scull & Zeehandelaar, 2012 ).

The desire for a fair wage and improved working conditions are two issues that spawned the labor unions for both industrial workers and public sector employees including teachers and government workers. Consequently, in the 1960s, state laws were written that defined negotiable topics for public employees and laid out the often complex processes for forming, joining, and operating a union.

Negotiable issues vary from state to state but almost always include salaries and benefits, but other items such as evaluation and grievance procedures, job assignments, and education-related issues such as academic freedom and student discipline. Local units of the larger national and state union organizations are responsible for bargaining with local school districts, although some states, such as Oregon and Rhode Island (McComb, 2000; “Report Submitted,” 2004), have explored state-wide negotiations.

Although membership in the large unions is not growing so rapidly and they have been challenged by non-union organizations, they are still a force. In June of 2007, the Missouri Supreme Court ruled that public employees in that state had the right to engage in collective bargaining, which overturned 60 years of legal precedent (Honawar, 2007a). On the other hand, as of 2009, twenty-three states had right-to-work statutes to counteract what is known as union security (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics). Teachers in those states are not compelled to join a union.