Employee and Labor Relations

Workers join unions for many reasons, including higher wages, better health and accident benefits, contractual provisions that ensure a safer workplace, greater job security, and a voice in the workplace. Skilled craftspeople were the first workers to unionize. In some trades, the ability of the skilled workers to move from one location to another affected wages within their industries and led to the formation of local unions. The local unions prevented tradespeople from other parts of the country from coming into a certain locale and bringing down wages.

Since the early days of labor unions, strikes have been used to achieve a union’s objectives. Workers who continued to go to work during a strike became known as scabs, and their names were shared among local unions in an effort to ensure that they were not employable. Union members refused to work with nonunion members, and would even refuse to interact socially with them or live in the same boarding houses with them.

Collective bargaining is the process that labor unions and employers use to reach agreement about wages, benefits, hours worked, and other terms and conditions of employment. Good faith bargaining requires the parties to meet at a reasonable time and come to the bargaining table ready to reach a collective bargaining agreement. Mandatory bargaining topics must be negotiated and include compensation and benefits, hours of employment, and other conditions of employment. Pensions, insurance, grievance processes, safety, layoffs, discipline, and union security have also become mandatory bargaining topics. With the fast-changing global economy, job security has become a critical component for collective bargaining.