What does it mean, in the US, to say that people are “allowed”, legally, to form unions?
What used to happen that no longer happens as a result of laws protecting the existence of unions?
I know that union members used to get assaulted etc. But presumably there are laws against assault. What I’m asking is specificall what it means to say people are allowed to form unions, in a formal, legal sense. Why isn’t this covered by free association, for example? And for another example, what can unions do now that they couldn’t legally do before union protection became the law?
In Texas, teachers are not allowed to form a union. What does this mean? What, specifically, is prohibited? If teachers use facebook to coordinate a walk-out with each other, have they broken a law? Or what?
Here’s what the employee handbook looks like in a world where unions have no legal protections:
1: This company does not recognize any trade union for the purpose of collective bargaining. All employees must negotiate the terms of their employment individually.
2: Any employee suspected of union organizing activity or associating with union organizers, on or off company premises, will be fired without warning. Additionally, the names of suspected organizers will be provided to other employers in the area for their protection.
Generally it means that a) employees have the right to get together and vote to have a union represent them in bargaining for contracts, work rules and so on, and that b) employers can not fire employees solely because they join a union.
When Texas says that teachers aren’t allowed to form a union, it means that the employer (let’s say the school district) won’t recognize the union as the bargaining agent for the teachers.
As to whether a teacher in Texas breaks a law when they walk out, I don’t know. In Missouri, teachers are allowed to be represented by a union, but they are forbidden by law to strike under any circumstances, and union or not, a Missouri teacher who walks out is violating both the law and the contract, and can be fired.
In other words, just what Cosmic Relief said more bluntly than me.
[ol]
[li]Employers can not fire employees for associating with (or being) union organizers. “Freedom of association” only prohibits the government for restricting association through government power, not employers using the threat of firing to do the same.[/li][li]Establish the conditions under which a union is deemed to be legitimate, and in that case the employer must accept the union as a bargaining intermediary for the employees.[/li][/ol]
Before unions came to be protected, what prevented someone, legally, from saying “I defer to whatever X says concerning negotiations of the terms of my employment–and if you (the employer) don’t like that, then me and a bunch of other people who also defer to X will stop coming to work.”
Does the legal protection of unions amount to saying you can’t be fired for being in a union?
Yes people were fired for joining a union. And much more. The police and army was used to break strikes. And the company goon squads. I could be dangerous to go on strike.
The labor act does more than just give employees the right to form a union. It sets up how a union can be formed. The rules for calling for an election. The rules that both the union and employeer have to work under. And if the employees win the election the rules on how the barganing is conducted.
Both employeers and unions have recieved unfair labor rulings.
At one time (I am not sure about now) it was against the law for US government employees to strike. Presedent Reagan fired all the air trafic controllers when they went on strike.
There was no legal prohibition against that. What prevented it was company policy and behavior.
Usually, companies could pretty easily kill even modest stages of organizing, just by threatening to fire someone for even being suspected of having union ties. This was in the days before internet and cell phones, so it was very difficult to conceal the organization of large groups of people without the company’s spies from knowing about it.
If it were reducible to one simple statement there wouldn’t be libraries full of books on labor law. But it’s hard for unions to exist when companies can threaten people for joining them, and companies aren’t even require to acknowledge that a union exists. The law eliminates those two major stumbling blocks and then sets out a framework explaining the rights and responsibilities of both parties for negotiating.
I was under the impression that everywhere in the U.S. a private employer may not fire or take any other adverse action against an employee for trying to form a labor union.
And I was further under the impression that if the workers voted to form a union and followed proper procedure, the private company had to recognize that union and negotiate with it.
I believe that state and federal government workers CAN be exempted, so while Texas and Missouri don’t allow teachers to form unions, they certainly do in West Virginia and are a very powerful political force.
I believe that this is correct. Freedom of association does not protect your right to belong to organizations that don’t like you because of your outside activities.
For example, some Christian churches will excommunicate you or revoke your membership if they find out that you are a Freemason. The church has a right to decide it’s membership. Nobody is saying that you can’t legally be a Freemason, but then nobody is saying that a church can’t have a “You can’t be one of us and a Freemason at the same time” policy.
The significant legal difference is that there are now laws restricting certain actions by employers, where before there were no laws.
Now, a vein of your questions have been how different were things, what stopped a group of employees from going to their employer and saying “deal with us or we will strike.” The answer is that certainly in American history you had major union movements prior to union protections, and depending on the circumstances of the employer, sometimes yes the employer did have to deal with that union.
However what they could often do is just refuse to negotiate and use overwhelming physical force to bring scabs in, and often the government would support this.
Additionally, employers could fire trouble making employees for union organizing, which if done early and correctly could stop unionization in its tracks.
By saying employers cannot fire someone simply for organizing a union, and saying employers have to negotiate with properly certified unions, you basically have created a legal right to form and participate in unions that an employers normal rights as employer cannot override.
However some large employers have been known to just permanently close entire facilities if they are becoming unionized, and there are no legal protections against that.
Before this goes any further, I object to your use of the perjorative ter, “scabs.” It’s demeaning and insulting to people who took o honroable work - and generally implies that somehow holding a job and unionizing makes you somehow greater morally than the man who gets hired after you and doesn’t.
When you say, “overwhelming physical force,” too, you also ignore that it was neccessary because the union decided they just wouldn’t let business continue and would use violence to keep people out when the employer decided that the workers weren’t really worth it. The history of the labor movement isn’t exactly covered in peace or honor by any party.
At one time union organizers could be charged with conspiracy to increase wages.
You could be charged with criminal conspiracy. So not only did they not have legal protections, their activities were in some instances considered to be illegal.
Scab is not a judgmental term when used by me in this circumstance. I’m generally extremely anti-union, and I just use the term scab because it is the historically understood term for what I’m talking about. Yes, it is a pejorative, but lots of terms are pejorative and are still widely used by all parties. Yankee has been widely used as both a happily accepted self-descriptor and a pejorative.
Companies sometimes refuse to negotiate with the union. Do you remember the movie Norma Ra. It was about the Stevens company and the start of its fight against the union. The movie ends with the workers winning the election. Funny thing about the movie was where it ended, because the Stevens company resisted sitting down at the table with the union for 10 years. They just paid their unfair labor fines $50 and went about business as normal. After the movie came out then they finally signed a contract.
What it means is when a election is won only the union that won the election has the leagal right to negotiate a contract with the employer for the employees. It stops companys from forming company union and claiming the outside union is not necessary.
IANAL but when I read the NLRA it seems pretty clear that the intent of Congress was to ensure freedom of association for union organizers so long as that association was carrying out duties which are protected by the act.
The big problem with your OP is a fundamental misunderstanding of the difference between “allowed” and “forbidden”. Unions were never, and are not now, specifically “allowed”, they didn’t need to be. They were never forbidden in the first place. Rather the companies in question eventually were “forbidden” from the sort of “strike-breaking” activities that they were previously “not forbidden” from doing. In the US, you are “not forbidden” from doing anything that has not been specifically “forbidden” by law. In other words, the gov’t cannot decide to “allow” us to do something. They have to specifically “forbid” us from doing it, if they don’t want it done.
From outside the US, here’s what laws against unions used to look like in Quebec. With that understood, it’s not surprising that Quebec has some of the largest and most powerful unions in Canada at this stage…