 |
Business | Industries | Finance | Tax |
| Index: > A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z |
|
|||||
| First Prev [ 1 2 3 ] Next Last |
The political structure and autonomy of unions varies widely from country to country. American and European unions are founded upon democratic principles and leaders are selected through an election process while in China, the union is controlled and run by the state.
Articles related to
the Labor movement
Child labor
Labor in economics
Labor history
Labor law
Labor rights
Labor union
Strike
Edit this template
The concept of trade unions began early in the industrial revolution. More and more people left farming as an occupation and began to work for employers, often in appalling conditions and for very low wages. The labour movement arose as an outgrowth of the disparity between the power of employers and the powerlessness of individual employees.
Unions were illegal for many years in most countries. There were severe penalties for attempting to organize unions, up to and including execution. Despite this, unions were formed and began to acquire political power, eventually resulting in a body of labour law which not only legalized organizing efforts, but codified the relationship between employers and those employees organized into unions. Many consider it an issue of fairness that workers be allowed to pool their resources in a special legal entity in a similar way to the pooling of capital resources in the form of corporations.
Today a government-imposed ban on joining a union is generally considered a human rights abuse. Most democratic countries have many unions, while most authoritarian regimes do not.
Unions are sometimes mistakenly thought to be successors to medieval guilds. Although guilds also existed to protect and enhance their members' livelihoods, guilds were groups of self-employed skilled craftsmen who had ownership and control over the materials and tools they needed to produce their goods. Guilds, in other words, were small business associations.
A union, in sharp contrast, is an organisation of hired workers who, generally speaking, own and control only their own ability to labour, not the tools or materials they work on. While industrial era unions could and often did consist of highly skilled factory workers, a break with the past during the nineteenth century was that unions could be constituted for essentially unskilled workers, including poor agricultural labourers.
Companies that employ workers with a union generally operate on one of several models:
| Politics | Business | Finance |
 |
 |
 |
|