COLLECTING BARGAINING AND LABOR RELATIONS

Concepts and brief description:

In the working world, with time, three different groups appeared in order to defend different rights and concepts. Those groups are the managers of a structure, the unions of employees, and society. All those groups have different objectives that are often opposed. Their main role is to negotiate with each other in order to find a solution that satisfies everyone.
Managers always look for solutions that have low costs and which raise outputs. They work on avoiding clashes with their employees which are often encouraged by unions. Finally they look for solutions which will let them remain flexible and keep control over rules and schedules.
Unions fight to obtain acceptable work conditions for employees. They want to enroll and represent as many workers as possible because the more employees they gather, the more power, financial resources, and strike power they obtain. Unions also claim higher salaries and stronger rights for employees. They aim at building solidarity among employees.
Society hopes that unions will transform violence between workers and management into negotiations. However, with time, many scholars became worried about union actions because they came to a point where workers have too much power over management.

Emotional hook:

Many criticize the actions of unions against management. However, if unions had not appeared, we probably still would work with bad work conditions and with no rights. Unions created a regulated and structured work area for almost all categories of jobs. Today we should be happy that unions allow their leaders to sit around a table in order to defend workers’ rights and conditions.

Key to elicit discussions:

The situation of the car industry is certainly the best US example which shows that unions are not always the solution to workers’ problems. With years, unions got too much power, gave too many rights to workers which make the production costs go higher, which can be the cause of huge troubles and recession for the US car industry.

Facilitative questions:

Can we really consider today that unions are good things for employees over all? Or can we say that many industries and companies suffer of the rigid rights given to employees?