Labor Union

Definition: Labor Union

Labor Union

Noun

1. An organization of employees formed to bargain with the employer; "you have to join the union in order to get a job".

Specialty Definitions: Labor Union

Domain	Definitions
Medicine	A confederation or league of independant individuals (as nations or persons) for some commun end or purpose. Source: European Union. (references)
Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits.

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Specialty Definition: Labor union

(From Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia)

A labor union (American English) or trade union (British English) is a commercial entity consisting of employees or workers having a common interest, such as all the assembly workers for one employer, or all the trades workers in a particular industry. The union is formed for the purpose of collectively negotiating with an employer (or employers) over wages, hours and other terms and conditions of employment.

History

The concept of labor 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 labor movement arose as an outgrowth of the disparity between the power of employers and the powerlessness of individual employees.

Labor unions were illegal for many years in most countries. There were severe penalties for attempting to organize labor unions, up to and including execution. Despite this, labor unions were formed and began to acquire political power, eventually resulting in a body of labor law which not only legalized organizing efforts, but codified the relationship between employers and those employees organized into labor 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 often considered to be a human rights abuse. Most democratic countries have many unions, while most authoritarian regimes do not.

Unions not guilds

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 labor, not the tools or materials they work on. While industrial era unions could and often did consist of highly skilled factory workers, one of the radical breaks with the past was that unions could be constituted for essentially unskilled workers, even poor agricultural labourers.

Shop types

Companies that employ workers with a union generally operate on one of several models:

In the closed shop, a business may only hire workers who already belong to the union (but see below).
In the union shop, a business may hire anyone, but workers must join the union within a designated amount of time after they start work (this is known as a "closed shop" in British English)
In the agency shop, workers may choose to not join the union, but must pay a fee to the union for its services in negotiating their contract.
In the open shop, a business may employ anyone it likes, regardless of their union status, and workers are not required to associate with a union at all.

The Problem of International Comparison

As labor law is very diverse in different countries, so is the function of Labor Unions. For instance in Germany, only open shops are legal. This affects the function and services of the union. On the other hand, German unions have played a greater role in management decisions through participation in corporate boards and co-determination than have unions in the United States.

In addition, unions have very different relationships with political parties in different countries. In many countries unions are integrally associated with a particular political party, usally those which are left-wing or socialist. In the United States, by contrast, while the labor movement is historically aligned with the Democratic Party, the labor movement is by no means monolithic on that point; the International Brotherhood of Teamsters has supported Republican Party candidates on a number of occasions and the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization endorsed Ronald Reagan in 1980, shortly before he destroyed it and banned all of its striking members from employment as air traffic controllers in 1981. In the United Kingdom the labor movement's relationship with the Labour Party is fraying as Party leadership embarks on privatization plans at odds with workers' interests.

Finally, the structure of employment laws affects unions' roles. In many western European countries wages and benefits are largely set by governmental action. The United States takes a more laissez faire approach, setting some minimum standards but leaving most workers' wages and benefits to collective bargaining and market forces.

Trade Unions in Britain

The legal status of trade unions in the United Kingdom was established by a Royal Commission, which agreed that the establishment of the organisations was to the advantage of both employers and employees. Most British unions are members of the TUC, the Trades Union Congress, which is the country's sole national trade union center.

Labor Unions in the US

Most labor unions in the United States are members of the AFL-CIO, or the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations. The Taft-Hartley Act, passed in 1947 over the veto of President Harry Truman, severely limits the powers of unions in the United States, and remains in effect. Closed shops are forbidden; union shops are allowed within the limits allowed by the statute and subject to additional conditions imposed by the National Labor Relations Board and the courts. Jurisdictional strikes (where two unions each claim work that they believe should be assigned to the workers they represent) and secondary boycotts (boycotts against an allegedly neutral company that does business with another company with which a union has labor dispute) were made illegal. Unions are no longer allowed to donate money to federal political campaigns.

Most importantly, the bill provided the executive branch of the Federal government with the ability to obtain legal strikebreaking injunctions if an actual or impending strike "imperiled the national health or safety", a test that has been in practice interpreted loosely by the courts.

Many US unions lost much of their prestige when links to organized crime were discovered. Union membership has been steadily declining for the past decade or so in all but the public sector (that is, unions of government employees).

Other

Some countries such as Sweden have strong, centralized unions, where every type of work has a specific union, which are then gathered in large national unions. The largest Swedish union is LO, Landsorganisationen. LO has over 2.1 million members, which is more than a fifth of Sweden's population. The largest organization of trade union members in the world is the Brussels-based International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, which today has 231 affiliated organisations in 150 countries and territories, with a combined membership of 158 million.

News

There are several sources of current news about the trade union movement in the world. These include LabourStart and the official website of the international trade union movement Global Unions.

See also Salting, Labor law, List of labor unions, strike

Source: adapted by the editor from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia under a copyleft GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) from the article "Labor union."

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Synonyms: Labor Union

Synonyms: brotherhood (n), trade union (n), trades union (n), union (n). (additional references)

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Crosswords: Labor Union

English words defined with "labor union": craft union ♦ featherbedding ♦ Hoffa ♦ industrial union ♦ James Riddle Hoffa, Jimmy Hoffa ♦ open shop, organised, organized ♦ perestroika ♦ self-organisation, self-organization, sister ♦ union card, Union joint, union representative, unionised, unionized ♦ vertical union ♦ yellow-dog contract. (references)

Specialty definitions using "labor union": BUSINESS REPRESENTATIVE, LABOR UNION ♦ independent union ♦ LABOR EXPEDITER, labor relations representative, Labor Unions ♦ MANAGER, BENEFITS, manager, employee benefits, manager, employee services, MANAGER, FLIGHT KITCHEN, manager, human resources, MANAGER, LABOR RELATIONS, MANAGER, PERSONNEL, manager, personnel services ♦ NOBLE ♦ payroll clerk, chief, personnel administrator ♦ SANDWICH-BOARD CARRIER, SUPERVISOR, PAYROLL ♦ timekeeper supervisor ♦ unaffiliated union, Union membership. (references)

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Commercial Usage: Labor Union

Domain	Title
Books	New Jersey Labor Union 2001: New Jersey Business Source Book (New Jersey Business Source Book. Vol 2: New Jersey Labor Unions) (reference) (more book examples)
Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits.

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Image Slideshow: Labor Union

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Non-Fiction Usage: Labor Union

Subject	Topic	Quote
Business		As mentioned earlier, both of Korea's leading labor unions have called upon the government to scrap its reform plans, "claiming that overseas sales would not only deepen the national economy's dependency on outside economies, but also raise power rates at home." In another statement released by a unified energy-related labor union, one representative announced that "the reorganization of the power industry that the government is promoting now amounts to giving up the sovereignty of the nation's security and energy sources. (references)
Civil Liberties	Swaziland	In January police arrested 15 labor union and political group members for organizing protest actions and for political association. (references)
Economic History	Japan	Labor union membership is about 12 million. (references)
	Tunisia	THE RIGHT TO FORM A LABOR UNION IS PROTECTED BY LAW. (references)
Political Economy	Ireland	The issue of mandatory trade union recognition remains high on the Irish labor union agenda. (references)
	Western Sahara	The Polisario-sponsored labor union, the Sario Federation of Labor, is not active in the Western Sahara. (references)
	Bahamas	There is little history of political violence or instability in The Bahamas, although semi-violent labor union protests erupted in early 1999 over Government plans to downsize the phone company. (references)
Political Rights	Chad	According to human rights groups, local authorities in Abeche, Ati, Chokoyan and N'Djamena arrested and beat observers from the Chadian Human Rights Collective and from the Labor Union Collective. (references)
	Poland	The Government formed after free and fair elections in 1997 was a two-party coalition composed of the center-right Solidarity Electoral Action (AWS) party anchored by the Solidarity Labor Union and the Centrist Freedom Union (UW), also with origins in Solidarity. (references)
	Suriname	President Venetiaan formed a cabinet from members of the New Front coalition, comprised of the NPS, a predominantly Creole party; the Progressive Reform Party, a predominantly Hindustani party; the Suriname Labor Party, a political wing of the largest labor union; and Pertjaja Luhur, a predominantly Javanese party. (references)
Women	Sweden	A third option, and by far the most common, involves settling allegations with the employee's labor union as mediator. (references)
	China	For example, at Fudan University in Shanghai, the Women's Study Center with the support of Shanghai's labor union has established a hot line to inform workers, mainly women, of their legal rights. (references)
	Spain	A 1998 study of 100 labor union contracts revealed that 38 contracts failed to use gender-neutral language, 22 employed gender-specific job titles resulting in the imposition of discriminatory wage differentials (i.e., the salary of a male secretary, "secretario," was 13 percent higher than that of a "secretaria" in one food processing industry contract), and only 17 addressed the problem of sexual harassment. (references)
Worker Rights	Slovenia	A third, much smaller, regional labor union operates on the Adriatic coast. (references)
	Taiwan	During the year there were no reports of political interference in labor union affairs. (references)
	Brazil	Intimidation and killings of rural labor union organizers and their agents continued to be a problem. (references)
Source: compiled by the editor from ICON Group International, Inc.; see credits.

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Frequency of Internet Keywords: Labor Union

The following statistics estimate the number of searches per day across the major English-language search engines as identified by various trade publications. Hyperlinks lead to commercial use of the expression at Amazon.com.

Expression	Frequency per Day
labor union	893
history of labor union	48
global labor union	13
national labor union	11
california labor union	10
labor union trend	9
international labor union	8
credit department federal labor union	7
labor union benefit	7
climate global labor union	6
Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits.

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Modern Translations: Labor Union

Language		Translations for "labor union"; alternative meanings/domain in parentheses.
Albanian		sindikatë punëtorësh (labour union). (various references)

Arabic		‏إتحاد العمال. (various references)

Dutch		vakvereniging (corporation, labour-union, syndicate, trade union, trade-union), vakbond (affiliated union, labour-union, syndicate, trade union, trade-union). (various references)

French		union, syndicat (labour-union). (various references)

German		gewerkschaft (trade union, tradeunion, trade-union, union), arbeitsverband. (various references)

Italian		sindacato (association, consortium, labour union, syndicate, trade union, tradeunion, union). (various references)

Japanese Kanji		労組 , 労働組合 , レーニン主義 (beggar, homeless, label, lane, layer, layered cut, layered look, layman, layoff, layout, layout-system, lecture, leg guards, leggings, Leghorn, lei, Leninism, leopon, leotard, lexicon, philosophy of life, racialism, racism, rail, rain, rainbow fish, raincoat, rainy, raise, range, ranger, rape, rapier, rare, rare metal, ray, Ray-Ban, rayonne, ray-tracing, record, recorder, recording, recreation, regatta, reggae, regular, regular chain store, regular member, regulation, Regulus, requiem). (various references)

Japanese Katakana		レーバーユニオン , ろうくみ, ろうどうくみあい, ろうそ. (various references)

Pig Latin		aborlay ionunay.(various references)

Portuguese		união dos trabalhadores (laboured), direitos trabalhistas. (various references)

Russian		профсоюз (labour union, trade union). (various references)

Serbo-Croatian		radnički sindikat (labour union). (various references)

Spanish		sindicato (labour union, syndicate, trade union, union). (various references)

Thai		สห� าพแรงงาน. (various references)

Turkish		işçi sendikası. (various references)
Source: compiled by the editor from various translation references.

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Anagrams: Labor Union

Scrabble® Enable2K-Verified Anagrams
	Words within the letters "a-b-i-l-n-n-o-o-r-u"
	-2 letters: nonlabor.
	-3 letters: linuron.
	-4 letters: albino, annuli, bailor, bunion, burial, inborn, labour, nounal, oorali, robalo, ronion, unborn, unnail, urinal.
	-5 letters: aboil, aboon, aloin, anion, annul, bairn, baron, binal, blain, bolar, boral, boron, bourn, brail, brain, broil, bruin, buran, burin, inurn, labor, libra, lobar, loran, lunar, noria, nubia, oboli, onion, robin, ulnar, unban, unbar, union, urban, urbia, urial.
Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits. SCRABBLE® is a registered trademark. All intellectual property rights in and to the game are owned in the U.S.A and Canada by Hasbro Inc., and throughout the rest of the world by J.W. Spear & Sons Limited of Maidenhead, Berkshire, England, a subsidiary of Mattel Inc. Mattel and Spear are not affiliated with Hasbro.