This week I decided to dive deeper into labor unions. Labor unions are designed to protect the association of labor workers and help with pay, work conditions and rights. There are many pros to labor unions, most commonly they tend to raise the wages for those workers that are a part of the union. Sometimes they often see raises in benefits, working conditions, and scheduling. These unions tend to come into play when workers are facing very harsh working conditions, or are severely underpaid. Unions can be great for these situations and bringing awareness and change to the workers who are being put into a tough spot. There are also some cons to labor unions as well. Obviously, these unions cause huge worker shortages during the time of action. They can also make it harder for the best of the best workers to get promoted as fast as they could be, and makes it harder to get rid of the worst workers. Many also believe that labor unions actually increase the long term costs of businesses making them less competitive in the long run. This also would be a negative for buyers because they hare having to spend more on products than they would regularly have to if the costs were not as high.
There are many pros and cons to labor unions and it kind of comes to which side of the workforce you are on. Managers and owners see them as more of a negative, but lower level employees see them as a positive because it looks out for their rights and protects them. When it comes to me joining I think it would depend on my job and where I thought I was going in the company. If I was a lower level employee in tough conditions I would join. If I was on a quick track to upper management I would most likely not join.
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