Collective Bargaining

Joining together with other like-minded people often makes it possible to accomplish objectives that elude individuals acting alone. This is particularly true when employees seek to influence their powerful and well-organized employers. The institution of collective bargaining recognizes the value of employees banding together to deal with their employers and the fact that the desires of employees and employers sometimes clash. Both employers and employees care a great deal about and are apt to disagree on wages, hours, and many other terms and conditions of employment.
Collective bargaining provides employees with representation, greater power in dealing with their employers, and a means of resolving issues in ways that meet the requirements of both parties. Labor unions play a critical role in collective bargaining by represent employees in their dealings with employers. Employees have the opportunity to choose, by majority rule, whether they want to have union representation.
Unions negotiate with employers to obtain labor agreements-contracts specifying the wages and many other terms and conditions of employment for the employees they represent. Then, unions have an ongoing role in representing employees, including filing grievances when disputes arise about whether employees’ contractual rights have been violated. There is much to recommend about collective bargaining. Providing employees with a means of influencing important workplace issues that directly affect their well-being is entirely consistent with our democratic values.
Rather than having to accept their employers’ dictates or quit, collective bargaining gives employees the opportunity to exert a strong voice in the workplace. Another laudable feature of collective bargaining is that the parties most directly affected by decisions about terms and conditions of employment get to decide the rules by which they will live. As a consequence, the rules contained in labor agreements can be responsive to the particular needs of individual industries, firms, or workplaces-as opposed to government-mandated one-size-fits-all standards. Despite these and other benefits, collective bargaining is wildly unpopular with U.S. employers.