LABOR UNION

Labor Union



Labor Union

Introduction

Several employees of a healthcare organization have been handing out union pamphlets in the parking lot of the hospital. Employees are talking about whether to join the union or not. Some of the managers have joined together and fired employees who were interested in the union to keep the union out. In spite of the fired employees, the NLRB oversees a vote and the unions are voted in (Cockburn, 2004). Union and management start negotiating a collective-bargaining agreement. Management and employees are having a hard time reaching an agreement, and hospital union employees are ready to go out on strike. The strike is scheduled to start tomorrow at 8 a.m. This report will make recommendations for managers to what to do in order to reach an agreement.

Background of Labor Union

It is pertinent to discuss the background of labor union, as this will help management and administration of the organization to understand the rights of the employees, and why formation of the union was legalized by the law. This will help the organization to understand various dynamics of labor union, which ultimately help in negotiating with labors.

Organized labor unions in the United States began to gain power in the 1850s, as industrialization grew in the northern states. While guilds had been present during the colonial era and into the early 1800s, organized unions for all trade workers did not emerge until the 1820s; early attempts to control shift length or women's hours led to some successes (Morris, 2004).

In 1852, the Typographical Union formed the oldest continuing national union in the United States. In 1859, in Philadelphia iron molders created a union, and in 1866, the first national union, the National labor Union, was founded in Baltimore, Maryland. The NLU was a federation of local unions; its initial success was the passage of an eight-hour workday for federal workers. By 1873, the NLU lost power during an economic depression, while the Knights of Labor, a new union, rose to prominence (Gross, 1989).

The Knights of Labor formed in 1869 as a trade union open to women, minorities (in 1883), and immigrants as well as native-born white men. Founder Uriah Stevens, a member of the Garment Cutter's Association, helped bring the union's messages of social revolution—not just economic protection to the public. By the mid 1880s, the Knights of Labor platform of the eight hour work day, the end of child labor, equal pay regardless of gender, age, or race, and the elimination of the private banking system contrasted with the new national union, the American Federation of Labor, which worked with employers on a more pragmatic level with no element of social change in their platform (Millis, 1950).

Although the Knights of Labor experienced some successful strikes, the 1886 Haymarket Square Riot, a labor protest of 1500 workers that turned violent when a bomb exploded and killed eleven people, twisted public sentiment against the Knights of Labor (Cockburn, 2004). The American Federation of Labor, however, stepped in to fill the gap, ...