At New Working Majority, we’ve been taking on more and more union clients, and because three of the four of us have never worked for a union, we’ve been having a few Unions 101 sessions so we can understand the landscape and history better. I majored in Labor Studies in college, and took a couple of labor law classes, so I spoke a bit about the federal laws governing unionization in our first session. While I was preparing for that, I was kind of shocked to find that there didn’t seem to be an easily understandable explanation of basic union definitions, the basics on laws that govern unions, and how they came to be. Because it doesn’t seem to exist, I wanted to share the group I came up with for our conversation at NWM. This is not a comprehensive list, it only covers the very basics of federal regulations. Because of the unionization of certain people at the Democratic Party, coordinated campaign, and individual campaigns, the movement just saw a huge new group of staffers become union members themselves, and I want to offer a sort of Labor Law 101 blog to folks who are looking to learn more about their, or other, unions. If there’s interest, I can make this into a series on our blog where I write more about union law in a casual context.
First, let’s start with some basic union and labor definitions:
The first thing to know is the two types of unions. Craft unions represent workers who all do the same kind of ‘skilled’ labor but don’t all work for the same employer. Think carpenters’, plumbers’, and electricians’ unions. These unions bargain with all of the employers with whom their members work more or less at the same time, as opposed to contract by contract, and their bargaining chip is that they’re skilled laborers and if they withhold that labor, it’s not easy for employers to replace them.
Industrial unions represent workers who all work in the same workplace even if they don’t do the same kind of work. Think healthcare, hotel, and municipal workers’ unions. These unions bargain with individual workplaces one contract at a time, and their bargaining chip is that because they cover the entire workplace, even if their labor isn’t considered ‘skilled’, if they withhold it, the workplace can’t function at all.
A collective bargaining unit is a group of workers who are covered under the same collective bargaining agreement, or union contract. These workers must prove that they do the same job function (or similar enough job functions) in order to group them all together in one CBU. In craft unions, because all of the members do the same kind of work, they’re automatically all included in the CBU, adherent to any rules the union has to be eligible for membership (usually working a certain number of hours or going through a union apprenticeship program).
Common CBUs for industrial unions include all the nurses at a hospital, all the janitorial staff in an office building, and all the teachers in a school district. A single union might cover multiple CBUs at one workplace if those two groups of workers don’t perform similar enough job functions to be included in the same CBU. Common examples of that would be a healthcare union covering one CBU made up of the nurses in a hospital and another CBU made up of the housekeeping staff at that same hospital, or a service workers union covering one CBU of all the baggage handlers at an airport and another CBU of all the food service workers at that same airport.
Now that we’ve got the basic definitions down, let’s talk about basic union organizing rights and what laws create and limit them. While not the first law governing unions and organizing, the National Labor Relations Act is definitely the most well known. The law was passed in 1935 as part of FDR’s New Deal program and created the National Labor Relations Board, which oversees all unionization in the U.S. The law also outlines who is allowed to unionize in the U.S., who is explicitly not allowed to, and the ways in which both unions and employers have to act during unionization and contract bargaining efforts.
The law explicitly excludes the following workers: supervisors with final say hiring and firing power (i.e. they can fire/hire without having to ask anyone else for permission), agricultural workers, paid domestic workers, public sector employees, and workers in the rail and air travel industries. Air and rail travel workers have the federal right to unionize, though under the Railway Labor Act which limits the rights of unions to strike. Public sector employees and domestic and agricultural workers have gained the right to unionize and collectively bargain in some states and cities, but still have no federal right to unionization, despite extensive organizing efforts. It’s important to note that the NLRA did not explicitly exclude paid domestic or agricultural workers initially, but was amended before passage to exclude those jobs, which were predominantly held by Black workers at the time, in order to gain votes from southern Democratic Congressmen. Domestic work, which includes home health work, childcare, and housekeeping, is still performed primarily by non-white workers, though it has become increasingly Latine. Agricultural workers are now overwhelmingly Latine and immigrants. These kinds of workers have come up with incredibly creative ways to collectively bargain without having a legally recognized union and have driven some of the most successful worker organizing campaigns in the last few decades, including the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and their Fair Food Program, which I can talk more about in a future blog post.
There now exist types of workers that didn’t exist in 1935, and since the NLRA has never been amended to include new types of workers, individual decisions about whether certain groups of workers can unionize are left to the discretion of the NLRB. Some recent examples include professional video game players, graduate student workers, and campaign workers! NLRB members are appointed by the President, which means that during Republican presidencies, there are huge concessions made to employers by the NLRB. As we’re in the first few weeks of the Trump presidency, one of the many concerns that unions have is that the Trump NLRB will reverse decisions on who can unionize and the labor movement will lose tens of thousands of members, if not more.
In my next blog post, I can go over some of the ways unions were able to win big in the late 1800s and early 1900s and how the Taft-Hartley Act put an end to those tactics, as well as limited unions’ power overall.
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