I recently received an email telling me that the drywallers' union is on strike, and this might cause delay to my condo. (Which isn't a problem - I'm perfectly comfortable in my apartment in the interim and I sincerely hope the people working so hard to build my home get a generous settlement that helps them be comfortable too.)
Googling around the idea, I get the impression that unions in the trades work like I recently learned unions in show business do - the union isn't specific to an employer, all workers who belong to a certain category are members of the union, and the different employers pay them according to the collective agreement for reasons I don't wholly understand but nevertheless am glad work.
Since they're going on strike, I assume they're in negotiations for a new collective agreement and the negotiations have stalled. (At least, this is the only situation I'm aware of that leads to a strike). Which raises a question I never thought about before: who's on the other side of the negotiating table?
The unions with which I'm personally familiar are all for the employees of a single employer. You work for that one employer, you're part of that union. You switch to another employer, you're no longer part of that union. So in collective agreement negotiations, the union is negotiating with/against the employer.
But since the drywallers and others like them (and the show business unions too) seem to represent everyone doing the same job for all different employers, who are they negotiating with/against? Is there someone who represents all the employers? A union of employers of unions?
Or is there a word for this kind of union where the workers work for many different employers, so I can google it better? (Non-employer-specific union was fruitless, and googling around the idea of multi-employer union kept getting interference from US health insurance plans. Also, I think Google's auto-complete feature is anti-union. But doing the same searches with DuckDuckGo just gives me even fewer Canadian results on the first page.)
7 comments:
In the USA anyway, the terminology you are looking for is "craft union" vs. "industrial union." The drywallers in your example would probably be a craft union.
They're called trade unions, and members are trade unionists (although they may or may not identify as such).
Oops, missed a question.
The other side of the table might be an association of developers, or a specific developer, one of the huge companies like Morguard.
Even though this union is a trade union, the people on strike are (probably) members of a specific local, and that local is on strike against one specific employer. In this sense, your drywall trade union is just like any other employer-specific union.
There are also locals that have many different units, each with a separate employer. Each unit might be very small, but the composite local can be very large and have many separate collective agreements.
Anything else, please ask!
Even if my drywallers are employer-specific, what happens when the union is industry-wide? For example, a few years back all the TV writers went on strike. All of them, for every single TV show, all at once. Who was on the other side of their table.
The TV writers were on strike against all the big media companies. They (media co's) have a consortium.
Wiki:
The strike sought increased funding for the writers in comparison to the profits of the larger studios. It was targeted at the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AoMPTP), a trade organization representing the interests of 397 American film and television producers The most influential of these are eleven corporations: CBS (headed by Les Moonves), MGM (Harry E. Sloan), NBCUniversal (Jeffrey Zucker), The Weinstein Company (Harvey and Bob Weinstein), Lionsgate (Jon Feltheimer), News Corp/Fox (Peter Chernin), Paramount Pictures (Brad Grey), Anchor Bay/Liberty Media/Starz (Chris McGurk), Sony Pictures (Michael Lynton), the Walt Disney Company (Robert Iger), and Warner Bros. (Barry Meyer).
So only the bigger employers are at the table? I'm surprised the smaller employer go for it! (As I've mentioned before, I'm glad this kind of system works, but I'm constantly surprised it does.)
Smaller employers tend to pay crap wages, and they usually will not negotiate. Really really small independent producers are barely employers at all. Writers will be working for "experience" or to "build their skills" or (worse) "build their brand". For the drywall guys, it would mean non-union wages, often dangerous working conditions, but no questions asked -- money under the table and/or undocumented workers.
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