History of Labor Unions

UNION ESSAY
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HISTORY OF LABOR UNIONS
The labor movement in the United States arose from the need to safeguard workers' collective interests. Organized trade unions struggled for higher pay, more golden hours worked, and improved working practices for those in the manufacturing sector. The labor movement was at the forefront of attempts to end child labor, offer insurance care, and assist sick or retired employees. Nevertheless, the early labor movement was motivated by more than just the immediate work interests of its founders. It held a vision of a just society based on the Ricardian work theory of worth and the republican values of the American Civil war, which promoted social equity, honored honest labor, and emphasized self-reliance and responsible citizenship. Starting in the 1830s with the formation of workingmen's organizations, activists for civil rights launched a series of reform campaigns that lasted throughout the nineteenth century. The National Labor Union, established in 1866, and the Realms of Labor, which peaked in the mid-1880s, were two of the most prominent.
These powers have catastrophic consequences. While union membership in the private sector started to decline in 1955, when unions comprised nearly one-third of the US population, it increased sharply in the early 1980s. By the late 1990s and early 2000s, some prolonged overdue union reactions had slowed and maintained union membership frequency. However, it was still less than one-seventh of the population and just one-twelfth for private sector employment. (Fiorito 2007) On the surface, these political efforts seemed to be at odds with labor unionism, focusing on the collective commonwealth instead of a higher wage, relating to all “manufacturers” rather than only wageworkers, and avoiding the trade union emphasis on strikes and boycotts. However, observers saw little conflict: organized labor addressed workers' urgent needs, while labor restructuring addressed their longer-term goals. Both were considered strands of a particular sequence, with a shared working-class base and, to some extent, a shared leadership.
MEMBERSHIP
According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the union membership rate—the number of pay and payroll employees who belong to a union—was 10.8% in 2020, up 0.5 basis point from 2019, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. The amount of unionized pay and benefits jobs fell by 321,000, or 2.2 percent, from 2019 to 2020, to 14.3 million. Nevertheless, overall pay and benefits jobs fell by 9.6 million people or 6.7 percent. The rise in the union membership rate was due to the grossly imbalanced decrease in overall pay and salary jobs relative to the number of union participants. The union attendance rate was 20.1 percent in 1983, the first year for which comparative union figures became accessible, and there were 17.7 million union employees. The Total Population Survey, a regular aggregate survey of about 60,000 qualified dwellings that obtains information on jobs and unemployment even amongst the nation's residential non-institutional workforce aged 16 and over, collects union representation statistics. (BLS 2021)
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