Are Labor Unions Affecting The Economy

Past in the Present: Labor Unions Affecting the Economy A labor union is, as described by Investopedia, “…an organization intended to represent the collective interests of workers in negotiations with employers over wages, hours, benefits and working conditions”. In todays date, some people believe the labor unions hurt the economy when negotiating for a higher salary for the workers. With a higher salary, people work less and that means that the market gets a lower supply. When demanding a higher salary, the equilibrium wage is affected. The equilibrium wage is the state in which supply and demand balance each other. If supply goes down, prices go up. Therefore, a lot citizens consider labor unions as a bad thing in the United States. The

Yet the truth is that America’s public and private unions have been one of the major forces in building a robust and vibrant middle class and have fought over the past century to improve the lives of all Americans in a variety of ways. Many different typed of labor unions have been founded throughout the years. Some of these labor unions in the United States are, The National Education Association Labor of the United states, International Union, The American Federation of Teachers, The International Brotherhood of Teamsters, The United Steelworkers, and the International Association of Machinist and Aerospace Workers. Each of these unions specializes in a different work field. As mentioned before, there are many different types of unions but he most popular in California is the United Farm Workers, founded by Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, and Philip Vera Cruz. Chavez, a former farm laborer itself, fought for the rights of all Latino and

Chavez achieved these things by going on a strike, protesting, doing a boycott, and fasting.
Over the years, labor unions have changed in the fact that its members have decreased in major percentages and women have become more involved in unions for the reason that, in a regular job, they don’t earn the same salary as a man earns. Labor unions have been losing a little bit of power over the years because they don’t have much members as in the nineteenth century. Working conditions on every job in the U.S. are also more stable, and safer, than they used to be so unions have not striven during the past years.
Women’s share of union members has increased markedly in the last three decades, from 33.6 percent in 1984 to 45.5 in 2014. Women represented by union in the United States earn an average of $212 more per week than women in nonunion jobs. In fact, unionized women earn more than nonunionized women in every U.S.