Comment by Macha
10 hours ago
At the very minimum, the company acknowledges the union and negotiates with the union for working conditions for union members.
It’s quite common that that also extends to negotiation on salary bands, and it’s also quite common the company then applies the same salary bands to non union employees also, rather than the norm in tech of individual negotiation. Many people think they’re in the group that is negotiating outlier salaries and would lose from this. However, many people with that viewpoint are also wrong about their position in the salary scale.
Sometimes this extends to promotion criteria and some unions push for tenure or seniority based promotions. This may or may not be better than your individual companies specific combination of merit, nepotism, the political clout of your managers and the business criticality of your department.
One thing that happens in the US that is illegal here is some companies agree to becoming a union shop and make joining the union compulsory.
> At the very minimum, the company acknowledges the union and negotiates with the union for working conditions for union members.
By federal law, if a company has a union, the union must represent ALL non-management workers, even those who do not pay dues.
This is obviously fucked up. But this has been union law at the NLRB for a long time.
The fair response: a union should only legally be responsible for representing its members. But these sorts of terrible union laws are the consequence of attempting to destroy them since their creation.
And for those of you who think unions are terrible (capitalists and ilk), what we had before was 'firebomb the business or the bosses house', and basically waging war between capitalists and labor. Unions and legal representation WAS the compromise.
Labor history has always been a bloody and murderous affair. Go look up the history of the pinkertons.
>By federal law, if a company has a union, the union must represent ALL non-management workers, even those who do not pay dues.
This is not true. There can be non-union job classes even if the employer has some unionized employees. Even in different geographic areas you can have one location have class X union and another non-union (eg Starbucks).
What you cannot do, is have a unionized location with union Software Engineer I and non-union Software Engineer I. Sometimes employers try to skirt this and have non-union jobs that are too close to union jobs, and then it's lawsuit time.
The problem there is that if it doesn't represent everyone, the company will simply give better conditions to nonmembers to pressure members to quit their membership. You do still have a way to change the union even if it's involuntarily representing you: just join it and then vote to disband it.