Strategies Unions and Employers Use During a Union Organizing Campaign
Labor Unions in the USA first appeared in the end if the XIX century, and experienced a large peak of activity in the 1930s, during the New Deal policy of Franklin D. Roosevelt. These organizations were created in order to achieve a list of important goals, such as protecting the rights of the employees, limiting the unfair actions of the companies towards their employees, acting towards decreasing of the accidents during the work time and so on. However, nowadays the number of labor unions tends to decrease, and experts have different opinions about this tendency, as some say that it would lead to tragic consequences for the working process, and for some experts these changes do not represent any significant outcomes (Bernstein, 1994). However, according to Cole Stangler, participation in unions while working directly affects the strategies that politicians use and the decisions they make (Stangler, 2012). In any case, union campaigns tend to have different effect on the companies because some of them reach the goals they were aiming for, and some of them fail because of the opposition of the employers.
Thus, it is important to find out the different strategies that unions use through organizing their campaigns and analyze the conditions that directly affect their success in order to see how labor unions can possibly bring changes to the working community. On the other hand, it is necessary to learn what employers do while opposing the union campaigns, as this information would allow to choose the most useful strategies for the unions for achieving the highest success in the employers-employees relations.
Strategies That Unions Use During a Union Organizing Campaign
While organizing a specific campaign, unions should understand and clearly see the goal they aim to achieve. It would directly affect the strategy they would need to use during this particular campaign, as different goals may require using different strategies. The following list represents the most common strategies that unions tend to use during organizing their campaigns.
First, some modern unions tend to cooperate with their companies in order to reach their goals. This strategy is rather successful, as choosing negotiating instead of opposing often leads to better results for the both sides of the team, as it happened in Ford, Xerox, and Scott Paper (Bernstein, 1994). In this case, unions and companies try to find a compromise in order to solve a specific problem, however, one of the sides may have to agree to lose some of its privileges to achieve the goal they are aiming for. In any case, the strategy of cooperation tends to be the most useful and successful in the modern corporate world, as it has proven its efficiency for both the unions and employers in such large corporations as Xerox or Ford.
Second, the most popular strategy for the unions, which has been in use since the beginning of the era of the labor unions, is collective bargaining. In this case, the small …
