Labor Laws and Unions
The company that I chose to look at the unionization was American Airlines. American Airlines is a Fort Worth-based AMR Corp. is the parent of commercial carrier American Airlines. For more than 50 years, Tulsa has been a key part of the company's operations as the home of its largest maintenance facility. Today, the plant employs about 7,000 workers in the Tulsa area. I believe this a good company to look at because of the benefits that American Airlines employees can receive with the company filing for chapter 11 bankruptcies. The benefits that American Airlines can receive from the Transport Workers Union of America are they have a voice with the company that one single person does not have. With a union they are able to discuss problems that the employees are having with the company and the unions job is to voice those concerns. For employees that are with the union do lose a lot of freedom. For example, if an employee has a lawsuit with American Airlines the Union appoints a lawyer for that employee instead for the employee choosing their lawyer. There are also many benefits of being apart of Transport Workers Union of America. On their website they have resources for their employees that do not understand the bankruptcy that American Airlines have employees benefits because of this for example, if you have a question on who is representing the employees in the bankruptcy and want to make sure they have the best intentions for the employees you can get this I information on the union website and also look at the Grievance packages American Airlines had set in place for their employees. The Transport Workers of America was founded in that was founded in 1934 by subway workers in New, then expanded to represent transit employees in other cities, primarily in the eastern U.S. Now, WU represents ground service employees, maintenance workers, flight attendants and other employees at a number of different airlines, including American Airlines, Northwest Airlines, Continental Airlines, United Airlines, Southwest Airlines, America West Airlines and Alaska Airlines. They organized when the Great Depression hit, public and private management took advantage of the high unemployment rates by offering jobs to people willing to take excessively low wages. This in turn started employees who disagreed with the ideas of this type of management. They started TWU and declared its aim to represent all public transit workers in the city, regardless of craft, and campaigned to reverse a ten percent wage cut that the public transit companies were trying to push through. They said that the increase in wages was justified by the increase in cost of living, limit the workweek to forty hours and hire more workers to eliminate the speedup and to establish safe and sanitary working conditions. The union proceeded clandestinely, forming small groups of trusted friends in order to keep informers at bay, meeting in isolated locations and in subway tunnels. They had one bargain process that has shown to be a winning formula. In the mid 1940’s. TWU’s first victory for airline workers was the 40-hour workweek. Employees were working a normal week of 48 hours with time and a half paid for overtime. TWU quickly secured the 40-hour workweek with no loss of pay for Pan Am workers. In the mid-1940s, TWU organized new locals in Miami, Florida; San Francisco, California; and New York to represent ground service employees. In September 1945 TWU signed a historic contract with Pan Am. I believe that union bargaining has a huge role in the organization with a union. That with a union employee has more bargaining power then if it is one person trying to fight a big cooperation. With a union you get backing from your peers and people who want to look at the best interest of the employees. Like I stated earlier there are many benefits of joining a union and the effect that it has on the company is that employees have a greater voice with a group then an individual.

Refrences

Transport workers union of america. (2012). Retrieved from http://www.twu.org/