Unionization 1

Unionization
Tammy Overly
Everest College Phoenix
December 7, 2014

Unionization 2 The labor movement’s status has always been precarious due to America’s love-hate attitude toward organized labor. With the right-to-work laws coming to many states, it will be even more precarious than before. Right-to-work laws allow people to work at a unionized business without joining the union. Today, like a century ago, some citizen passionately believe that unions are crucial bulwarks of freedom, while others feel just as strongly that they are at best outdated and at worst an obstacle to progress. Labor is not merely a commodity, but a special part of the human experience; workers deserve a say in the working conditions of their labor; the right of workers to organize in their own self-interest is a basic human right. During the 1950’s the American economics professor Clark Kerr(2010) observed that “organized labor and management are primarily engaged in sharing between themselves what is, at any one moment of time, a largely given amount of income and power.” Kerr’s words point to the crux of labor history; this is a power game, who will rule the workplace? Some employers have taken the position that managers, as representatives of business owners, should have all the power. The rule of the workplace it that management dictates and workers obey. In today’s workplace there is no right to employment security and no prohibition against unjust dismissal in the private sector such as exists in most other advanced industrial countries. The laws of the U.S. workplace are governed by the doctrine of “employment at will.” There is some protection to ensure that an employee may not be dismissed for clearly