Empowering Workers: Understanding Labor Unions in Business

1. Vocabulary: define in your book • Labor Union • An organization of workers united to protect and further their rights • Collective Bargaining • Negotiating between workers and the boss. Where the workers speak as one, with the same demands • General Strike • A tactic of unions where they don’t work in order to gain concessions, or agreements from an employer • Sit on, sit down, picket • Arbitration • A legal process where an independent 3rd party rules on an issue between workers and boss • Child Labor • The practice of using children for manual labor • Tenement • A run down apartment building, small. Or, slum.

2. Emergence of Unions • To protect workers from the worst abuses in business • Labor and Environmental conditions atrocious • Only way to improve conditions is through collective bargaining • Workers bargain as one voice • Gives more power to the workers • Wages, conditions, hours, compensation, safety • Uses strikes, slowdowns, boycotts, walkouts as a tactic