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To me, fighting for workers rights combines the simple with the incredibly complex. Put simply, unionizing is about raising wages and benefits, maintaining job security, and making sure you have a right to be heard at your workplace. This is all fundamentally true, and unionizing a workplace has proven to do all of those things. Unionizing though, is also about changing our relationship to work, and to our employers.
In a country where influence is directly related to wealth, how can we expect workers, who on average don’t even have a spare $400 in case of an emergency, to stand up to their corporations who may have hundreds of millions to spare? This is no exaggeration. It is estimated that every year companies in America spend over $400 million just to ensure that their workers don’t enjoy their right to collective bargaining. There’s a reason someone’s boss is willing to spend so much to make sure they don’t unionize. However much a company may spend to union-bust, that’s because they probably know they’d have to spend even more on the higher wages, vacation days, retirement and healthcare plans, and more, that their employees would be able to fight for with a union.
Imagine there are two employees, who have the same job, with the same experience and education level, but the only difference is that one is covered by a union contract, and the other isn’t. The one covered by a contract will earn 10 percent more than the other one because of their unionized status alone. But unions don’t just benefit people who are in unions. States with high levels of union density have higher minimum wages, higher salaries, and higher rates of insurance coverage compared with the average.
We make our communities, our states, and our country a better place when we unionize.
Eric Barber
Brewer