Unions and Collective Bargaining
Individual Project 4
Charlotte Broadus
Indiana Wesleyan University
Dr. Edward Sherbert

Unions and Collective Bargaining Individual Project 4
Unions are the backbone of our national employment as the first unions organized in the 1820s were against excessive taxation, and prison labor as competition. Unions stood for public schools and poor and middle-class workers, they argued that the government protected the upper class, employers, and management by allowing them to maintain and at times increase their economic advantage (Moran, 2008). Over the years, unions took on the role as representatives for a group of employees coming together to protect their wages and work environments. Unions fight for the rights and benefits of these workers. Union workers earn 30 percent more than nonunion workers and are more likely to receive health care and pension benefits than those without a union. Unions lead the fight today for better lives for working people, such as through expanded family and medical leave, improved safety and health protections and fair-trade agreements that lift the standard of living for workers all over the world CITATION www11 \l 1033 (www.unionfacts.com). Unions have struggled in recent years due to companies trying to maintain a competitive advantage and take their business outside of the U.S. to reap the lower living costs and cheaper office space CITATION Mor08 \l 1033 (Moran, 2008).
Collective bargaining is a method of mutually determining wages, hours, and terms and conditions of employment through negotiations between representatives of the employer and the union, resulting in a collective bargaining agreement CITATION Loc04 \l 1033 (Lockwood, 2004). We have seen this most recently in the news as the NFL owners and players association have been in negotiations to come up with a new CBA. Luckily, for us football fans, that agreement came recently and we will have a football season.
The advantage of collective bargaining is that the union has greater bargaining power than the individual employee would have in attempting to negotiate the best possible deal CITATION Mor08 \l 1033 (Moran, 2008). Sometimes in representing