The Role of Unions in Advancing Equality and Promoting Diversity in Essay

The Role of Unions in Advancing Equality and Promoting Diversity in the Workplace - Essay Example The paper tells that trade union began in Europe and subsequently became popular during the industrial revolution, this is due to the fact that there was the lack of necessary skills required to perform most jobs. This lack of skills moved the bargaining power of employment completely to the employers’ region, thus causing workers to be badly treated and poorly paid. Trade union organizations might be made up of professionals, students, the unemployed, apprentices, past workers and individual workers. Major unions strive to provide the best for the members of the company, this includes job security, positive work environment, ability to strike in the event that certain conditions are not adequately met, and salaries and benefits. Larger unions participate politically so as to be influential in legislation that will benefit the represented companies and employees. This may be seen through unions endorsing leaders who promise to have the issues addressed. Unions do have a substa ntial impact on a compensation and work lives of non-unionized and unionized workers. Unions do raise wages of its unionized workers by roughly 20% and also compensation, including wages and benefits by about 28%. Wage inequality is also reduced by unions due to the fact that unions do raise wages more for low and middle-income workers than for higher-income workers, more for workers in the blue collar industry than for their white-collar counterparts, and more for workers without a college degree, thus reducing the margin between the highly paid workers and those lowly paid. A standard pay is set by strong unions that nonunion employers to follow. For instance, a graduate from high school who is in an un-unionized workplace, but whose industry happens to be 25% unionized is paid around 5% more than a work similar to him working in less unionized industries. Impact of unions upon total nonunion income is to some level as large as that on total union income. Fringe benefits happen to be the most sweeping advantage for unionized laborers.