It is not just employers who have power in a business context. The employees who work for them also have some degree of power, for without them, or if all of them refused to work, a company and its profits would deteriorate. Alone, employees all have the power to at least have some weight, or else the employer would not need to have hired them (even overhired workers can still at least inconvenience a company, so they too have power). If they come together to form a union to collectively fight for or maintain livable or merited pay, benefits, and working conditions, the power is enormously increased. Yes, workers' unions are a specific manifestation of employee power, but they must be established as a group, differentiating this issue from the general subject of the previous entry in this series. The power of unions is the power of multiple employees linked together. In some cases, this could entail the power of a massive group of unified workers from the same industry or company, but either allows for greater strength than any one person could tend to have on their own.
A single worker can be exploited in silence. An employer can intimidate or manipulate him or her into not bringing the matter to light, either to the other employees or to the public, and oppressing a single employee is of course easier to carry out than the oppression of a group of employees who all have the same moral and practical concern about their workplace. When employees openly acknowledge their experiences with workplace exploitation whenever applicable (for it is not logically impossible for a company to be free of this mistreatment), and any retalitation or abuse directed towards one employee is more likely to be opposed by others, there is significant potential to ensure the right treatment of workers. The shared connections with other workers that forms a union increases the risk to trampling on employees, as their collective standing amplifies their power to affect a business by leaving companies or making demands.
Unions can strongly deter employers from not only continuing whatever exploitative practices they might already be engaging in, but also from trying to sneakily reintroduce oppressive behaviors or policies that were already confronted or trying new methods. A group of people has more observational capacity than one and more emotional strength to draw from. Moreover, certain individuals might not have personalities that make it easy for them to oppose irrationality and injustice, not in the sense that they do not understand or care, but in the sense that not everyone has the same level of resolve or communication skill. A certain kind of employer might oppress those under them and then take advantage of how some workers might refrain from doing what they can to resolve the problem. Together, employees have a better chance of securing the conditions that are objectively best for them because difficulty with confrontation or articulation is lessened when there are people of different talents to rely on.
This power of unions, like the power of employers or individual employees, can be misused or craved for petty reasons--and some unions might fall into corruption similar to that they are supposedly pushing back against in the workplace itself. Hypocrites, egoists, and fools of all other types could be present in a given union. This itself does not mean that unions are inherently oppressive or hypocritical as well, but if the members and leaders of a union were to so choose, even an organization like this could succumb to error. There is, though, not a single kind of power that cannot be pursued with erroneous motivations or applied in irrational ways, so this is not unique to unions out of all the categories of people that can be present in the business world, the other groups being employers, individual employees, and consumers. While it might not always seem like it, the last of these categories, the consumers, have major power of their own which will be addressed next.
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