Opposition to trade unions

Over the years trade unions have accomplished a lot of things, however there has also been a great deal of opposition to them. This opposition has been increasing in recent years as business leaders and politicians have taken to blaming the unions for any number of problems. The result is that unions are far less popular now than they used to be.

It will probably come as no surprise to learn that the biggest opposition to trade unions is from business owners. Obviously the owners and the unions have a conflict of interest in that the union wants to raise wages to the highest possible level while the company wants to keep them as low as possible. The result is that there is usually quite a bit of tension between the two groups. This is usually what leads to strikes which are not good for either party. In most cases the unions and the company have found ways to work together to avoid strikes but this is not always the case.

Over the years most governments have also been opposed to trade unions. This is not universally true of course, in some countries the government is very much pro union. However in most cases the government tends to take the side of the employers. This is in large part because the business owners are very powerful politically and contribute a great deal of money to election campaigns. However there are other reasons for it one of those is the belief that unions hurt the economy.

One of the issues that a lot of developed countries face is that they are losing jobs to developing nations. The reason is that wages are much lower in these countries and a lot of people blame the unions for this. Of course the argument can be made that the reasons have little to do with the unions since the wages that are paid in developing countries are far below the minimum wage so wages would be lower whether their were unions or not. The issue is actually quite complex and there are a lot of reasons that jobs are going overseas but the unions make an easy target and the politicians are generally quick to blame them.

One surprising place that there is a great deal of opposition to trade unions is amongst workers themselves. There have been quite a few studies that show that that union workers receive higher wages largely at the expense of non-union workers. This has led many workers who are not members of unions to be opposed to them. Whether the studies are true or not is open to debate and you could certainly argue that the logical solution would be for the non-union workers to organize. This seems unlikely however as more people are now opposed to unions than have been in the recent past.