The biggest accomplishments of trade unions worldwide

Trade unions have somewhat fallen out of favor in recent years as there are many people who wonder why we still need them. After all there is now plenty of legislation in place to protect workers. People tend to forget however that it was solely because of the trade unions that this legislation came into existence. Remembering what unions have accomplished will help people to understand why they are still important.

Far and away the biggest accomplishment of trade unions has been to massively improve the safety of the worker. In the early days of the industrial revolution safety was not really a major concern for the company, anything that slowed down production hurt profits. Workers were largely deemed to be expendable as a result there were no safety rules or equipment at all. Not surprisingly a lot of workers were killed or injured. In most developed countries this is no longer the case as there are all kinds of regulations in place to protect worker safety. However in a lot of developing nations this remains a problem.

Workers being killed and injured on the job was made even worse by the fact that there was virtually no system in place to make sure that an injured worker or the family of a killed worker was taken care of. There was no workers compensation or insurance. If an employee was injured and no longer able to work he was just let go and left on his own to figure out how to make a living. The unions changed this by forcing the creation of workers compensation to make sure that people who were injured on the job are taken care of.

Another of the big achievements of unions was to get the workday limited. There was a time when workers were expected to work as much as fourteen hours a day six days a week. In some cases they were even expected to work a half a day on Sunday. Reducing this was actually one of the primary reasons that unions were formed. Getting the working day reduced was one of the early goals of the trade unions and this is something at which they were largely successful as the forty hour week has no become standard in most places.

Of course the most widely talked about union achievement has been to increase wages. During the industrial revolution wages declined dramatically as the skill levels required to do the work went down. It got to the point where workers really couldn't live on what they were earning. In many cases factory owners would simply inform the workers that they were cutting wages and anybody who wasn't happy with it was free to leave. The unions have been largely able to change this and force wages up to the point where employees can have a reasonable standard of living.