Take a Moment and Really Think about Unions

2017 has been anything but a successful year for unions. For a multitude of reasons unions have a bad reputation, although it’s thanks to unions that we have labour rights and weekends. Unions are really good at helping individuals deal with institutions that want to exploit their work; and history has proven this time and time again. So why all the hate to unions? It comes from boomers and earlier generations making unions the scapegoat for problems that unions didn’t cause in the first place. Now that inequality is on the rise the trend is reversing.

Vice recently published that unions are cool again and it might have to do with the fact that millennials are facing precarious employment with low wages. Yes, unions are good to fight inequality and we in North America should rethink how we talk about groups of workers uniting against exploitation.

Union members may have a good understanding of those values and the benefits they receive through collective bargaining, but what about those who aren’t in a union?

One piece of good news for unions is the striking disconnect between generations in how they are viewed—a poll in 2015 showed that 57 percent of millennials think of unions positively, versus only 41 percent of baby boomers. Maybe that’s because memories of unions as corrupt are finally fading. Maybe young people are more open to left-wing politics. Or, it could be that, in today’s era of income stagnation and freelance gigs replacing careers with benefits, millennials recognize that they may need to band together in order to secure a piece of the economic pie.

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