A group of workers that act together for mutual benefit
How does it internally work?
Each can organise in its own wat
How can a union make the affiliated company do stuff to benefit the union(why can"t a company just say: f*ck off to their demands)?
Because there's a large difference between the bargaining power a single employee has than all of them together. If one employee says "give me the weekend off or I stop working" the company will fire him, lose a small bit of productivity temporarily, hire one guy and have someone train him, in a short while they're up again to the same productivity level and that's that. If all of the workers say at the same time "give us the weekend off or we stop working" the company can't fire everyone, I mean, they can, but it will take them a long time to hire the same amount of people, then hire external people to train them, then wait until they get up to speed and produce the same amount of work the previous guys did, and in the meantime they produce 0 so they're burning money and missing deadlines... In other words, it's cheaper for the company to talk to the union than it is to have to fire everyone.
Also, a union has members that do the same job but don't work at that specific company, so in this hypothetical dispute, not only do they lose all their unionised workers already on the pay role, but it's harder to hire replacements as well.
Yes, some unions do that, but not all. Some are company or situation specific.
A group of workers that act together for mutual benefit
Each can organise in its own wat
Because there's a large difference between the bargaining power a single employee has than all of them together. If one employee says "give me the weekend off or I stop working" the company will fire him, lose a small bit of productivity temporarily, hire one guy and have someone train him, in a short while they're up again to the same productivity level and that's that. If all of the workers say at the same time "give us the weekend off or we stop working" the company can't fire everyone, I mean, they can, but it will take them a long time to hire the same amount of people, then hire external people to train them, then wait until they get up to speed and produce the same amount of work the previous guys did, and in the meantime they produce 0 so they're burning money and missing deadlines... In other words, it's cheaper for the company to talk to the union than it is to have to fire everyone.
Also, a union has members that do the same job but don't work at that specific company, so in this hypothetical dispute, not only do they lose all their unionised workers already on the pay role, but it's harder to hire replacements as well.
Yes, some unions do that, but not all. Some are company or situation specific.