For decades, there has been an ongoing movement with the sole aim of trying to balance the rights of employers and the rights of employees. It’s a hard line to find the spot where neither employees and employers are taking advantage of one another, but thankfully we’ve come a long way since these movements started way back when.
There are plenty of examples where both employees and employers have been treated unfairly, either by management or trade unions, but today we’re going to highlight three textbook examples that will give you a very clear idea of what an unfair labor practice looks like.
Management Interfering with Union Organization
The entire purpose of a union is to make sure workers are able to decide what they want and their terms for working so they can bring these proposals to their management structures. Let’s say a factory has rather dangerous elements and workers have to use gas masks to protect themselves from fumes.
The union may decide that maintenance needs to be carried out regularly on the masks and health checkups need to be offered by the company to protect the health of the worker. This, of course, would be at the expense of the company. However, if management were involved, they could manipulate the union to save money, thus the employees are ultimately losing out on their democratic status.
If this kind of invasion is allowed to go on for a long period of time, it creates a very biased working environment for workers and traps them where they are in terms of rights and flexibility, which can lead to all manner of issues down the line, namely the company becoming a corrupt place to work.
Management Bullying Employees
Imagine a situation where an employee is being mistreated by a team leader within a company, and they complain to management and the union about what is going on. This is entirely within the employee’s rights, but let’s say the management is aware of what is going on, and now makes the employee’s life much more difficult because they’re bitter about the complaint.
There are a ton of knock-on effects to this happening, such as future employees not wanting to make a complaint since they fear they may be bullied or driving the employee out completely so that the complaint is dropped and no longer has to be dealt with. This is a prime example of unfair labor practices where companies manipulate their power to take advantage of workers.
Unions Bullying Workers
In a situation where a union is picket-lining a business, there are situations where workers within the union may bully other workers who cross the picket line into work since they’re not joining them on their cause. This is completely unfair to the employee because the entire purpose of a union is to promote the fact that everyone gets a choice and doesn’t have to be forced to do things they don’t want to do.
Summary
As you can see, there are a vast number of ways in which a labor practice within a business can be unfair, and it’s not just employers being unfair to employees, but it can be from employees to other employees, and even employees to employers, and it’s vital that everyone involved in a business is on the look out for corruption.
