MGMT 6045 Final Assignment: Unions, Young Workers, and the Future

This essay delves into the crucial role of unions in improving the lives of young workers, emphasizing benefits such as overtime pay, minimum wage, and health and safety regulations. It argues that unions are vital for the future generation entering the workforce, especially given the increasing prevalence of part-time jobs and student debt. The essay explores how unions protect employees from harassment and discrimination, ensure fair treatment, and promote healthy employer-employee relationships. It also discusses the challenges unions face in attracting and educating young workers about their rights, as well as the importance of adapting to the evolving nature of work. Furthermore, the essay highlights the benefits of unionization for both employees and employers, including improved wages, benefits, and economic activity. The assignment also addresses the author's perspective on the topic and how it evolved throughout the course, incorporating outside research and peer-reviewed journals to support its arguments. The essay concludes by emphasizing the need for unions to adapt and remain relevant to the needs of young workers in the modern labor market.

Running head: IMPORTANT OF UNIONS
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Important of Unions
Name
Institution

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IMPORTANT OF UNIONS
1) Unions make a key difference both in the quality of life and also at the workplace.
Unions provide us major benefits and advantages to all the workers such as overtime pay,
minimum wage Health as well as safety regulations. To me, unions are indeed vital for young
people since, in the coming years, the future generation shall be all about young individuals
entering the labor force (Saez, Schoefer & Seim, 2019). Young people need something to
enhance their working lives. An increase in population by taking into account the working-age
remains almost approximated to slow down in the coming years. The decline in the past years in
the overall performance of young people has made a remarkable increase in global considering
every probable opportunity that comes in the way of this generation. But there remain few
exceptions, in this case, first the future of young people is indeed complicated and unpredictable
because of the increase in part-time jobs, as well as the increasing burden of debt of student, late
retirement of old workers, etc. shall inhibit the young people from developing themselves.
The union plays an important role in improving the quality of life of employees. Other
essential roles that the union plays are that it ensures that the employees receive vacation pay,
parental, and maternity leave. Also, the union protects employees from harassment and
discrimination (Cook, Lorwin & Daniels, 2019). Unions help sustain healthy relationships
between the employee and employer by ensuring the rights remain met about the collective
agreement. Unions positively impact our societies via the work that they do for participating in
charity jobs, social justice, and raising awareness both in a political platform and a workplace
setting.
Unions remain the principal means for employees to protect and organize their rights in
the workplace. The union indeed can make the employees be aware of their rights in the

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workplace. Not every person who accepts employments in any organization fully knows their
privileges and rights that come with the rank. For instance, an employer may attempt to exploit
workers by repudiating them aptly time breaks in a busy work environment, and a large number
of employees shall tolerate this kind of abuse due to fear of being sacked or having their
managers disappointed with them (Allegretto & Mishel, 2016). The collective agreement
safeguards young workers from this kind of abuse by updating them of their legal right as stated
in the constitution (Kincheloe, 2018). Also, the union shall make workers liable for if illness or
injury were initiated due to workplace neglect or abuse. The contract of the unions creates basic
conditions and terms of work. Most unions if not all give employees a voice with the owners of
the business and offer a means to acquire a measure of dignity and security in the job.
Unions are very essential today. It is true that in the global economy, some business
owners resist unions and work's nature is changing. All these people that are against trade unions
do not understand the essential roles unions play to the life of the individual in the workplace.
For example, employees have less power more so when they fight for their rights by themselves,
but acting with other people they may affect real change (Ibsen & Tapia, 2017). Unions remain
the young people watchdogs, using the power that they have to ensure that employees' rights as
stipulated in the constitution are protected. Besides ensuring equitable treatment and fairness,
different employers identify that there remain benefits to providing employees better wages as
well as benefits.
All these issues so that young employees need unions. We clearly understand that when
employees combine as a group in a union, they may change their places of work for the better
mainly by pushing for decent conditions and better pay. Also, unions are a great way of getting
ahead. It has helped more than 250, 000 individuals every year to get the training and learning

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opportunities they require to get on with life (Goodwin & O'Connor, 2016). It is also true that
unions help close gasps of racial wage, by establishing pay transparency, correcting
discrepancies of salary
But, according to some researchers, Unions remain not that effective linking with the
younger generation and educating them about their freedoms and rights within the institution and
therefore this has made these young employees care less about activities linked to the unions
than to older generations in real words (Gülçür & Ilkkaracan, 2016). The administration of the
unions must get into this problem by educating the young generation on their responsibilities and
roles so that that they may embrace as well as learn their rights as employees and understand
themselves better. However, it is very hard to educate most of the young workers to understand
their rights in the workplace because most of them do not prefer to be in the unions at times as
they claim that they can be successful without being in the unions.
Today, youths experience many challenges in the institution or anywhere in the labor
force. The newly employed youths may take a lot of time to get promotion and this represents
one of the key challenges that most of the youth encounter in the workplace (Twenge, 2014). The
employment rate of youth in the generation of today is double the actual average percentage rate
of learners or new graduates migrating from other nations normally don't find job-related to their
areas of specialization. Most of the organizations also prefer to give young workers short term
internships and unpaid internships that given them permanent jobs.
The viewpoint of most of the youth on the role of unions in the workplace is that the
unions fail to perform their duties in certain circumstances. Unions often allow their workers to
bond and work as a group and by this way, unionization plays an important role to increase the
living standard for their workers in the real term. The unionization of employees is quite

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important because it gives employees to acquire ideas from other fellow workers. Today, many
institutions begin to deploy the old employees out thereby creating a conducive environment for
the future young workers.
Some researchers argue that the unions not only protect workers, they also fuel economic
activity (Köhler & Jiménez, 2017). The unions stimulate the economy in that it allows the
average people to accumulate more money to spend. All members of Unions can afford better
food, transportation, and houses. Being paid on average, greater than employees that are not in
the union and having improved benefits for example security, dental and health benefits make
healthier families that may contribute positively to the growth of the economy.
Similarly, unions can help the young individual who normally hates their job because of
the low paid service sector works such as catering, retail, cleaning, and hospitality. The Union
can help call for full employment of employees.
While unions may offer many benefits for young employees, they are also made up of
many advantages for business owners or employers, including strict labor laws governing the
freedom and right of employers or business leaders about unions. The unionization of employees
in the workplace does not show that the relationship between employers and employees will be
improved. Understanding some of the drawbacks of the union for business leaders or employers
shall help people work better and avoid conflicts.
2) Unions are the institution for the employees, which satisfies the basic rights and
interests of the employees within the workplace so that they may enjoy a good lifestyle. Also, it
offers equal opportunity for young people to work in the company. There are some essential
improvements that the union needs to undertake to ensure that they attract more youths into the
unions. First, the union has to make the youths aware of their basic duties and rights linked to

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their specific field and specific jobs. Unions so put more of their effort on young employees
since they are the future generation of this nation who would create the working environment as
well as make it better with the new innovative technology and ideas. This will, in turn, help the
firms to meet their set goals. We reside in a world of globalization and it remains the
responsibility of the union to support the growth of the youths in the workplace. They are
supposed to help many employees in the workplace by fighting for their freedoms and rights.

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References
Allegretto, S. A., & Mishel, L. (2016). The Teacher Pay Gap Is Wider than Ever: Teachers' Pay
Continues to Fall Further behind Pay of Comparable Workers. Economic Policy Institute.
Cook, A. H., Lorwin, V. R., & Daniels, A. K. (2019). The most difficult revolution: Women and
trade unions. Cornell University Press.
Goodwin, J., & O'Connor, H. (2016). Norbert Elias's Lost Research: Revisiting the Young
Worker Project. Routledge.
Gülçür, L., & Ilkkaracan, P. (2016). The ‘Natasha’Experience: Migrant Sex Workers from the
Former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in Turkey 1. In Deconstructing Sexuality in the
Middle East (pp. 199-214). Routledge.
Ibsen, C. L., & Tapia, M. (2017). Trade union revitalisation: Where are we now? Where to
next?. Journal of Industrial Relations, 59(2), 170-191.
Kincheloe, J. (2018). How do we tell the workers?: The socioeconomic foundations of work and
vocational education. Routledge.
Köhler, H. D., & Jiménez, J. P. C. (2017). Spain: a peripheral economy and a vulnerable trade
union movement. Rough waters European trade unions in a time of crises, 61.
Saez, E., Schoefer, B., & Seim, D. (2019). Payroll taxes, firm behavior, and rent sharing:
Evidence from a young workers' tax cut in Sweden. American Economic Review, 109(5),
1717-63.

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Twenge, J. M. (2014). Generation me-revised and updated: Why today's young Americans are
more confident, assertive, entitled--and more miserable than ever before. Simon and
Schuster.
Tyler, G. (2016). Look for the Union Label: History of the International Ladies' Garment
Workers' Union: History of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union.
Routledge.