Curriculum Labor Unions & Collective Bargaining
Labor Unions & Collective Bargaining
How workers organize, negotiate contracts, and use collective power to shape wages and working conditions.
- What Unions Actually Do The basic function of a labor union - turning many individual workers into one negotiating voice. 📄 Read-aloud
- The History of the Labor Movement How industrialization, dangerous factories, and decades of organizing led to the legal right to unionize. 📄 Read-aloud
- Collective Bargaining: How Contracts Get Negotiated The process unions and employers go through to negotiate a binding labor contract. 📄 Read-aloud
- Strikes: The Economics of Withholding Labor Why a strike is fundamentally an economic weapon, and how both sides weigh its costs. 📄 Read-aloud
- Labor Unions: Checkpoint 1 Covers what unions do, the history of the labor movement, collective bargaining, and strikes. 5 questions
- Right-to-Work Laws Explained What right-to-work laws actually change, and the free-rider debate at the center of the argument over them. 📄 Read-aloud
- Union Density and Why It's Declined What union density measures, and the main economic and legal forces behind its decades-long decline. 📄 Read-aloud
- Do Unions Raise Wages? What the Evidence Shows What decades of economic research find about the union wage premium, and its limits and tradeoffs. 📄 Read-aloud
- Public Sector vs Private Sector Unions How government-employee unions differ from private-sector unions in law, leverage, and controversy. 📄 Read-aloud
- Labor Unions: Checkpoint 2 Covers right-to-work laws, union density decline, the union wage premium, and public vs private sector unions. 5 questions
- The Gig Economy's Challenge to Traditional Unions Why app-based gig work doesn't fit the legal category unions were built around, and how organizers are adapting. 📄 Read-aloud
- Union Dues and What They Fund Where union dues actually go, and how they connect back to a union's ability to bargain effectively. 📄 Read-aloud
- Labor Unions Around the World How labor organizing looks different across countries, from sectoral bargaining to codetermination. 📄 Read-aloud
- The Future of Organized Labor Recent signs of renewed organizing energy, and the open questions that will shape unions' next chapter. 📄 Read-aloud
- Labor Unions: Checkpoint 3 Covers the gig economy, union dues, unions around the world, and the future of organized labor. 5 questions
- Monopsony: When Employers Have Market Power What happens to wages when a worker has very few employers to choose from, and how that shapes the case for unions. 📄 Read-aloud
- How a Workplace Unionizes: The Organizing and Election Process The concrete steps a group of workers takes to form a legally recognized union, from first conversations to a certified vote. 📄 Read-aloud
- Union Pension Funds and Their Economic Influence How union-negotiated retirement funds became major investors in their own right, and the tensions that creates. 📄 Read-aloud
- Sectoral Bargaining: An Alternative Model How some countries negotiate labor contracts across an entire industry at once, rather than workplace by workplace. 📄 Read-aloud
- Automation and the Future of Union Jobs How automation reshapes unionized industries, and the strategies unions use to respond to it. 📄 Read-aloud
- Company Towns and Historical Labor Exploitation How some employers once controlled nearly every part of a worker's life, and why that history still shapes labor law today. 📄 Read-aloud
- Trade Unions in India The history and structure of India's trade union movement, its political links, and its role in a largely informal workforce. 📄 Read-aloud
- India's Labour Codes How India consolidated dozens of labour laws into four codes, what they change for workers and employers, and the debate around them. 📄 Read-aloud
- Worker Cooperatives How businesses owned and run by their own workers operate, famous examples like Mondragon and Amul, and their economic strengths and challenges. 📄 Read-aloud
- SEWA: Organising Women in the Informal Economy How the Self-Employed Women's Association built a union, a bank and cooperatives for women working outside formal jobs, and why it became a global model. 📄 Read-aloud