Government
Specific countries, especially countries run by Communist parties, while still having unions in name, do not allow for independent trade unions, just as they rarely allow for independent businesses. These state-run trade unions do not function in the same way as independent trade unions and generally do not hold any kind of collective bargaining power, acting to ensure the smooth running of Government industry.
Attempts to reduce the effects of trade unions may include union busting activities by private companies or state action including governments of authoritarian regimes such as in Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany and Burma's military dictator, Ne Win. Many democratic governments have also attempted to limit the effects of unions, although success has been mixed.
It has been argued, particularly by market anarchists, that government intervention in the economy has been decidedly anti-union, even in economies like the United States or the European Union. Kevin Carson maintains that the most effective union tactics are either criminalized or displaced by state policy in most countries. Trade unions established themselves through sitdown strikes, sympathy strikes, secondary boycotts, and hot cargo agreements; these tactics are all illegal in most industrialized countries. Similarly, the original unions doubled as social welfare organization, using union funds to provide healthcare and pensions to workers and welfare to the unemployed. By adopting various welfare-state measures, governments made the populace less dependent on unions.
Read more about this topic: Opposition To Trade Unions
Famous quotes containing the word government:
“No government can help the destinies of people who insist in putting sectional and class consciousness ahead of general weal.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)
“... until both employers’ and workers’ groups assume responsibility for chastising their own recalcitrant children, they can vainly bay the moon about “ignorant” and “unfair” public criticism. Moreover, their failure to impose voluntarily upon their own groups codes of decency and honor will result in more and more necessity for government control.”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)
“Freedom of men under government is to have a standing rule to live by, common to every one of that society, and made by the legislative power vested in it; a liberty to follow my own will in all things, when the rule prescribes not, and not to be subject to the inconstant, unknown, arbitrary will of another man.”
—John Locke (1632–1704)