TRADE UNIONS IN FOREIGN COUNTRIES

In the Western countries (North America, Europe and Australia), the labour
parties are professionally run organizations and rich corporate unions. They
play a major role in politics and are basically craft based unions. In such
unions, a worker is typically hired to do some particular work in one
organization, and then he moves on to work in some other organization.
Apart from collective bargaining, the craft unions usually act as a recruitment
agency or a placement service for the members of the union. Organizations
get in touch with the union's recruiting hall, and those union members who
are currently having no work are generally referred for the job depending on
the requirements. There are two levels of unions: the Mother Union and the
Machinist Union. The mother union, ASL-CIO, is nation-wide and is the
biggest union. The machinist unions include the maintenance workers and
engineers, and this union is associated to the mother union.
Contrary to this, in countries like Iran, the government policies and the
constitution do not allow trade unions to attain power and often union
leaders are imprisoned and sentenced to death for trying to influence the
labourers against the government policies. Most of the unionized workers in
the United States of America belong to industrial unions. An industrial union
is basically a representation of workers across a broad gamut of jobs within
one or more industries. A typical industrial union is the United Auto Workers
(UAW), which represents skilled craft workers, assembly-line workers and
unskilled workers in most of the key American automobile companies.
In the US, for the union to be formed at least 30% of the employees should
sign cards. Then, within a period of 45-90 days a federal official would
conduct a secret ballot election, where a simple majority of the employees
should vote for the union, to initiate the formation. According to the UK law,
management of the organization should recognize a trade union in terms of
pay and employment discussions, when a simple majority of the workforce
wishes to be represented and also has voted for the same. But there is
hardly any evidence whether union members do secure any noteworthy pay
mark-up or a higher job protection than those people in the non-union jobs.
In the Western countries, generally professionals like lawyers, doctors, etc
are employed by the union to conduct its functioning, though they
themselves may not be political leaders. In the Scandinavian countries, the
unions often hire campus recruits for working as professionals in the labour
organizations.

With respect to the training programs, they have the Harvard Trade Union
Program which aims to educate the members to tackle with significant
present-day workplace and labor law problems. It is a part of the scheme at
Harvard Law School known as Labour and Work-life program that deals
with an array of labour and employment on the labour markets and the
workplace. In countries like South America, there is a huge funding for the
training and development needs and they have huge campuses owned by
the organizations for their training centres. The South-East Asian countries
have a macro-focused trade union system, which acts as a strategic partner
to the government in competing for FDIs and ensuring that the labour is
competitive by promoting training to the workers.
In ASL-CIO, the membership benefits include retirement planning, mortgage
and real estate financial support, consumer credit counseling, travel
discounts on hotels, car rental, etc, discounts on cellular services, low
interest credit cards, health club discounts, etc. In South East Asian
countries, an important aspect of compensation is that wage differentials still
exist, based on various factors such as location (with the exception of
Singapore, which is a city-state), enterprise and gender. In Thailand, urban
workers in enterprises enjoyed higher average wages than their counterparts
in enterprises located in rural areas. Also, gender wage differentials still
persist, and womens earnings by and large fail to sustain with mens,
particularly in the private sector.