At the risk of teaching the former to suck the latter, this piece was recently posted to another NUJ group and is a useful reference for anyone you know that might need a good definition of a union:
Trade unions are 'associations of workers for the common representation of their interests', dealing in a collective way with issues such as pay, hours and working conditions (Elliott 1973: 464).
Trade unions were created by working people because, as Robert Taylor (1994: 5) explains, 'the worker as an individual in the workplace suffers from having an unequal power relationship vis-à-vis his or her employer'.
Taylor, a longstanding labour correspondent of the Financial Times, continues: 'Only when workers decide for themselves to combine together collectively can they establish enough unified strength to provide themselves with a strong and credible workplace voice to counter the often arbitrary demands being made upon them by the employer.”
One such trade union is the National Union of Journalists, known as the NUJ, which was founded a century ago to represent those whom its first historian described as the 'starveling scribes' of journalism, who were working up to 90 hours a week for 'the paltriest remuneration' (Mansfield 1943).
As well as a national structure with full-time officials and a leadership elected by the members, the NUJ has workplace organisations - called 'chapels' for reasons lost in the mists of time - in which every member at a workplace can have their say.
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