Could you please explain to me what exactly are unions and why they are so important in today’s politics?

Ok, this might take a sec. You might also want to look at some resources…

Unions (also known as trade unions) are groups of workers who have organized to achieve a common goal, whether that’s to improve their working conditions or to have a voice in their workplace or defend their rights as individual workers or members of a group, or to engage in political action. 

That last part is why unions are important to contemporary politics. 

To begin with, unions are mass organizations of workers – even at a historically low level of “union density” in the U.S, there are 14.5 million union members in the United States – which means that they can try to leverage the votes and activism of their members in shaping the political system. Unions are very very good at doing outreach to large numbers of people, because at the end of the day, doing voter outreach (whether that’s voter registration, issue advocacy, phone-banking, precinct-walking, or GOTV) uses a lot of the same skills and technologies and organizational methods that are involved in organizing workers into unions. 

Second, unions are one of the only organized groups in politics that are “of, by, and for” the working class. Historically, unions have been a major “counter-vailing force” that balanced out the influence of the wealthy and big businesses, and the decline of unions is one of the big reasons why our political system has become responsive to the preferences of only the affluent. Moreover, unions historically have not just advocated for the interests of their own membership, but have supported broader social and economic legislation – the minimum wage, overtime laws, health and safety regulations, civil rights legislation, immigration reform, universal health care, Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid, you can go down the list of progressive causes and unions have historically been one of the largest and loudest backers of all of these causes. (Huge caveat here: this hasn’t always been the case on a number of issues, and there’s a very complicated history of how the labor movement shifted from being an organization of white men only in the 19th century and well into the 20th century to one of the most diverse organizations in America today.)

Third, and this has to do with the previous two: unions have historically been a major bloc within the Democratic Party since the 1930s (arguably, you could go back as far as the 1910s and the AFL-CIO allying with Wilson over the Clayton Anti-Trust Act, but at that time you had major union federations like the IWW who either didn’t support party politics at all or supported the Socialist Party). As a result, the Republican Party has been actively trying to kill the labor movement since at least 1947, when they passed the Taft-Hartley Act, through to Reagan breaking the PATCO strike in 1981 through to present attempts to pass national “right-to-work” laws. For their part, the Democratic Party historically was the party that passed the Wagner Act that legalized unions and established the National Labor Relations Board to oversee collective bargaining, but has since the 70s been rather tepid over attempts to reform labor law to help unions pull out of their decline, although Democrats have (with mixed results) tended to fight Republican anti-union pushes. 

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