Unions contribute to a stable, productive workforce—where workers have a say in improving their jobs. Library workers in public, academic and school libraries have organized in unions for better wages, working conditions and benefits.
Unionization as a human right was included in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as Article 23 when the UDHR was issued in 1948.
Article 23.
(1) Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.
(2) Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work.
(3) Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.
(4) Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.
Sixty years later, unions continue to be viewed as fundamental to democracy. Elaine Bernard wrote in 2008: “Unions are the premier institution of a free, democratic society, promoting democracy in the workplace, as well as economic and social justice, and equality. They have this role because they are instruments of transformation of members and of society at large. In this wonderful transformation rests the real power of unions.”[ Bernard, E. State of US Labor & Building Union Power. Democratic Left 2008, 36: 6].
