This study basically looks at how nice business is to unions from what I can tell. In such, through clever wording, they say that working in the US is as bad as working in countries that are known to not care about worker safety and what not all because unionization may or may not be welcome. So apparently I'm just as good working in the US as Kuwait (which having done that I can tell you is not true AT ALL) or Indonesia. I'm gonna go ahead and call BS on this. Anyways here is the story. (link=(https://thinkprogress.org/economy/2014/05/29/3442519/us-labor-rights-rankings/" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Article) ( Study)

quote:
The ITUC Global Rights Index covers violations in 139 countries recorded over the past 12 months (April 2013- March 2014). The methodology is grounded in standards of fundamental rights at work, in particular the right to freedom of association, the right to collective bargaining and the right to strike.2 These rights are based on international human rights law3 which we have spelled out in the form of 97 indicators in order to translate narrative text into numerical ratings. Countries are then rated in clusters from 1-5 depending on their compliance with collective labour rights. The level of economic development, size or location of the country is not taken into account given that fundamental rights are universal and workers in all parts of the world must have access to them. A high rated cluster means that workers in the country have no right to their collective voice due to government failure to guarantee rights.

quote:

Level 1
• Irregular Violation of Rights
• Collective labour rights are generally guaranteed. Workers can freely associate and defend their rights collectively with the government and/or companies and can improve their working conditions through collective bargaining. Violations against workers are not absent but do not occur on a regular basis.

Level 2
• Repeated violation of rights
• Countries with a rating 2 have slightly weaker collective labour rights than those with the rating 1. Certain rights have come under the repeated attack by governments and/or companies and have undermined the struggle for better working conditions.

Level 3
• Regular violation of rights
• Government and/or companies are regularly interfering in collective labour rights or are failling to fully guarantee important aspects of these rights. There are deficiencies in laws and/or certain practices which make frequent violations possible.

Level 4
• Systematic violation of rights
• Workers in countries with the rating of 4 have reported systematic violations. The government and/or companies are engaged in serious efforts to crush the collective voice of workers putting
fundamental rights under continuous threat.

Level 5
• No guarantee of rights
• Countries with the rating of 5 are the worst countries in the world to work in. While the legislation may spell out certain rights workers have effectively no access to these rights and
are therefore exposed to autocratic regimes and unfair labour practices.

Level 5+
• No guarantee of rights due to the breakdown of the rule of law
• Workers in countries with the rating 5+ have equally limited rights as workers with the rating 5. However, in countries with the rating 5+ this is linked to dysfunctional institutions as a result
of internal conflict and/or military occupation.

quote:
United States of America ---- 4

From Article:

quote:
The category means that U.S. workers experienced between 27 and 35 of the 97 separate rights violations the group tracked. The only country in North or Central America to fall into a worse category was Guatemala.

The report follows years of work to undermine labor rights in statehouses around the country. As the Economic Policy Institute has documented, more than a dozen states have put restrictions on collective bargaining for public employees over the past three years. Another 19 states have taken up so-called “right-to-work” laws in that period that erode benefits and wages for all workers by undermining unions.

But American labor rights and union strength have been waning for decades. The decline in union membership rates over the past 30 years corresponds to the disappearance of the middle class and the explosion of economic inequality in the country. Economists have found that the middle class does better where unionization rates are higher, and that the strength of the middle class is the key determiner of the broader economy’s growth or stagnation.