Closed shop

(States Twitter)-Closed shop is a form of union security agreement under which the employer agrees to only hire union members, and employees must remain members of the union at all times in order to remain employed.

International Labour Organization covenants do not address the legality of closed shop provisions, leaving the question up to each individual nation. The legal status of closed shop agreements varies widely from country to country, ranging from bans on the agreement to extensive regulation of the agreement to not mentioning it at all.

Closed shop

Canada

The status of closed shops varies from province to province within Canada. The 1946 Supreme Court ruling Rand formula determined largely that, while Section Two of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms guaranteed both the freedom to associate and the freedom not to associate, employees in a work-environment largely dominated by a union were beneficiaries of union policies, and as such should pay union fees, regardless of membership status. However, religious and conscientious objectors were allowed the option of paying the amount to a registered charity instead.

UK

All forms of closed shops in the UK are strictly illegal under section 137(1)(a) of the Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992 (c. 52).

Australia

All forms of closed shops in the Commonwealth are illegal under the Workplace Relations Act 1996.

United States

The Taft-Hartley Act outlawed the closed shop in the United States in 1947, but permits the union shop, except in those states that have passed right-to-work laws, in which case even the union shop is illegal. An employer may not lawfully agree with a union to hire only union members; it may, on the other hand, agree to require employees to join the union or pay the equivalent of union dues to it after a set period of time. Similarly, while a union could require an employer that had agreed to a closed shop contract prior to 1947 to fire an employee who had been expelled from the union for any reason, it cannot demand that an employer fire an employee under a union shop contract for any reason other than failure to pay those dues that are uniformly required of all employees.

Construction unions and unions in other industries with similar employment patterns have coped with that prohibition by using exclusive hiring halls as a means of controlling the supply of labor. While such exclusive hiring halls do not, in a strictly formal sense, require union membership as a condition of employment, they do so in practical terms, in that an employee seeking to be dispatched to work through the union's hiring hall must either pay union dues or pay a roughly equivalent hiring hall fee. So long as the hiring hall is run on a non-discriminatory basis and adheres to clearly stated eligibility and dispatch standards it is lawful. The Taft-Hartley Act also bars unions from requiring unreasonably high initiation fees as a condition of membership in order to prevent unions from using initiation fees as a device to keep non-union employees out of a particular industry.