“Company union” is a generation-old sneer-smear term dear to the hearts of leaders and some members of the big national and international labor organizations. It refers to any local union, formed with the employer’s consent and approval, and working along amicably with management to obtain ever better working conditions and wages for the employees while allowing the employer to make decent profits. A more polite but less accurate term is “independent union.”
Company unions almost never get into newspaper headlines or onto television or radio news programs. Hence, it may be news to some Americans that more than a few of these organizations are active in the United States, and rather often prove immune to attempted takeovers by the AFL-CIO, Teamsters Union, United Auto Workers, Steelworkers, etc. Members of company unions fairly frequently vote against absorption by national/international unions in elections supervised by the National Labor Relations Board, partial to the big organizations though the NLRB notoriously is.
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