In the post-industrialized society, labor unions emerged as a tool for collective bargaining in the 1920s-1930s during the Great Depression, when unemployment in America reached 14%. During this period, America was transforming from a predominantly agricultural society to a mechanized industry leading to the need for a specialized labor force, the challenge of child labor, and the acceptance of unskilled labor as the backbone of the industrialized workforce. During this period, management unthought the concept of federally mandated minimum wage.
The concept of labor protections founded its roots in the heavily industrialized Northern Eastern states, which demonstrated the improvement of the importance of unions and their connection to greater economic prosperity. According to Ahlquist (2017), in rich democracies, Unionization also correlates with redistribution of both income, and financial risk, demonstrating that unions can be political actors. To the extent that unions tend to mobilize citizens further down the income distribution