system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: What is a Workers Union and what do they do?

Also, why are there jokes about being unionized? Is it a bad thing?
gpt
A union is basically an organization of workers that will collectively bargain in order to ensure that wages and working conditions are good, using the resources of the collective crowd that could not be attained by the individual.

The good thing about this is that it ended practices such as child labor, horrendous factory and mining conditions, long work hours with fewer days off, and low wages that were seen in the early 1900s.

The bad thing is that unions have in modern times taken that idea and pushed it far enough to where workers are overpaid, spoiled, and almost impossible to fire. A unionized janitor can be paid as much as 10 non-union janitors for doing the same job, and there are people that put on tires for 30 dollars an hour. The fact that you are put into a tenured position is also problematic because it means that you don't have to worry about quality or even doing a good job. Teachers are heavily unionized, and the ones who are tenured show a visible lack in quality.

Like any system, it proves that too much of a good thing can be a bad thing.