unions

n. act of uniting; unification or two or more parties (i.e. countries, states, companies, people, etc.); workers' association; federation; amalgamation; marriage; reproductive coupling; device which fits two pieces together

A trade union or labour union is an organization of workers. The trade union, through its leadership, bargains with the employer on behalf of union members ("rank and file" members) and negotiates labor contracts with employers. This may include the negotiation of wages, work rules, complaint procedures, rules governing hiring, firing and promotion of workers, benefits, workplace safety and policies. The agreements negotiated by the union leaders are binding on the rank and file members and the employer and in some cases on other non-member workers.
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Noun
1. an organization of employees formed to bargain with the employer; "you have to join the union in order to get a job"
(synonym) labor union, trade union, trades union, brotherhood
(hypernym) organization, organisation
(hyponym) industrial union, vertical union
(part-holonym) labor movement, trade union movement, labor
(derivation) unionize, unionise
2. the act of pairing a male and female for reproductive purposes; "the casual couplings of adolescents"; "the mating of some species occurs only in the spring"
(synonym) coupling, mating, pairing, conjugation, sexual union
(hypernym) sexual activity, sexual practice, sex, sex activity
(hyponym) assortative mating
3. the state of being joined or united or linked; "there is strength in union"
(synonym) unification
(antonym) separation
(hypernym) state
(hyponym) coalition, fusion
4. the state of being a married couple voluntarily joined for life (or until divorce); "a long and happy marriage"; "God bless this union"
(synonym) marriage, matrimony, spousal relationship, wedlock
(hypernym) marital status
(hyponym) bigamy
(classification) law, jurisprudence
5. healing process involving the growing together of the edges of a wound or the growing together of broken bones
(synonym) conglutination
(hypernym) healing
6. a political unit formed from previously independent people or organizations; "the Soviet Union"
(hypernym) political unit
(hyponym) confederation, confederacy, federation
7. a set containing all and only the members of two or more given sets; "let C be the union of the sets A and B"
(synonym) sum, join
(hypernym) set
(hyponym) direct sum
8. the occurrence of a uniting of separate parts; "lightning produced an unusual union of the metals"
(hypernym) happening, occurrence, natural event
(hyponym) amphimixis
9. a device on a national flag emblematic of the union of two or more sovereignties (typically in the upper inner corner)
(hypernym) device
10. the act of making or becoming a single unit; "the union of opposing factions"; "he looked forward to the unification of his family for the holidays"
(synonym) unification, uniting, conjugation, jointure
(antonym) disunion
(hypernym) combination, combining, compounding
(hyponym) coalescence, coalescency, coalition, concretion, conglutination
(derivation) unify, unite, merge
Adjective
1. of trade unions; "the union movement"; "union negotiations"; "a union-shop clause in the contract"
(antonym) nonunion
(similar) closed(a)

n. union, unity; association, conjunction

1. <set theory> An operation on two sets which returns the set of all elements that are a member of either or both of the argument sets; normally written as an infix upper-case U symbol. The operator generalises to zero or more sets by taking the union of the current partial result (initially the empty set) with the next argument set, in any order.
For example, (a, b, c) U (c, d, e) = (a, b, c, d, e)
2. A type whose values may be of one of a number of other types, thet current type depending on conditions that are only known at run-time. A variable of union type must be allocated sufficient storage space to hold the largest component type. Some unions include extra information to say which type of value the union currently has (a "tagged union"), others rely on the program to keep track of this independently.
A union contrasts with a structure or record which stores values of all component types at once.
3. An SQL operator that concatenates two result sets, that must have the same number and types of columns. The operator may be followed by the word "ALL" to indicate that results that appear in both sets should appear twice in the output.
(2002-02-26)