The Laborers' Union

With a membership in excess of 4,000, the Laborers' Union is clearly the largest organization within Greyhawk's guild structure. The membership of the union is composed mainly of lower-class unskilled workers and a small proportion of failed apprentices from other city guilds.

The Laborers' Union was created under special charter from the Directing Oligarchy to provide a labor pool for established Greyhawk businesses and to protect the interests of the common working man. To this end, the Laborers' Union has established a scale of minimum wages for the various types of employment that may be on offer to the membership, and insists that prospective employers provide the union member with at least one hot meal a day during the course of his, or her work. While prospective employers are supposed to guarantee these conditions, this is not always the case, and most workers are merely glad they have a wage, however small, to look forward to at the end of the day.

Membership in the Laborers' Union is open to everyone, including noncitizens of Greyhawk. It costs 5 sp to register as a union member, for which the new member receives a registration certificate and can enter the main hall of the union building where employment notices are posted (and proclaimed, for the benefit of the illiterate), and prospective employers assemble work gangs. Because 5 sp may be a hard price to pay for the very poor, the union may sometimes agree to have the fee paid in installments from wages if extreme poverty can be proven.

Because of the city's system of justice (see Chapter 2), most municipal menial labor is carried out by convicts; thus, members of the Laborers' Union can expect to be hired by private individuals or as temporary labor by other guilds.