Hacker News Reader

Comment by rb808 | Hacker News Reader

I had a friend who worked for a union supermarket chain. It went bankrupt as it had trouble competing with non-union chains like Whole Foods who pay their staff half of the old chains but somehow get a reputation for treating employees well. It would be good to know which stores are union and which ones aren't because it isn't obvious.

View on HN

Meanwhile Safeway and Kroger are both unionized and seem to be doing just fine. Unions alone aren't the issue, though it can definitely be a cost. I wish everything in the US wasn't a race to the bottom.

Keep in mind that Amazon pays their blue collar workers far more than Kroger/Safeway

Unionization isn't exclusively about pay. It's about workplace power and voice, the result of which is often higher pay but not exclusively or always. In the recent crisis having a union at Canada's major grocery chains meant they were able to demand a whole series of safety measures and accomodations (plexiglass shields, hazard pay, sick day flexibility etc.) that would have been far more difficult to obtain otherwise.

The origin of the modern union movement (as opposed to old guilds) has a lot to do with the demand for 8 hour days, weekends, and regulation of child labour -- not exclusively issues of renumeration.

Unfortunately part of the post-WWII settlement between labour and capital in the US and Canada had to do with giving up a lot of the shop floor power that unions had won during the 30s, the war, and immediately after it -- in exchange for compensation and job security. The AFL-CIO took a far more moderate political line, and clamped down on socialist and communist agitators within its organization. And when the right wing and austerity forces became more ascendant in the late 70s and into the 80s they were left with no real political tools to fight it with. Unionization, and compensation, declined. And unionization got its reputation as a bureaucratic and often corrupt practice as it failed to do much to help its workers.

Amazon: $12.71 avg. https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Cashier/Hourly_Rate....

Kroger: $8.93 avg. https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Cashier/Hourly_Rate...

Looks like they are being paid roughly 42% more hourly.

I had no idea until now, but with this in mind, I imagine unionization at Amazon will be an incredibly hard sell that is unlikely to happen unless that 42% gap shrinks significantly.

Union certification?

I know that I've seen union badges on employee uniforms in the public sector. Maybe not at the uniform level, but even a plaque or playing it up in advertising now that buy local is a massive thing.

(Of course, half the US population seems to reflexively shudder at the word "union" these days, so how successful this would be is... debatable.)

Hey, as long as it's cheap, just throw more workers at the meat grinder.

That may be true, but even if unionization ends up not working out it clearly should be the right of workers to choose to unionize if they want to without management interference.

Sometimes it even seems counter-intuitive. The one and only time I ever bought a new car, I ended up with an "import", because it was one of the few ones I could find that was assembled by union labor, and at a factory reasonably close to where I live.

Whole Foods seems particularly difficult, though. In my area, there aren't a whole lot of places that occupy "that" corner of the market. (Organic, sure, but the main thing I'm looking for is clearly labeled local produce, bulk bins, and some harder-to-find ingredients such as vital wheat gluten.) The only ones I can get to by public transit in less than 60 minutes are Whole Foods, and a grocery co-op. And I'm inclined to guess that, however crappy Whole Foods may be about this sort of thing, their compensation is still way better than the "15% off your groceries as a thanks for volunteering, and the satisfaction of being more involved in our community" that the co-op is offering to the people who work their registers.

This is why unions try to organize within an entire geography all at once, so that the store they're organizing isn't at disadvantage from competition.

Also an argument in favor of sectoral bargaining.

Similarly, it would be good to compare vs co-op.

> pay their staff half

Half?

This also seems off to me... Sounds like some well paid grocery store workers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com