Apple Is Union-Busting in NYC, Labor Group Alleges
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Companies will pay millions to union-busting law firms because labor organization is really the only thing that will improve the material conditions of their workers.
To anyone at Starbuck's, Amazon, Apple or really any other company, this should be all the evidence you need that you should join a union because it's the one thing your employer will spend millions to avoid happening.
Ultimately, your relationship with your employer is adversarial. Don't forget that.
Maybe this is a scale issue. As a single owner of a business I feel personally responsible, and my actions in business are the same as in my personal life. But with a business I share ownership with, I have less personal responsibility, therefore by default I am simply not responsible (and feel less so) about the effects the business has.
Multiply this out to thousands of shareholders, where this connection of ownership -> responsibility towards employees dilutes to the point of non-existence.
[0] except sometimes for salespeople who bring in big accounts, which is why salespeople in many companies are better compensated than engineers.
Don’t better working conditions attract better employees? If labor organization is the only way to achieve this (as you claim), wouldn’t companies be encouraging unionization to improve their competitiveness in the labor market?
I would rather negotiate on my own and save myself union dues. Unions are basically like a HOA, and I would never lock myself into one of those either.
If you don't trust your coworkers, then you're placing your trust in companies to make decisions for you. And that's why we're seeing the rise in unionization again because it hasn't worked out that well.
Why do I have to trust either of them? My coworkers often seem intent on doing as little work as possible. They are somewhere between bourgeois and champagne socialist. Management is comprised of the same people. I think many are just lazy and have gotten worse over the last two years.
Whereas for a carpenter definitely. Or working in construction, I'm going to be part of a union somewhere, if there isn't a union I'll go to where there is one, if it's small and weak make it larger and stronger. And work like fuck while inside it, I love doing that, doing perfect work and sweet alienation while working. It's just too dangerous without a union, one of the big wins a union gives you is workplace safety. That's not a fucking joke, bosses do try to push you into bad working conditions for marginal amounts of money, just scream at you to work faster, that's just wrong. I could have lost fingers working under the Chilean minimum wage. I could have damaged my spine working a bottling station alone with three people on the other side, rotating my back too much too fast (like do I have to be a fucking doctor to know that that's harmful, if it hurts the wrong way I have to deflect that work). And plus, the wages are much better with unions, you get better raises, and you can actually--get this--bring up win-win situations for the company without getting cheated out of your upside completely.
And I would love to pay Union dues. They're such little money, like nothing, like 1% or some meaningless shit? Even if they were 8%. The money you spend that you get nothing back from directly is the money that really gives you dignity. Like taxes, I love paying taxes too. Pay the fuck out of those taxes. Knock out those taxes.
In case software development change course the developers will be in a bad state for their ignorance of the world of the world outside the display :(
Nope. Perception of better working conditions attracts better employees. Actually improving working condition is one way to boilster that perception but companies have found cheaper alternatives, like beanbag chairs and brand cults.
What you're describing there is intentionally or unintentionally capitalist propaganda. What this ignores is the extreme power imbalance between the employer and the employee. It also ignores human history where the improvements in labor conditions through the Industrial REvolution came through labor organization.
Maritime is a good example of how market forces don't work in the favor of worker safety. The Titanic is a famous example where there weren't enough lifeboats for everyone on board but that capped off centuries of ships that weren't seaworthy and other issues.
What really changed was in the 1970s many unions in the US had become bloated and corrupt. A famous example is Jimmy Hoffa continued to be paid $100,000/year as the union president from jail in the 1960s. The late 70s saw the rise of Thatcher in the UK and Reagan in the US. In the 1980s, labor unions were completely eviscerated. Thatcher in particular went on major union-busting efforts gainst the coal miners and the newspaper industry.
Is it really any surprise that real wages have remained stagnant since the 1980s? At what point are people going to realize that the only way to correct this is for labor organization?
Hairs can be split, but not on that.
Ultimately work is just like any other trade. You trade your time for money. Would you like to go to a store with the attitude that all customer transactions are adversarial?
At one place where I work frequently, I watched the union clique screw over someone who wasn't in the union because their target was a competitor for a big prize. To me, the union ends up being another layer of management
Unions, like any general collection of people, will have good and bad actors leading to good or bad hierarchies. Your anecdote sounds like a shitty situation. Not every union is the same, and there are plenty of times when a union seems like more stress than it's worth for the people involved, and that's all fine.
To your anecdote about going to the store: Yes, I go to every store with the assumption that they will, through active or passive means, attempt to take as much money from me as they can. It's why I check sold prices vs advertised price, it's why I confirm I wasn't accidentally overcharged on my receipt. The company wants to make as much money as possible and I want to spend as little as possible, and those are both pretty rational positions.
That is a sad way to live.
Employee/employer relationship is the same as buyer/seller relationship. Do you declare war every time you go to buy a load of bread? Of course not. You negotiate a price both of you are comfortable with.
Of course when you have an hammer (and sickle) everything starts to look like a nail
Nope, this is correct language. Your company wants to buy labor for the lowest possible cost to them. You want to be paid the highest possible wage. You are in conflict, direct opposition. A negotiation, by its nature, is a way of resolving conflict. War would be another. But the fact that unionists and socialists remove the social niceties and get down to brass tacks doesn't change the nature of the labor market.
When you have a hammer and sickle, everything looks like the class war, because it is to us.
And in fact with the whole union-busting I would say that also is diametrical at an eventual point, Cuyahoga Falls Massacre for instance. The other thing is once there is a union get back to a less adversarial mindset--be at odds to an extent as always, but not opposite.
[1] Not going to say viceversa in this situation.
It wasn't like that before. Especially for Apple. It used to be borderline Marketing. If you could call it that. But Apple never did any of that. Steve doesn't even want his donation to be known. Somehow Apple went from one end of the Spectrum to the leader in "virtue signaling".
More power to Apple if it wants to attempt to convince its workers that forming a union will not be in their best interest. More power to the workers if they want to listen to voices on the other side.
Carry on.
In NYC, With a company like Apple, where you’ll get a press hit for reporting that Tim Cool peeled an orange at his desk, pushing stories like this is very effective.
But of the day, it’s just noise.
And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like “1984.”
I think unions are some of the most evil, corrupt, harmful institutions to have ever existed. On par with drug cartels and such in terms of harm to society. Not even talking about old time unions (my opinion of mafia was lowered by their union associations) - someone I know is in the union right now, and despite being left wing and kinda captive audience they keep telling me about all the stuff the union does - work prevention, corruption, feather-bedding, bureaucracy and general waste. And while they don't care that much, I sometimes get the impression that the apathy is caused by helplessness - speaking out against the union won't achieve anything but will probably make it very hard for you to get jobs in the industry. I think in this way unions are literally worse than something like CPC/etc totalitarian govts, at least CPC's incentives can be aligned correctly some of the time.
So, mandatory anti-union training is kinda like mandatory anti-patient-abuse training (for doctors), or e.g. anti-harassment training.
2- The first paragraph of the article says that not only did Apple not immediately embrace the unionization of their labor force, but according to the filing, violated US Labor law. I can accept this weird pro-management twisting of the definition of "union busting" to exclude legal opposition, but I do not understand how anyone in good faith can say that illegal union opposition techniques don't fit a personal definition of "union busting". You can argue that the investigation may determine otherwise, but the title does say "alleges" to hedge that.
are you saying it is a complete one way street? unions can not be opposed under any circumstances? if some employees meet to discuss the power of "individual agency" that is considered union busting? there can be no competing ideologies?
I'm not saying people aren't allowed to oppose unions, either ideologically or legally. If a jobsite is trying to organize, employees discussing "individual agency" is fine. But there are only 2 competing ideologies "union" or "no union".
There are plenty of people who would accept the viewpoint that members of the labor unit cannot themselves engage in "union busting" because they aren't part of the management group (there would also be hardliners who feel that all people of all levels of the organization that undermine the union are attempting to union bust, myself among them, but I'm fine pointing out that there is another viewpoint)
That said, any action that an employer takes to prevent unionization, legal or illegal, fun or boring, is engaging in "union busting". They have ways in which they are legally allowed to do this, but any attempt to describe anti-unionizations efforts taken by management as somehow not being "union busting" is disingenuous based on the definition of the term.
...and "anti-union" = "union busting"?
While it seems to be some advancement here, and the NLRB may make these meetings illegal, I wonder how we got to this point. It's an easy case to be made that anti-union meetings may be coercive. It's also completely illegal for company higher ups to organise, or for companies to meddle in labour organisation affairs, yet it is fine to push workers to not join unions?
The glib answer is "Capitalism, neo-liberalism, and the lack political party that actually answers to/is beholden to the labor class". There's a lot of nuance in those 3 things, but if you study the history of labor struggles and policy in the US it's mostly that.
Alot of people felt that unions were way too strong going into the 70s and 80s. Particularly as the “new south” became an onshore outsourcing destination, policy flipped.
https://www.lawcha.org/2016/11/23/bill-clinton-remade-democr...
It started with Reagan. No judgement applied.
I mean, now that we're a generation removed it's easy to forget that unions in this era were terrible. They were (generally) anti-immigrant, nepotistic, protectionist, and willing to sacrifice the jobs of their own members to get in dumb turf wars with other unions (plus the whole organized crime thing). You can also look up the whole "two-tier wage systems" many of them implemented.
Modern unions are clearly more well behaved - I wish more unions today pushed a "not-your-dad's-union" message instead of trying to sell Americans on a nostalgia.
But in the primary sense, the AFL-CIO used to staunchly anti-immigrant but has since softened they stance.
Once a workplace successfully unionizes, there are immense and permanent legal rights given to the union and restrictions imposed on the employer.
But until the criteria for an official election, it's just ideas being shared and the NLRB has little oversight.
It is not in a company's interest to be unionized. This shouldn't exactly be news.
Even in this article, the organizers acknowledge that what Apple is doing isn't illegal, but argue that it should be.
I get it. Organizing labor is tough. They're looking for some legal reprieve. But at the end of the day unions are fundamentally bad for employers. We can push for laws requiring them to roll out a welcome mat but we shouldn't expect them to like it.
"Apple is doing illegal things" is not the same as "It's not in Apple's interest to be unionized". We can and should expect the 4th estate to hold people accountable when they break laws in their pursuit of more profits for the investor/management classes.
The fact that people are reading "Apple is doing illegal things in order to prevent unionization" and shrugging is indicative of the larger issue which is that anti-union sentiment has become so pervasive in the country it's essentially the default at this point.
I feel that people should be mad that Apple opposes unions so much they're willing to commit crimes to prevent it, just like I feel that people should be mad if they found out that Apple was using iPhones to create a Batman like spy network. People should be mad when companies break laws and exploit them, not shrug and go "whelp, that's just them doing a Capitalism, hayuck!"
Why not?
OP was just pointing out why management is typically opposed to unions, since raising labor costs hurts the share of the profit to be given to ownership/management, they didn't seem to be weighing in on whether that increase in cost was a net good or bad.
Bad means harm basically.
For ownership and management...not literally the opposite. I highly doubt a manager has had that difficulty putting food on the table (in the 70's, I divine yes, occasionally it did happen sometimes and it disgusted the manager who went through that. I recognize they were underpaid then, but it's been a golden age for that class of worker ever since). Not stealing food from them. Worst case, they can always ask for demotion and put food on the table that way, as the employee. And a lot of people did that between the 40s and the 70s, choosing a diagonal-downward move to a job with a different demand balance, becoming schoolteachers for instance. Wozniak did that, a lot of Great Men did that.
The Unions were a constant impediment to improving product quality and production rate (and for aircraft, quality is exactly equal to safety!), even when there was no automation involved.
The first company invested in a robot to process parts by blowing hot air through them so adhesive didn't bridge over the perforated holes in the part. The union objected, and a $100K robot was reduced to being a heat gun holder for the union worker that now manually processed the part just as before, with a huge scrap rate, since touching the part with the heat gun ruined it.
Despite the company working hard to foster good relations with the union, the union decided to strike not for any work demands, but simply because they had money built up in their strike fund. A couple of weeks of violent protests (burned cop cars, etc.), shots fired at engineers (including me) stationed as lookouts on roofs to prevent arson, etc. convinced me that unions are never, ever better than thuggish extortionists.
Since those two (my first jobs) I have refused to work for any company with a union. And I'm back in Texas, a right-to-work state where union membership cannot be compelled even if a company is unionized.
I have NOTHING good to say about any experience I've ever had with labor unions. They are bad through and through.
It’s doable. Just need to find the will to act.