I got fired for unionizing at Starbucks and I’d do it again
jacobin.com
jacobin.com
If the government were serious about correcting the massive power imbalance between capital and labor that is currently destroying American society, one of the first steps should be implementing financial penalties for retaliatory termination that are so severe they make the CFO not want to get up and go to work the next morning.
It's cruel that stable housing and health care are tied to employment. Employers have enough power as it is, they don't need to lord the basic needs of health and shelter over us, too.
Or at least, it used to.
Why don't companies invest in better managers? It seems like it could help make their stores operate more efficiently and at the same time it would reduce the chances that the employees form a union, which is costly to the business.
$$$$
But they should.
If paying your lowest tier workers a living wage and good benefits would disrupt the business, could it be that your business relies on suffering to exist?
Which, honestly, maybe it shouldn't.
If living wage is substantially different from the market rate, employer cannot afford it without going out of business. Employers don't have infinite money, they have checks and balances. Paying employees more would require different pricing model, for example. If your pricing is far enough from what customer is ready to pay, customer is not paying and you end up out of business.
Basically, employer's responsibility is to pay market rate, not living wage. If there's a disconnect, it needs to be addressed on the legislation level, not individual employer level.
a low market rate means that there are a lot of poor schmucks willing to work for scraps.
if a business can not survive without paying a living wage then it should not exist in the first place. no amount of legislation can fix that
Is it possible to calculate the possible return on investment in training? Maybe? It is most certainly possible to calculate the cost of training, and that sum comes right out of profits, so it doesn't happen, given the other is unknown. This is the way of things in corporate America. Profit above all.
Apologies for my cynicism, but I'm finding it harder and harder to exist in the status quo.
Software is lucky that we can go Architecure route for promotion instead of a Engineering Manager route. This is not the case for most other professions.
Which is honestly better than bringing in corporate managers who have no experience anyway.
It's all responsibility and no authority. You probably don't even have much discretion or visibility when it comes to how employees are rewarded.
Bonus, it pays considerbly less than anything else you can do.
Because the more you invest down at the levels where it really matters, the less you have left to line the pockets of the ultra-rich alphabet soup at the upper levels. Gotta pay for those multi-million dollar "bonus/severance packages" and all that junk somehow right?
Where are the AUSAs when you need them? Prosecutorial discretion wielded so plainly means that people very obviously do not have equal protection under the law.
I guess I don't understand the ask here. Starbucks should be more authoritarian and discriminatory? Does no one remember the bathroom fiasco? I'm not sure what management is supposed to do other than call the cops more often.
There was a similar article about Medieval Times workers trying to unionize because guests were bad. But I guess I never thought that one of the roles of customer service unions is also unionizing against customers.
Also, please understand, finding another job means someone else walks into that same bad situation. Some people are OK with that, others see the bad situation and want to take an active role in fixing it. Organizing labor is fighting for a cause larger than yourself. Unions have earned us 40 hour work weeks, an end to child labor and other safety regulations. It's not about finding work for yourself, it's about making work better for all your colleagues.
I think quitting can also have the effect of making work better for your colleagues. Starbucks will either have to be continually training new hires(however minimal that might be) or deal with less than ideal employees. That is until they improve benefits to remedy their situation. Which they will assuming it hits their bottom line.
This one is an interesting point that I have a couple of (unanswerable) questions about. She cared enough to want improvement, did she ask for some of the things she mentioned as perks of unionizing (like the music change)? She mentions that she was in the process (?) of a raise when she was fired, so presumably they saw some value in her (or just wanted to push her out of unionizing). I wonder what sort of options were available for a single store in a large, franchised company.
For some of the "location issues," what sort of things would she have wanted the company to provide? What benefits with unionizing would help with (e.g.) the OD issue? It seems like this store was going to be a non-ideal location with or without a union, perhaps seeking out some sort of "hazard pay" arrangement would have made it worthwhile for the employees.
My real question, I guess, is whether this was something that could have been worked out, as a group, with the employer, rather than unionizing. A company will in almost all cases be hostile towards a move toward unionization, but I wonder if there could have been, or was, any negotiation that would have been satisfactory for both parties.
This is exactly what a union is. Employees negotiating with their employers as a group rather than individually.