Might be in other cases, but in this case it's about low pay, and shitty shift patterns:
> Reportedly, retail staff at Apple Glasgow earn 12 ($15) per hour. Workers at the store say that low wages, plus unfair shift patterns and a lack of pay transparency have prompted the move toward unionization.
https://appleinsider.com/articles/22/06/10/glasgow-apple-sto...
They seem to also have asked for ways to enable better communication to corporate but it seems to have fallen on deaf ears, even their colleagues in other countries have ways but no one listens:
> "In the UK, Apple have staff forums, but these are continually shown to be ineffectual and feedback is ignored," one anonymous worker told the Glasgow Evening Times. "It is a one-way conversation."
I guess the conclusion is that people tried, Apple didn't want to, so now the workers forced them to listen.
I hope workers in other countries are following what's happening here and realize they have more power than what they think.
Lots of talk about family, and close knit this, and "it's my job to support them" that. The usual self-righteous linkedin bullshit, but unusually brazen given someone was killed and a couple people injured.
I remember thinking "if they're so 'supported' by one of the world's richest companies, why do so many of them want to unionize?"
$15/hour for high-end retail is peanuts in almost any urban area. Given how much cash Apple has, and how fast they continue to accumulate it, they can absolutely afford to pay a livable wage to their retail employees.
You may not know a lot about Glasgow either, it isn't like "any urban area". It is one of the poorest places in the UK, massive opioid problem, lowest life expectancy in the UK (in the poorest areas), derelict housing everywhere, highest rate of refugees per capita, high levels of violent crime (amazingly, this has got substantially better and it is still terrible by the metric of anyone familiar with crime in other countries)...the only big employers are govt and retail, this compares well with low-skill govt work. You cannot compare this to any city in the US either, maybe Detroit or somewhere? But the US is just another world relative to Europe (Glasgow is more like somewhere like rural West Virginia...but a city).
Glasgow isn't like it used to be. Scotland in general is one of the wealthier of the UK outside of the SE.
The poor areas are mostly in Wales and the North.
I live in Scotland near Glasgow, my family is from there, I have been there frequently over the span of decades. Parts of it are wealthy, but the vast majority is not. Almost everyone who can leave when they are young, does leave...that speaks for itself (I grew up in Scotland, I know maybe 40-50 people who grew up in Glasgow...I cannot recall one person who still lives there, it happens but not by choice). And if you look at any statistic, it is poor (and the heavily reliance on govt spending inc. jobs).
Scotland is not wealthy "in general" at all (again, before you reply: I have lived there for over two decades). Edinburgh is relatively wealthy, it is at the top of cities outside London. Aberdeen is wealthy because of oil. But the rest of the country is not.
And even then, these stats are misleading. Edinburgh has individuals who drag up the average (to a large extent, these people do not exist in Glasgow...there is no "upside" scenario) but if you look at the worst areas of Edinburgh, they are worse than anywhere in the UK. This kind of grinding poverty is unique to Scotland and hasn't changed. In fact, one of the lowest life expectancy neighbourhoods in Europe (iirc, it was under 60...and this was in 2005) was in Edinburgh. They redistricted the area (they actually knocked down almost all the housing in the worst area) so it dropped out of the stats, but those areas still exist.
It isn't like the North-East either. In the North-East you have high levels of deprivation but you see less harm than in Scotland. If you look at the worst places in the UK for life expectancy - https://www.statista.com/statistics/296698/local-areas-with-... - almost all of them are in Scotland. The only place that really compares in England is Blackpool and possibly Sunderland, both places are regarded as exceptional...and you see it in: Ayrshire, Lanarkshire, Glasgow, Dundee, etc. Blackpool is a tiny place, it is all over Scotland.
Btw, this is one of the common misconceptions from people online who have only ever been to Scotland on holiday. Cities like Edinburgh are more segregated than any other city in the UK. I know people who lived in Edinburgh for years (I went to university there), and you take them into the areas for locals (often down a side street near a tourist area) and they have never seen anything like it (the only place I have been that compares is public housing in Milan and rural Eastern Europe, I haven't seen anywhere in the UK like it).
It's a bit odd to claim that government and retail are only big employers given the presence of the JP Morgan, Barclays, SSE etc.
It's true that the UK's policy of pursuing a service based economy has destroyed what was a fairly well paying industrial/manufacturing sector. Recent reports seem to indicate that despite record low unemployment, living standards of the average person are set to drop below much of eastern europe; despite being a much wealthier country.
I don't think there's really much of a downside to unionisation here. It's not like one staff member asking to be paid more was ever going to happen being such a small cog in such a big machine.
This thread started off from the perspective of an apple investor not a retail employee. As an investor, I think there is a real downside to unionization.
They've already communicated their needs (wages are too low), and you've already dismissed their concerns. Your comment here is kind of proving exactly why Apple employees so desperately need to unionize -- they aren't going to get fairer wages any other way.