No argument that these workers have a right to unionize, but I find many of their demands petulant and counterproductive. Have a look:
1) The right to unionize without intimidation
2) Commitment to non-discrimination based on legal classes
3) Discipline happens on the clock and is free from harassment and abuse
4) Right to self-defense, covid safety, disaster/emergency pay raises, and zero tolerance for harassment
5) All firings should have a Just Cause
6) Allow workers to pick up shifts in non-union stores, transfer to them, etc.
7) Reimbursement for necessary equipment, limits on dress code
8) Full time for 32+ hours, benefits for 20 hours
9) New work cannot be added to job descriptions without negotiation
10) Schedule guarantees
11) Seniority will be used to prevent unfair working conditions
12) Workers in a store will have a committee to oversee working conditions in their store
13) No reduction in wages or benefits without negotiation
14) Unions have a place set up in the break room for union comms
15) The right to wear union pins/swag
Absolutely zero of these are "petulant", and we can argue about whether any of them are "counterproductive", but they all seem absolutely baseline reasonable to me.
#4 alone isn't "covid safety", it includes a reinstatement of COVID benefits and pay. "Protecting pay for store closures...and for workers who leave early or are sick" also doesn't really make sense in an _hourly_ work environment.
Perhaps they just shouldn't be working at a restaurant that serves pork? What a ridiculous idea. I'm going to found a religion in which the main belief is that I should not be required to type on a keyboard. As someone working in tech who uses a keyboard non-stop, this is not my problem. Rather, my employer should be obligated to offload that work onto others and only assign me work that does not require the use of a keyboard.
First of all, there are plenty of developer that don’t use keyboards. Perhaps they have some eccentric tools which they believe are superior, but more realistically they have a disability or injury and can’t use keyboard. Usually they have other tools at their disposal and are able to do their work just fine. It is in fact illegal to discriminate against them on those grounds in most jurisdictions, and employers are able to accommodate just fine. I’m sure your fictional religion will do just fine as well.
Secondly, if you’ve worked in the service industry, or even manual labor, you should know that situations arise all the time where a worker is unable to perform a task. Reasons range from religion and ideology, but also disability injury, sensory issues, neurodiversity, and even just a lack of skill and confidence. What usually happens is that workers are nice to each other and accommodate the worker’s inability, usually by rotating tasks among them selves. In many cases their bosses don’t even know about this, but more commonly their immediate manager knows this and hands out tasks according to their worker’s abilities.
Now this is ripe for abuse. So codifying this in a labor contract makes perfect sense. While this is just unofficial a bad manager could force a worker to perform a task they are unable or unwilling to do, effectively forcing them to either suffer or quit. Codifying this in the union contract is a protection against this kind of abuse.
Can we really not take a quick moment to say, "Maybe we can help our Muslim and Jewish friends feel more comfortable"? Your solution is really, "No Muslims or Jews in restaurants" rather than "Hey, if needed, we can just ask Kevin to toss the bacon in the oven."
That's hardly the point. The majority of Starbucks locations are in countries with tiny or non-existent Jewish/Muslim populations: U.S., China, Japan, Canada, etc. [1] In the United States, for example, only 3.5% of Americans are Jewish or Muslim. [2] Wanna bet that figure is far smaller in China?
What's more, this isn't a situation in which there are no alternatives. A person who doesn't want to handle pork has plenty of other employment options.
> "No Muslims or Jews in restaurants"
Seriously? I suggest that people who don't want to handle pork shouldn't apply for jobs where they'll handle pork, and you paraphrase me as "Ban Jews and Muslims from restaurants"???
Let me put it this way: do you think someone who doesn't want to handle pork should be accommodated at a pork processing plant?
VERY, VERY hard disagree.
Yes, it does. Hourly environments can (and some do) have paid leave for special circumstances based on, e.g., scheduled time during which the special circumstances prevent work. I’ve seen this in both private unionized environments and public sector (union or not) ones.
Some of this (e.g., paid sick leave) may be balance-driven, whereas paid leave for closures, and external events which force early unplanned shift termination often would not be, since these conditions would be decided by management, but the decision would trigger paid leave for individuals impacted.
"7) Reimbursement for necessary equipment, limits on dress code"
Whereas the actual text reads:
"We propose that workers will not be held to a dress code, except for where local, state and federal health/safety standards are enforced. We propose that Starbucks will provide or reimburse each worker 2 pairs of non-slip shoes each year, as well as fresh aprons for partners every shift. We also propose Starbucks provide visors for workers who cannot comfortably use Starbucks-provided hats."
So they're not proposing limits on dress codes. They want to do away with the dress code entirely. This is absolutely petulant. Maybe some employees will show up in tuxedos, but my money would be on more and more employees showing up in less and less professional attire. Adding distraction, eroding the customer experience, and reducing the professionalism.
On another note, seniority is a toxic, irrational policy. If you want to see how corrosive it is, go talk to any honest member of a teacher's union. Seniority allows low performers with bad attitudes to hang around indefinitely with little consequence.
I expect the compromise to be something like, "there's a dress code but I'm not forced to buy anything other than basic black T-Shirts that the company wants me to wear, and the company buys me 1 pair of shoes a year."
The professionalism of ... Starbucks coffee shops? Are you for real? It's not a bank. Let people wear what they want and what makes them happy. You can still require people cover sufficiently for sanitary and safety reasons.
> On another note, seniority is a toxic, irrational policy
Yes. Agreed. But also, Starbucks has been hiring people specifically to "outcompete" pro union voices. A rush of new hires can destabilize organization efforts. Seniority for the purposes of protecting workers is reasonable. Seniority as the only criteria is not. It's a careful balance.
https://smallbusiness.chron.com/uniform-influence-performanc...
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.2466/pms.1974.39.1.5...
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/001088040004100...
Punishing and retaliating against union organizers is petulant and childish.
Hiring someone for 32 hours a week, and then refusing to schedule them for the last 8 hours to avoid turning them into a "full time" employee, is petulant and petty.
Harassment/intimidation is petty and petulant.
Punishing someone off the clock is petulant.
Requiring company-branded aprons while on the clock and then requiring employees to purchase and maintain the aprons is petty.
Antagonism is what you get when you treat workers antagonistically.
If your boss demands you wear specific clothes, and demands you should keep those clothes clean in your own time, they are effectively making you do more work after hours using tools and utilities that you also have to pay for. It is perfectly reasonable for a union to try to negotiate either: a) laundry pay and utility compensation, or b) for the company to do this work instead. In this case the union is demanding the latter.
Another variable for me would be how many company provided outfits there are. If they just give them one apron and expect it to be washed daily, that would fall under an onerous requirement in my opinion and would justify a laundry service.
When comparing it to the company provided footwear, their example was a woman who went through three sets of shoes and being told three different times the shoes weren’t suitable for arbitrary reasons. If they are going to be that picky, they should absolutely foot the bill to ensure the uniform fits their standards.
You can search my HN comment history, I'm the furthest thing from pro-union, and nothing in here stood out to me as being inappropriate.
I encourage you browse the web and see for your self, workplace psychology is an interesting study.
As for seniority rules, I don’t remember reading anything about those, but from my experience, I’m not a huge fan, I think there are better systems, particularly those which are based around consensus. However, given Starbucks’ huge corporate management, I’m guessing that seniority is miles ahead of the system they have now, which is probably management arbitrarily picking which is wide open for abuse such as retaliation. They probably picket seniority because it is very hard for management to abuse it.
Because a market requires certain conditions to be true: equal access to information, many buyers and sellers, and that the products being exchanged are comparable. It's possible that requirements 1 and maybe 3 can be met, but 2 completely kills the possibility of an efficient market in this proposal because there are far more sellers of time than buyers.
All capitalist economies (that I know of, please correct me if I'm wrong) employ regulation of market activity to compensate for imbalances in one of more of the three areas above. The theory for doing so is not based on goodwill to all people or something like that, but because distorted markets are inefficient and waste value.
To be clear, the things being exchanged here are the shifts themselves. I don't see why you can't have a healthy market between the few dozen or so people that work at a starbucks location.
Likewise a well managed company shouldn’t have many collisions on PTO slots etc. as they would hire extras when PTO is in high demand, but if a collision occurs there should be systems in place to resolve those (seniority could be one of these systems, but should not be the only one) other systems could be some points based systems (e.g. where a worker that has previously not been favored, will get priority in collisions), or even just lottery.
As for promotions, a consensus is absolutely favorable to seniority. If a consensus is unreachable other systems could take over, but in a well managed workplace, failure to reach consensus in a promotion scenario should be really rare (and honestly a worrying sign of an unhealthy work environment).
EDIT: I want to make clear that I’m speaking general here. In the Starbucks scenario, seniority is a perfectly cromulent practice to prevent their bosses from practicing retaliation by allotting worse shifts to workers they don’t like. A consensus driven approach is probably an overkill in a workplace with such a large corporate management.
Honestly I don’t think I’ve ever worked in a workplace (unionized or otherwise; service work, manual labor, tech, or otherwise) which didn’t employ some sort of senior rule (mandated or organic). I’m personally not a fan of this practice and I think there are better ways to partition benefits and organize schedules, but there are also certainly worse ways.
An example of way more petulant practice is management cutting benefits or arbitrarily giving workers they don’t like for some reason worse shifts (which happens aplenty in ununinized small shops), and an example of way more counterproductive measure is a hard systematized schedule (e.g. a 2-2-3 12 hour shifts) which bigger shops with long opening hours love hard systems like these, but are really hard on workers, and bleeds a tonne into their free time.