Apple’s Unionized Store Workers Seek Tips and Higher Holiday Pay | Hacker News Reader

Apple’s Unionized Store Workers Seek Tips and Higher Holiday Pay

bloomberg.com

10 pointsmfiguiere8 comments

I strongly suspect the tipping demand is a negotiating tactic. It gives the union something to give up on their side which they don’t really care for in exchange for a concession from Apple.

Tipping isn’t gonna make Apple workers a penny. No one’s gonna tip them. But on the other hand, Apple is absolutely not gonna add another step to their checkout process offering the customer a chance to tip.

The tip demand is a negotiating freebie for the workers. Something they will happily give up but Apple will be willing to make meaningful concessions to remove.

The tipping I don’t understand. This means the store has to track them and and add the money to individuals’ checks? It’s not like they can cash out from the till. That is an odd thing to ask for. They don’t work on commission which is one reason I feel ok going to an apple store for a phone. The rest seems normal and I hope they have some success.

A good number of prominent up-and-coming labor unions in the US seem to have some sort of a weird self-inflicted-harm fetish and an uncanny ability to turn public sentiment against them (even when the public already favors them), which they don't shy away from putting in the spotlight shortly after making any notable progress.

They had a solid list of demands, and then just somehow felt the dire need to tack-on this absolutely strange demand for tipping that makes them look like out-of-touch morons that the opposition tends to paint them as (especially given that afaik most people don't like the whole tipping-dependent approach to a lot of things in the US).

I saw some people in the comments here calling it a negotiation tactic ("ask for more than what you actually want, so that you can negotiate down to what you want"), but this is a very "questionable" way of using that tactic. If the union wanted a higher-than-actually-needed demand to negotiate down later, they should've just used a higher number for their holiday pay demand. Or literally anything else that wouldn't give the anti-union sentiment such good ammo. Which shouldn't be that difficult to find, if things are indeed as bad as the union claims they are without their presence.

Honestly, I couldn’t have come up with a worst demand than this. I almost have to think this is an idea that was introduced by a subversive element in the union. Literally ten monkeys on ten typewriters could have produced something more coherent. Just incredibly tone deaf and out of touch, and I say this as someone who’s pretty, pretty pro-labor!

You want better comp, so instead of shifting that burden to the richest company in the world, you’re going to … try to directly extract that value from the customers visiting the store at which you work. OK.

Going to be hilarious when Apple has a facially neutral reason for closing the unionized store when people stop going to the one store with a markedly worse consumer experience.

It's totally fair for employees to ask for more salary or leave especially if the company is raking in high profits but I think it's absurd to have a tipping system in an Apple retail shop. Maybe maybe I could make sense of a tip for a support request where the clerk goes the extra mile but in the unions system the tip is then spread amongst all members of the union.

   > Finally, the union is asking Apple to pay $1 an hour more to employees who become first-aid certified

If Apple wanted their retail staff to be first-aid certified then they could just require that. I don't see why Apple would want it so much that they'd pay $1 an hour for it.

I am not familiar with union negotiations. Is this a case of "we ask for a bit of over the top or outlandish things which we'll then give up in order to make it easier to score the main points"?

Does every business have to have tip pressure (despite the "no pressure" statement)?

The only possible upside to the proliferation of tipping culture is that maybe this will finally result in legislation that bans it altogether? And then with it banished from the sit-down restaurant industry, it can be relegated to the very few niches where it belongs (either as a true gratuity paid under extraordinary circumstances or a low-stakes bribe paid to a person occupying some sort of gatekeeper role in the hospitality industry).

https://archive.is/v1tpo

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