Hanging by a Strand: Worker dissent brews at an iconic New York bookstore (2020)
thebaffler.com
thebaffler.com
"Working in a retail environment, when things are busy, managers will step in and cover a desk while someone goes to a bathroom—things that, if you wanted to be a stickler about it, should be done by union labor, ..."
Started out making sure you didn't have to work 7 days a week, 14 hours a day with dangerous equipment - now has become, if you work in a bookstore and you need to use a bathroom for 10 minutes, the only person 'allowed' to cover for you is another union member...good grief.
Highlights perfectly why an ever increasing number of folks are anti-union and union enrollment continues to fall in this country.
‘Since the latest layoff, “they’ve been scheduling managers to do things like work a register for hours at a time, sorting and shelving books.”
“This is deliberate and systematic,” he continued. “There are days when there are as many managers working on the floor as union workers.”’
Should it not be okay for a business to ask any of its employees to perform a reasonable and safe task for which they’ve been trained?
Apparently, according to one of the replies in this thread, it is “self-peasantisation”. They would rather prohibit people that are already employed by the business and trained to do those tasks from doing those tasks, because they are not in a union, so the business could hire union people instead to do those tasks.
I find a 'standard' 13" (as on an older Macbook Air, for example, which I think is technically 13.3" and 16:10?) a bit too claustrophobic for anything creative - either due to apps needing toolbars, or my workflow needing multiple windows accessible (e.g. coding, with VSCode, a shell or two, and a browser for docs and StackOverflow).
A 15" (which I have now) is nice to work with, but then the laptop becomes a touch too heavy for travelling comfort (unless this is something you specifically optimise for when buying e.g. [0] - but then there are other tradeoffs).
Thus I wonder if a 14-14.5" with minimal bezels, set in a lightweight chassis similar to a traditional 13" (see how big the bezels are on an older Macbook Air, for example - lots of space for a larger screen without unduly enlarging the chassis) might not be a sweet spot?
Out of curiosity, what was the comment that you were originally intending to reply to?
Thanks for the flag - I've moved my comment there too :)
> "Bass Wyden has cleared her business almost entirely of the layer of upper management that once stood between her and the union."
Separated by 3 sentences.
There's a few people choosing to be obtuse in the comments ("the only person 'allowed' to cover for you is another union member": correct, because otherwise it's an ersatz way to break a union) or obtuse and offensive ("soft, entitled people deserve to have their jobs taken by machines and immigrants")
That's self-peasantization.
But I gotta treat the article like advocacy fanfic if it's going to whiplash me from "there's a 1:1 ratio of management:line worker somedays" and "the owner systemically removed the management layer between her and the line workers" in 3 sentences.
I will take a bite.
How is it being obtuse? Sure, you can call it as a way to break union. That doesn’t change the fact that this sounds like a ridiculous and inefficient setup, because it is.
If your defense for a silly workplace setup is “that silly setup is to avoid union-breaking, because if we didn’t have that silly setup, that would be union-breaking”, it isn’t as strong of a defense as you think.
If anything, it is pretty much the perfect ammo for anti-union sentiments. Because you are essentially saying that those inefficiencies and silly setups are required for unionized workplaces (similar to the one in the OP, not talking about film or athlete or police unions) to continue existing.
TL;DR: it's a multi-turn game.
If this wasn't a provision, you could just hire N=X employees to replace the X employees that unionized, then lay off the unionized employees. This used to happen, hence why it's a standard provision in collective bargaining.
It's inefficient if you fire employees en masse. (the particulars in the article are quite damning re: firing en masse, receive PPP loan to not fire, then stonks)
The thing is, their union didn’t prevent that from happening, but it did add that silly inefficient setup mentioned above. The question is, how is this a good thing?
If all unions did was keep a reasonable eye on safety and (let's say) sensible workers' rights, while also offering a simple outlet for collective bargaining, I'm not sure many employers would have a problem.
But we now seem to be in a position where the unions are protecting their very existence with provisions such as the one discussed that (at least at face value) seem nonsensical; and sadly these provisions become the reason that otherwise sympathetic folks start to understand why an employer might want rid of a union.
(I've seen other examples of such silliness; setting up a venue for a large meeting in the US was far more time-consuming and frustrating than it otherwise might have been, because certain tasks on the project plan [some quite trivial] could only be performed by union members, who of course were not always aligned and available with the non-union workers.)
Why would you be sure of this? Employers (i.e. people in power) will always resist change that in any way could lesson their power. Like the ability to tell people to work in unsafe conditions, or get them to work hours without pay (wage theft). This is especially true when they can pocket the money themselves.
As a counter-point, can anyone think of examples of complete nonsense rules that employers in non-union workplaces enforce?