Apple has reached its first-ever union contract with store employees in Maryland
apnews.com
apnews.com
I know this site is pretty pro-union, but if I were them I would not have wanted to unionize at all. Apple has decent salaries for what it is, and it's probably cheaper to close the store than hire a McKinsey consultant to renegotiate union contracts.
Forming a union is much more difficult than you propose.
If workers had a notion that their store was underperforming, there's no way anyone could unionize fast enough to prevent it from closing. So it's not a realistic hypothetical. In fact, the company would probably close an underperforming store sooner if there was a unionization drive and would have plenty of time to do so before certification.
Presumably closing the store in response to an attempt at unionization would be the same thing?
After unionization, what is required when closing a store is written into the negotiated contract.
The parties could put nearly anything they want into the contract. But if the company intends to close the store then they'd just not accept anything in the contract that makes it difficult to close the store, and if the workers go on strike then they were going to close to store anyway.
Size has nothing to do with it. Just because a company is large doesn't mean it needs to start making poor business decisions.
> corporate death penalty
That's a bit extreme. If you want to be seen as objective, this kind of inflammatory rhetoric will only work against you.
To be clear this is also inflammatory rhetoric disguised as what some would have you think is ‘common sense’.
Yes, you can frame this as "bad for business". Contrary to what all the armchair economists online will say, you should never just do what's good for business. If we did we would be seeing crimes against humanity. And we do, just not here.
Its always a balancing act. Often what's good for business isn't good, and what's bad for business isn't bad. You need more robust reasoning than that. Because if that's all you're relying on to form your opinions, you have no substance.
You're saying "well okay it could negatively impact business".
I'm replying "that doesn't mean anything, and sometimes negatively impacting business is very good".
It's not enough to just say something. You need to explain WHY. So what? Who cares? If you don't answer that, I'm sorry, you don't have an argument and anyone wise would choose to not listen to you.
It's bad for business. Okay let's assume that's true. So what? What's the big idea? What's the cost versus the benefit?
This is an oxymoron.
https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2019/2/22/18236424/a...
Wow, that is incredibly hard to respond to without casting aspersions. You claim there is no reason to hide a fundamentally unpopular and sometimes illegal thing?
This is the kind of thing that is so wrong that it doesn't merit a factual response. This in line with people using levels on airplanes to prove the world is flat.
I don't know if McKinsey is or isn't union busting, there are credible accusations against them. But I do know that discounting the notion out of hand and not even attempting to present evidence or argument is so laughably wrong that you should feel ashamed.
This site is pro-union for anything outside of tech, but staunchly anti-union for tech. except maybe gamedev, which has a reputation of underpaying
But yes, I'm in gamedev and this was a forgone conclusion for studios making record profits but laying off very talented people. If your ace isn't safe, the rest of us jokers need to band together to survive. These same FAANGs seem to forgotten why they paid their other tech so well, and they are sowing what they reap.
If this site is primarily workers (as opposed to business owners) then I am not surprised.
Isn’t it a non-managerial activity (on purpose)?
Seems like there would be very limited influence on creating one
Linus’s position and other people like him is indefensible.
From this side of the pound, usually the large majority is happy with the benefits, even without being themselves union members.
That is why countries with strong union culture have negociation rounds of industry leaders with the main union groups, to discuss how the sector will be handled for the current fiscal year.
You may have detente or even just a laid back employee base.
But you're only pro-Union insofar as you are financially and personally comfortable with what the Union demands at the penalty of consequences.
Unless there is some kind of non-standard relationship between yourself and the Union, then there isn't a direct connection between what they will eventually demand and what you are willing to give at the cost of your business.
Your pro-Union stance can only be solely due to lack of personal stakes, and therefore it is only a matter of time or a change in labor circumstances. Unless your vision for your company is as a total cooperative.
>there can not be shared interest between business owners and Unions.
There absolutely can. The point of a zero-sum game is that one party cannot win more without the other winning less. This is only a problem if all parties care exclusively about winning the most, rather than about winning enough sustainably. If you value your workers and care about them and want them to have happy, good lives, then you can absolutely find an alliance with a union.
It's not like a criminal justice case where one side has to win and the other has to lose, it's like a divorce where if everyone maintains a level head and allows the existence of humanity in the other side, everyone can come out happy. It only becomes adversarial when one side decides to make it that way.
The interests are misaligned, but is it really unbelievable that there's some minority of business owners actually
1. Do care about their labor?
2. Feel the best long term profit strategy is one of retention instead of the cheapest labor?
3. Whose primary goals are not to maximize profit margins?
At the end of the day, the customer (the business) values the labor it’s buying more than money it costs and the vendor (the employees) value the money received more than the labor sold. Both sides end up with more value then they started with - positive sum.
If that was not the case, neither side would agree to the transaction.
There are of course shared interests - almost everything! The business, the customer, the cash flow, everything matters to both of them.
Not sure what if anything was being suggested by that comment? It seems like nonsense.
But unions are ultimately a rich man's sport. They require funding and if they need to exert power they can only do so by withholding service. The poor are generally not in a position to act on either, especially the withholding of service. Unions embolden the rich, but can completely cripple the poor. So you find much less support when the money isn't there.
I would like to disagree. Unions are a tool for the poor, the people who don’t have a lot of rights, and protects them from the whim of the rich. If you are working a minimum wage job, and you are being made to work excessive hours, what is your recourse? What is your bargaining power?
Okay, one answer may be to quit and try somewhere else since there isn’t anything to lose here.
Well, I can tell you a very real scenario. My mother was working as a bank clerk in India. Has been her whole life. In the same bank (branches changed but she never changed the bank). When she was 50, there was a fraud. There was a transaction from a local businessman to someone, worth 3x her annual salary. She approved the txn. Once discovered, the businessman took the bank to court who in turn put the blame on my mom of will full ignorance. Businessman offered to settle out of court but we couldnt afford it, of course. At this point, the union came to mum’s help. They pressured upper management to get their house in order, not shift the blame to the tellers, and do not even think about firing her.
That's the question. What is your bargaining power? All you have is your ability to stop working. Which, indeed, can exert power –– But if you are poor how long can you really go without work before you starve to death?
The rich can afford to sit around and wait until the over side caves. But unless you working excessive hours is the only thing keeping a business afloat (in which case, what do you stand to gain?), most likely they can outlast poor you with ease. Once you give up, your power is gone.
If you can't go without work for weeks, months, maybe even years, the business will quickly recognize your idle threat is just that. It is not just coincidence that unions are rare in professions where there isn't a whole lot of money floating around.
> Well, I can tell you a very real scenario.
This doesn't appear to speak to bargaining power, just communication. No power was needed to be exerted. If it came to a point where power needed to be exerted, how long would your mother have actually lasted? Assuming she could have lasted long enough, perhaps she wasn't as poor as you let on?
Strikes don't need to be and shouldn't be simple affairs, they can and should be nuanced and creative because the capitalists certainly will try to be clever and creative at putting people back into abusive working conditions when it suits them.
Unions are about organization. Because organization creates options. Options are power. Money is one way to get options and therefore power, but not the only way.
Still a luxury of the rich, of course. The poor can't afford to lose a day, or even an hour.
Okay, just do some simple reasoning.
Who has more bargaining power? An individual or a union? A union, of course. Therefore, who can end a strike sooner? A union, of course. Therefore, who can get paid sooner? Unionized workers, of course.
If you're POOR and in a position to REQUIRE CHANGE, a union will be necessarily better for you. I don't even understand how this can be up for debate because it seems so painfully obvious.
Depends. Whomever has the most money. Generally, a group of moderately wealthy people will have more combined money than a single very wealthy person, but statistical likelihood does not provide a guarantee. We can find all kinds of examples in history where exceptionally wealthy individuals have completely dominated over unions.
And even when unions, especially labour unions, do show some amount of strength, they often have to go crying to a rich government for additional power when they don't have enough money of their own.
But if the union members are poor (like, actually poor, not pretend poor like we keep seeing in other comments)...
> If you're POOR and in a position to REQUIRE CHANGE, a union will be necessarily better for you.
Require is an interesting word. What is actually "required"? From what I gather "require" merely means something akin to "would be really nice to have". In that vein, a poor person attaining wealth would be really nice to have. Few would argue with that.
So, why don't the poor unionize and use their power to the capture wealth they are so sorrily lacking? The answer is simple: They don't have the resources to actually do it. Unions are a rich man's sport.
They... do. You just described a union and why a union would be good for poor workers.
> They don't have the resources
Right... which is why they unionize, to pool resources.
> Unions are a rich man's sport
You've said this, and never explained how. Rich man are, presumably, business owners. Not laborers. Why, and how, would a union be beneficial for business owners? Wouldn't it be bad for them?
Okay, given that you say they have unionized, but are still poor, what are they waiting for? Why are they sitting on this mythical power that will magically appear without money that you speak of?
> Right... which is why they unionize, to pool resources.
What resources? They are poor. They don't have resources to pool. If they had such resources they wouldn't be poor.
> Rich man are, presumably, business owners.
Why would that be the presumption? The data shows that business owners tend to be quite poor themselves, if not even the poorest, statistically. Obviously there are counterexamples, but the average mom and pop trying to eke out a living at their restaurant down the street, that won't make the year before bankruptcy, are probably not rich. What makes you think that they are?
> Wouldn't it be bad for them?
Why wouldn't business owners also stand to gain bargaining power if they joined a union? It seems you're completely contradicting yourself now.
It's not mythical, it's logical. If you rely on me and ten other people to run your business, and I say I'll walk without a raise, then you say, "good luck". If all ten of your employees say they'll walk, you have a problem.
That's just bargaining power. It's a real thing that exists.
> what resouces?
The most valuable resource from a business perspective, labor. Without labor you don't have a company. You don't have a product. And you don't have customers. Again, a tiny drop of labor you can let go. All of it? Well, there's nothing left.
> business owners stand to gain bargaining power
Two problems. 1, businesses already have perfect bargaining power in labor relations. They can't get more because they have the most. Number 2, bargaining power against themselves? Again, why? That doesn't even make sense.
Yet we can find all kinds of examples where the employer did say "good luck" to all ten people. In fact, it used to happen frequently enough that the government will now often step in to try and prevent the business from doing that. As before, labour unions, even when comprised of moderately wealthy people, are not always wealthy enough to hold power and have to cry to a much richer government for assistance.
> The most valuable resource from a business perspective, labor.
You can direct your labour resources towards the union, but that comes at the cost of not being able to direct it to your paid job. Opportunity cost is real. If you are poor, what supplemental resources do you plan to use to acquire things like food in the absence of the pay you gave up? There is no such thing as a free lunch.
> businesses already have perfect bargaining power in labor relations.
And...? Even if that is true (it's not, of course), unions are not limited to labour relationships. The farmer unions talked about at the top of the thread branch (which you obviously didn't bother to read) aren't about trying to embolden farmer bargaining power over their farmhands.
> bargaining power against themselves? Again, why? That doesn't even make sense.
Uh... What? Best to stop and think before replying, my friend.
Finding a few counterexamples on a gradient doesn't mean the gradient doesn't exist. Finding a few counterexamples means that strikes don't always work, but they certainly work more often than solo negotiations.
At best you are doing this thing that smart but narrowly focused people do where you try to break it down to a binary. That might be possible, but if this most charitable interpretation is correct your binary is "Are unions perfect" which they clearly aren't. Instead your binary should be "Are union usually better than solitary negotiations?" and that the answer to that is clearly yes.
I also doubt this is your actual issue, because you have introduced data and brought in hypothetical mom and pop stores that are clearly unrelated. Because of abject non-sense like this:
> You can direct your labour resources towards the union, but that comes at the cost of not being able to direct it to your paid job.
We are talking about strikes. You know and have demonstrated a knowledge that withholding labor is the power a laborer has, not directing it to a union. And in some situations (like the Kellogg's Strike over the pandemic) the union pays people on strike, this is a problem with many solutions and people get more options as they pool effort and resources.
You are ignoring repeated explanations and willfully choosing to answer the wrong questions. You are not engaging with this topically honestly.
Generally, least as long as the members are moderately rich and have the richest, and therefore most powerful, entity – the government – willing to hold their hand. But how successful do you think labour unions would be if the government eliminated all laws that protect labour unions? Let's be real: Most of them wouldn't stand a chance. A lot of them aren't rich enough to exert the needed power on their own.
> Instead your binary should be "Are union usually better than solitary negotiations?"
It seems the problem here is that you're doing that weird programmer thing where you think everything is binary. The first comment described four possible states on the blatant surface. It cannot be distilled down to a binary state. To try and force it into to a binary state loses everything that is being talked about. The quantization you are trying to apply is invalid.
With respect, no wonder you're so confused about the subject. Hopefully recognition of your error can get you back on track.
> the union pays people on strike
Assuming we're still talking about a union of poor people, and not going off on wild tangents, how? Where has this money magically appeared from? Sure, rich people can fund a union and pay out dividends to workers on strike, but then you're talking about rich people. We recognized from the very beginning that unions are beneficial to the rich.
Again, where do you think these poor people are magically finding all this money out of thin air? You keep going there, but never seem to be able to answer to it. Let me be clear: Poor people, not rich people.
This is binary thinking where a gradient is required.
Poor is a spectrum. Someone with a car and a house and a $20/hour job might be poor because they barely make ends meet but manage to save a few hundred a month, but they have more options than a renter who is otherwise financially identical because they can use their house or car as collateral to get a loan.
A group of people might be able to take out a loan an individual can't. A group of people might collect dues as a cost to be in that group and pay them back out to allow strikes.
A group of people can threaten a strike and that costs Zero dollars.
> The data shows that business owners tend to be quite poor themselves
This is bullshit. I now think you are a liar. We are clearly talking about business large enough for strikes to happen and that excludes whatever non-sense dataset you have cherry picked.
More people have more options. Options are power. Why are you arguing against this fundamental point?
And someone with a $1,000,000 per year salary and a penchant for hookers and blow might also barely make ends meet. Is there some kind of useful takeaway from this fun anecdote?
> but manage to save a few hundred a month
If we assume the average worker with 20 years under their belt, that's ~$40,000. In what world is that poor? That alone, even ignoring the house and any other assets (a car, perhaps?), is somewhere around the top 20%. This disconnect from reality is fascinating.
> A group of people might be able to take out a loan an individual can't
Just who, exactly, is going to lend to poor people, even if they come by the millions, for no reason other than to cover their living expenses? There is almost no chance the poor are going to pay you back, unless maybe they happen to win the lottery. But if you really want to "invest" in the lottery, why not put that money directly into the lottery? What value do the middlemen bring?
> A group of people might collect dues as a cost to be in that group
From who? The poor don't have resources to pay dues. Are you being tricked by rich people again?
> We are clearly talking about business large enough for strikes to happen
No, we are clearly not. What makes you think the farmers that we were talking about earlier in thread even have employees? Many farmers do not. You're clearly not talking about anything related to what the rest of us are, but anyway...
> More people have more options. Options are power. Why are you arguing against this fundamental point?
Get back to us when you've actually read the thread. As amusing as your confusion is, there is no interest in arbitrarily changing the subject for no reason. Never was, never will be. Start a new thread if you want to talk about something else. Hijacking an existing thread for a different purpose is in bad faith.
Maybe don't put forward arguments that hinge on denial of reality?
The railway strikes in Germany from beginning of this year prove that, no, the bourgeoisie cannot just sit around and wait and/or rehire their entire staff. The 2023 Hollywood labor disputes show that "the poor" can indeed last longer than "the rich".
Ironic. If I was able to meet reality, that would imply I have a full understanding of reality, at which point for what reason would there be to talk about it? That would be a pointless waste of time.
> 2023 Hollywood labor disputes show that "the poor" can indeed last longer than "the rich".
According to the internet, these "poor" you speak of are making average incomes into the hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. These are, generally, very rich people. Perhaps you aren't aware of what poor is?
Sometimes going on strike would be tough — there'd be less to eat, if the union wasn't large enough to subsidise strikers with workers' income from elsewhere.
The early trade unions were not successful. I mean, they were successful in bringing about change, but they were not successful as power entities. They had to lean on government to exert the power. Unions are a rich man's sport.
Of course, government itself is ultimately a union, although differing in how membership is recognized. A government of only poor people wouldn't go far either, though. Government equally needs riches to wield power.
That's because national railway and other such national critical infrastructure workers like policemen, teachers, healthcare workers, etc have actual leverage. Like what are you gonna do then? You can't outsource your infrastructure maintenance, healthcare or policing to remote offshore Asian workers, but you can for other non-credentialed internet connected professions in the private sectors where the language is Englisch, which correlates to their unions being very weak in negotiation power, like IT workers for example.
The recent tanking of IT/tech jobs in some high-CoL countries has made IT workers there realized that without the low interest rates to artificially inflate the market demand, they have virtually no leverage over their employers unlike those in credentialed professions with unions.
You can certainly try, but the quality will be noticeably poorer. You can get away with that for a while, especially as a big business, but I think the tide is already turning there. Everyone's tired of broken shitty tech that doesn't work properly with no one to really contact about it. Skilled IT professionals are in huge demand nowadays, it's only the fleas on the rats complaining that the ship is sinking. Rats can swim, they'll be fine as long as land isn't too far. Mechanics and firefighters that can actually keep the ship going (if you pay us well enough), are on the other hand doing quite well these days. Unions are great, especially for tech professionals. As long as you're still allowed to negotiate personally as well, there's no reason not to.
I know HN loves repeating this outdated trope to feel good, but that's not always the case and not in many I saw where they offshored and product quality didn't drop because they made sure to hire qualified people and managers, and not bottom of the barrel on the cheap.
Sure, you won't find many rockstar workers abroad, but most companies don't need that many rockstar engineers especially for CRUD work which is a commodity now, and plenty of countries have upskilled their workforce in the last 20 years especially in web CRUD, that they can take on the maintenance of stable products on the cheap.
>Everyone's tired of broken shitty tech that doesn't work properly with no one to really contact about it.
You mean like the one Google, Microsoft, Crowdstrike, etc. build in he US and not by offshore workers?
>Unions are great, especially for tech professionals. As long as you're still allowed to negotiate personally as well, there's no reason not to.
That's not how unions work in France and Germany. The unions set strick salary bands so that a newcomer can't earn more than someone who's been longer in the company so your negotiation doesn't get you anything, you let your union negociate for you.
So they didn't save much money, they just chose not to pay their domestic talent. Much better.
>Sure, you won't find many rockstar workers abroad, but most companies don't need that many rockstar engineers especially for CRUD work which is a commodity now,
Sure, we're mostly in tech and tech is one of the "easier" factors to outsource. I think your underrating how much even Crud work needs, but that's besides my main point.
You can't outsource everything. If you need people in a physical store, or on a physical setting in a building or in government land, you'll need to negotiate with your labor or shut down the project. I guess you can immigrate aliens who you can pay under minunum wage with the promise of citizenship, but that's clearly beyond the gray area at this point.
>You mean like the one Google, Microsoft, Crowdstrike, etc. build in he US and not by offshore workers?
In the grand scheme of things, most of my CS nightmares came from financial issues, not technical. And yes, they want to make that experience painful.
Sure, Crowdstrike happens but domestic labor means it's mostly fixed (and actually fixed) in a weekend instead of a week with precarious results.
Did it? What I read from the dispute is that it only slightly delayed AI while throwing Voice actors completely under the bus.i think the only reason it even settled was due to declining movie sales, another issue self inflicted by the rich.
When union workers strike, they do so collectively, which means that the bargaining power is not that of a single individual but that of the collective workforce. Employers often can’t just wait out a strike because they lose tons of money when all its employees aren’t working. The union’s strength lies precisely in this collective bargaining power.
Also, unions raise money to support striking workers and unions emerged initially in the jobs where workers were paid the least and exploited the most (see early 19th century textile workers in the U.S., for example). The decline of unions since then is a more complicated history but the reality is that unions most benefit the most exploited workers who would otherwise have no recourse as individuals. Collective support helps maintain workers throughout a strike.
You’re still thinking of the rich. The poor don’t have money to raise. If they did, they wouldn’t be poor.
If they’re losing money on that store, they’ll close it. If not, they’ll keep it open. But it’s not mandated to keep a money losing store opened. No one’s going to go into court and argue, “no fair! They closed my money losing location!”
And there you have the real reason Apple doesn’t care about a union here. The performance of this location can be ascertained in a fashion that is authoritative, objective, and unassailable. If they ever lose money, they’ll close, union or no union. So it doesn’t make a difference to Apple.
I am a Senior Manager and saw a thing or two.
What I dislike about your statement is the confrontational usage. If we don’t fundamentally agree on collaboration, we run into fights over power.
A business owner sets the direction and the goals. A union is a commitment and should go beyond defensive rights. Both should work together on different interests sometimes but shall fundamentally agree: without a successful business there won’t be any employees, not the other way around.
And without employees there would not be any business. At the end of the day they put the work as well.
It’s in Apple’s interest to keep these employees happy because they are the face of the company. Their customers interact with them when they buy something and when something goes wrong.
I agree that the relationship should be more constructive than confrontational, but it goes both ways. Apple is both a wonderful and difficult company to work for.
Successful businesses always attracts employees, that has never been an issue. So the scarcity here comes from the business side and not the employee side.
The other way around would be that employees starts a successful business if there is none around, but that isn't the case. Good setups that enables good jobs are hard to create, you see what happens when those leave in the Midwest after the car industry left.
In the end it is up to each area to ensure their workers are competitive on a global stage, either price wise or skill wise or some other advantage. Otherwise there wont be anyone who wants to pay them.
It can't be anyone else, even when it could easily be.
Businesses that employ unskilled labor aren't the equal partnership that you want to make them out to be.
See the fact that the trend is toward international outsourcing. Unionization will increase that trend, even if the cashier that the public sees is now making $20/hr (now at half-time hours and much of her family has now had to move out of the area to find work, due to a downward trend in job availability: aggravating the gentrification or the depopulation trend, depending on the area).
I think that Unions are economically and socially useful, but not in the case of what is essentially unskilled labor.
As beyond the rational nonsense of such a proposition, the existence of non-unionized unskilled labor plays an important economic and social role. For one, these jobs maximize job availability to a lower class that is growing for reasons other than job availability and average salary trends. The alternative being unemployment.
And unskilled unions should especially be discouraged when other wage control issues are both not addressed and frankly aggravated by the generally pro union side.
In summary, unskilled labor wages should be buoyed by measures other than unions: reasonable minimum wage law, labor supply control at the population level, etc. As unskilled Unions otherwise distort the economy and social sphere too much. Last, one can't rationally justify the existence of such Unions on profit margin. If they are justified for one, then they are justified for all. And vice versa.
Unskilled labor is something people can be trained to do in a very short period of time, and where it doesn't require any kind of specialized training or certification
Yes, we still should respect people doing unskilled labor, but pretending that there's no such thing doesn't help anyone. All it does is generate a scoff at the idea that stocking shelves or operating a point of sale is "skilled"
I just find it distasteful when people are outright rude or dismissive to “unskilled labor.”
Look, even un-unionized laborers in America get paid significantly more than, say, China or Bangladesh. And they're also adults, by law. The reality is the jobs that can be outsourced safely already have, a long time ago. When was the last time you saw an article of clothing made in the US? Or a plastic product made here? Or anything really, besides an automobile?
But not all jobs can be outsourced. You can't outsource retail or food service.
How do you get that successful business? Employees like Product Managers trying to analyze product market fit, leadership setting direction, etc.
This happens a lot in small business - the owner/founder thinks they and they alone have the magic sauce, and it quickly becomes "you should be grateful to have this opportunity to work on my ideas".
And that social contract was broken some 6-10 years ago at this point. Businesses can be successful, record breaking profits successful. But still refuse a raise or even lay you off to save a penny.
So the increased opposition is inevitable. You can't just lie saying "times are tough", cut hours and and pretend unemployment is at an all time low, and not expect your labor to resent the business.
What leverage are the union employees supposed to bring to bear, strike until the store opens? Or if suing business into existence turns out to be a workable strategy then we've maybe been running society wrong for a long time now.
Of course, that's assuming the main activity of a business is to make and sell things. Could be a wrong assumption.
This is a company with hundreds of thousands of people. I work in several ones. It is very hard to do this kind of things. If you do, there will be paper trail because you would need to get consensus from others.
If store is unprofitable, then they would just use that reason.
If the store is unionised and profitable, why would apple even close it?
Hard but doable. A few companies got burnt with direct messages between executives showing up in court in discovery, but everyone watched and learned to quickly scrub and remove those routinely. So next time it’s easier. And of course we only find out those that slip up and get caught.
But even that is not needed, all it really takes is the subordinates to read between the lines. It takes just one minion to suggest closing that particular store for “unrelated reasons” and they are promoted quickly. Everyone else learns exactly what the idea is without leaving a single paper trail.
In my area, it didn't take a paper trail for Starbucks to get a smack. Several stores in the area were unionizing or considering unionizing.
So Starbucks removed the cushioned anti-fatigue floor mats from a bunch of stores, declaring them a trip/fall hazard.
Employees talked to each other and discovered that they'd only been removed from a few stores, not all. You can guess which.
Employees told the NLRB who asked Starbucks to explain why the mats weren't a trip hazard in non-unionizing stores.
The mats returned quickly.
- remove conviniene for employees
- employees get more tired
- sales decline
- store justifies shut down
Seems like quite the stretch, just to not want to bargain with labor. I 100% believe it, but it's just sad. This all happened because businesses are stingy with paying employees properly.
The reality is that workers are individuals who have to fend for themselves. Employers are naturally organized and have the power to modulate work conditions and say "find work elsewhere if you're not happy." Unions are the countervailing force to that. Even in the fairest of societies this would be true.
Workers in unions earn up to a million dollars more in their lifetime.
They probably didn't need a software developer to tell them.
That's the thing. I dont know of any Apple Retail in the world that pays below average to their industry counterparts. And benefits are decent as well.
If you are ever involved in organizing - expect this pattern.
- Homegrown: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/seattle-sandwich-chain...
- Dandelions: https://www.orlandoweekly.com/food-drink/dandelion-community...
- Starbucks (multiple locations): https://edition.cnn.com/2022/11/22/business/starbucks-closur...
The other two are examples of relatively small businesses that look like they either decided to burn everything to the ground and go out of business rather than accept a union for ideological reason or were failing independently of that.
If he is unhappy, he can at least sell it.
As far as, "independently failing" I'm also skeptical that staff at a visibly failing business would feel comfortable to unionize.
As the parent implies here, typically union standards are incredibly generous. They're not difficult or costly to meet. Often it is painted as though a union is asking for the world and then some, and then you read the print and its... a COL adjustment. Which 90% of businesses do, anyway. Or something of that nature.
I'm being presumptuous here but from what I've seen, its trivial for a company to flourish with a union. Ideologically though, most American companies are opposed just because.
yes, that is exactly the anti-union rhetoric: if you form a union, we can't continue business and you will lose your job.
Restaurants have famously thin margins. If the profit margins are 5%, then a 1% increase in expenses (due to union demands) results in a 20% reduction of profits.
Unions can drastically increase operating costs for a business. When I was at a trade show in las vegas a few years ago, I had to work with a "lighting guy", "setup guy" and a "cleaning guy" to plug in a couple lamps for our display, b/c each role was unionized.
I actually managed restaurant business. Our labor cost target was 15%, and food cost 30%. Then operating expenses like electricity, water, rent... I'd estimate there's 20% of revenue left over. Was our profit margin then 20%? No, because we were constantly buying new stores and random things we don't need. For example, a 16,000 dollar automated flattop grill that barely works, when we already have a flattop.
I'm often dubious of the "capital" that businesses purchase. Point being, profit margins are not really a good measurement of much. I can burn money and have low profit margins, if I wanted.
There's a park right there, and lots of people hanging out after work are grabbing ice cream from a place that's in the same building - that's the kind of establishment that makes sense in the location they are in (the ice cream place is not a sweat shop either that is only able to survive by underpaying workers: as far as I can tell their starting wages are 21/hr, they have 100% employer paid health insurance premiums, paid vacation and sick time, and a ton of other benefits - Homegrown's benefits were worse despite the union). There's 2 other cafes that have sandwiches nearby, and for one they are open starting at 7am so you can actually have breakfast there before work, two, Homegrown charges 15 for a sandwich which gets you a full meal at both those other places. From a quality standpoint the other 2 also feel more like a proper meal than fast food.
If this is the way that they ran all of their locations, then really there is no surprise here, union or not.
Ex- used to work at Target. Watching anti-union videos was part of onboarding and quite regularly required at store meetings.
I've never understood how employees choose unions when they form new arrangements like this. Does someone more familiar with the process have any insight into why the names of the unions that get selected in these votes never seem to bear any relationship to the work being unionized?
Some unions are more willing to take on an underdog, whereas others only get involved if it feels like a sure thing. Sometimes a union will support a drive if it specifically strengthens their position (like an adjacent industry). And some industries like fast food the big unions feel are a lost cause, so most union activity there is independent.
Others may not have the capacity or ability to help in larger cases like these.
It’s less formal than you might assume
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Brotherhood_of_Carpente...
Why do you say "Carpenters Union Las Vegas"?
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Note: I am not a union official, or even a member, and this is entirely based on my own (possibly flawed) understanding as a history and poli-sci enthusiast. Take it with the requisite grain of salt.
Like, imagine you're a teacher and you're on strike because of conditions at some steel mill you've never heard of. You want to support your fellow workers... but also, you're forfeiting your income for a cause that's not yours, for people you don't know.
Additionally, I think backpay is sometimes part of a deal.
It can get quite sophisticated as all stores are specialized and trained to make these repairs, including Geniuses getting trained on much of the same equipment as an iPhone assembly line, (plus the equipment to do the reverse) including test and validation equipment. I have worked at flagships in top tier cities, down to the smallest mall stores in a market that has exactly one store, the job is exactly the same. These jobs don’t require engineering degrees, but at least for Genius they require quite a bit of training, not so dissimilar from trades. It’s been quite a few years since I’ve been there but used to be if one is promoted up to Genius they will be certified to do repairs. If one fails training and cannot get their Apple Technician Certification, they’re demoted or fired.
If your manufacturing job could be outsourced, you'll want the teamsters to refuse to unload the outsourced versions of the widgets off the boat
The company is not your friend.
Just compare earnings by workers at the Big 3 who are represented by the UAW and Tesla workers who are non-unionized [1].
[1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/ford-gm-stellantis-pay-raise...
This is more like oppositional defiant disorder than politics; it's true that your interests are not fully aligned with your employer, but that doesn't mean you should do everything that they say not to do.
A better answer is that the USA has some of the oldest and therefore most antiquated union laws. Other countries have sectoral bargaining systems, which are better precisely because individual employers are less motivated to oppose joining them. (Because with per-corporation unions, your employees joining makes you less competitive. But with sectoral systems it doesn't because your competitors all have to join too.)
Doesn't this have the same problem, but now for your whole country? That industry in your country becomes less competitive against the same industry in another country.
But you're still back to the original problem, because you're not just competing with Indonesia, you're also competing with other industrialized countries that have skilled workers but may not have unions. And you'll have to pay the market wage in those countries, which will certainly be higher than the median wage in Indonesia, but having a union that e.g. prevents bad workers from being discharged would still put your industry at a disadvantage.
Relative to what? The question isn't really whether Poland is more or less competitive than California (the other differences between them would dominate), it's where they would each be with the other system.
> And the cohesion provided by sectoral unions is enough of a social benefit that you rarely find their employer class willing to destroy that contract.
It also tends to result in market concentration because a startup who can't hire in an industry without negotiating with a huge existing union is put at a disadvantage relative to large incumbents, and the incumbents may like it that way.
This is such a multi-variable hypothetical that I don't consider it worth discussing.
How are the employer's and employee's interests aligned exactly?
I would posit that they're not at all. They're completely opposed. You, as an employee, are completely disposable. You are an inconvenience because they have been unable to economically automate your job... yet.
Even if you're in a job unlikely to be automated anytime soon (eg software engineer), the industry as a whole is colluding to suppress your wages with what I call "permanent layoff culture". Layoff 5% of the staff every year and give their workload to the remaining employees.
There is an extreme power imbalance here. If you withhold your labor, it really doesn't matter. If the employer fires you, well that's a real problem (for you). It's your health insurance, shelter, food and water, putting your kids in school and your transportation (because we're a dystopian car-dependent hellscape here in the US).
But I'm sure you're better off negotiating as an indivudal. So many believe that. I'm sure they're all right.
If there was no shared interest, whey would employees and employers ever work together in the first place?
Well, if you're a tech employee you get paid in your employer's stock. But if they were entirely opposed you wouldn't be working for them, or you'd be a contractor and not salaried.
There doesn't seem to be a lot of evidence to support this. Why would it even be true? The union isn't some magical thing.
"Obviously" requires the act of perception, but why would management take the time to perceive the situation? Remember the old adage "Nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM"? Much the same applies here. Management's job is typically to follow the trodden path and do what everyone else that came before them also did, not to actually develop and lead in newfangled directions. They have no reason to consider if opposing joining a union is actually worthwhile, it's just what you do.
If you are old enough to remember the IBM adage, you might also be old enough to remember when management would only hire college graduates. That's what everyone else did, so they did to. It obviously made no sense at the time to anyone who actually looked, but that was the status quo, so management customarily followed suit without evaluation. But look now: Businesses no longer do that. Finally, something broke the status quo and overnight management had to give it some thought and realized that it was nonsensical. Obviously management acting in some way does not imply how obvious something tangentially related is.
> I do know a company where the owner voluntarily recognized the union… one company.
Sure. And nothing magical happened, right? Obviously. What could happen? Unions aren't magic. And with enough of these people going against the grain eventually everyone else starts to take notice that the status quo may not be what it seems, but it's a long road to see that kind of shift. It took decades upon decades upon decades from when everyone noticed that the college thing was the most braindead idea ever to actually seeing management in general change their ways. It took the limited number of pioneers willing to challenge the status quo to eventually see the change take place on a wider scale.
As before, management isn't some kind of all knowing super being. It's just irrational humans who follow the crowd without much thought or reflection. In fact, I posit that people in management in particular are especially prone to not putting much thought or reflection into things as avoiding that line of thought is what helps propel them into management. You don't often see the staunch engineer who wants empirical data for every last decision make it into management. They typically don't make for good managers, even if they should on paper, as managers have to work the crowd and the crowd isn't driven by data. The crowd is driven by arbitrary emotions.
This isn't entirely logical. Companies also spend millions to fight off patent trolls, but that doesn't naturally lead to the conclusion that you should team up with the trolls or that patent law doesn't need to be reformed after all. Something can be bad for you and bad for the company, so evidence of harm to the company is not sufficient to prove benefit to you.
Personally (speaking as a software engineer), if unionization is ever raised my plan is to look into all the details of the plan and weigh my options. I'm disinclined to trust any claim that something is always good or always bad, so I take the pro-union propaganda with the same salt as the anti-.
You might be skeptical of the union side, but the company is doing whatever will let them pay you less and/or exert more undemocratic control over you.
the latter isn't necessarily bad for the worker, e.g. if a tech union tries to force divestment from Israel
if more money for workers is involved, sure, I'm with you. but I kind of doubt it. If the (tech) union spends more effort pushing political things unrelated to money, best of luck to them. for unions outside of tech, this seems like less of an issue
I think that what you say here can be true, but I don't believe it is definitionally true.
I have a vote in the US elections every year. In my entire adult life, I haven't ever felt like the federal government represents me. Most of the time the US federal government acts against my interests while pursuing the interests of some other segment of the population whose vote matters more to them. This suggests that having a vote in an organization does not make my interests by definition aligned with that of the governing body that the majority elects.
A union is much the same: it represents the interests of the majority of its members. Most unions will actually fail to represent some portion of their members well, because their obligations are to the majority and few organizations are completely homogeneous.
This may be fine and right, but it also means that I can't just assume that my interests will align with the interests of the majority and therefore of the future union. Sometimes my interests may align better with those of the company, and the rational move for me in the event of unionization is to consider that possibility.
> I haven't ever felt like the federal government represents me. Most of the time the US federal government acts against my interests while pursuing the interests of some other segment
Imo, the only thing a rational participant in a democratic system should do is either (a) voting for a candidate that represents all of your make-or-breaks or (b) abstaining. I think if more people abstained (which I feel most people “wish” they could [I quote that because they absolutely could]), we’d see a little more change or diversity in opinion. Yet people feel shoehorned into a side because for the better part of a decade “side = !other side” (in the US, anyway) which perpetuates the notion that you don’t have to offer anything new and hurts the possibility of real change. Let the abstaining groups make their voice heard by the very act of abstaining.
The difference is that companies don't often claim patent trolls are good and then turn around and fight them.
From the studies I've seen, factory unions pay the most at formation, and after 5 years they fall to 1-2% above comparable factories in regards to total compensation. This makes sense, as union contracts are usually negotiated against industry averages, and no offense to joe schmo from aluminum castings but the Harvard MBA in charge of negotiating for the company is usually a better negotiator.
On the other hand, Tesla isn't building new North American factories in Mexico.
And speaking of opening plants: the UAW got one of the big 3 to stop their planned closure of one of their plants.
Then they have excess capacity, which is generally not great for the union: Now if the union goes on strike the company just increases utilization at facilities in another country and actually saves money.
It also raises the company's costs in general, and so raises prices, and so lowers sales, and soon you're looking at more plant closures.
This is really about companies sharing more of their profits with their workers which is a good thing.
What are we to compare, exactly? How the "old guard" auto companies have better cash cows than the new guy trying to get off the ground and use that to pay more to attract the best talent? Just like how and why Microsoft and Google pay way more than DuckDuckGo?
> The company is not your friend.
A union is a company. First we find encouragement to vote "yes" to see the company form, but then a warning that it will not be your friend... No wonder the typical American is so afraid of labor unions.
I certainly hope Apple retail employees are facing no conditions that threaten their health or safety, and my suspicion is they are not.
The "pool" of humans overall's wealth, health, safety, and happiness increases in general when people strive for more through education and training. I don't see retail jobs as a permanent resting place for anyone. They are useful learning tools however for learning how to interact with coworkers, customers, and develop other skills. The usage of Union law to abate this is bad for society as a whole.
https://www.construction-physics.com/p/how-much-safer-has-co...
> The most significant early step was the passage of workers compensation laws, which compensated workers in the event of an injury, increasing the costs to employers if workers were injured (Aldrich 1997). Prior to workers comp laws, a worker or his family would have to sue his employer for damages and prove negligence in the event of an injury or death. Wisconsin passed the first state workers comp law in 1911, and by 1921 most states had workers compensation programs.
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> OSHA in particular dramatically changed the landscape of workplace safety, and is sometimes viewed as “the culmination of 60 or more years of effort towards a safe and hazard-free workplace.”
Can you elaborate on how unions abate the lessons you mentioned previously?
EVERY job should be livable and with proper benefits like universal healthcare and paid leave. if the company cannot afford it, it should not exist. people are real, companies are not.
It's not manslaughter, but it certainly is still abuse. Collective bargaining seems to be an inevitably in such a situation.
So that means what? They get to be treated poorly in the meantime? Apple store employees are probably better off than Walmart employees, but unionizing helps (to some degree) to ensure it stays that way.
I think we forget that the (rather limited in the US) employee rights that we do have, even things as basic as not being expected to work 10-12 hour shifts 6-7 days a week were only won because of hard fought action by work unions (since individual workers have zero leverage).
Corporations are built on the premise of generating returns for shareholders. That is their number one priority, and whatever they can do to cut costs, including reducing headcount, wringing the most out of employees, treating them poorly, etc., they _will_ do (with few notable exceptions) so long as it doesn't damage their brand image and profits.