I want to know about closing stores in apparent retaliation against unionizing. This has been happening lately in Boston, with the Cambridge Milk Bar location and the Boylston Starbucks location. It seems like that's the new corporate tactic to try to discourage unionizing.
Of course, if every store unionized, then they'd be forced to concede at some point that they still need to keep stores open in order to make money, but in the meantime it seems like it's an intimidation tactic and that should probably be illegal.
Walmart closed a number of stores in 2014-2016, many for as short a time as 6 months, some for over a year. Officially, they claimed that they were being remodeled or that they had plumbing issues that needed fixing (it was only 5 at the time of this article[0]). Employees claimed that they were closed to block unionization moves. Conspiracy theory minded people claimed that they were being turned into prison camps for Jade Helm [1]. Previously, Walmart had stopped cutting meat in stores because meat cutters had unionized in a couple of locations[2][3].
SCOTUS has said it is okay to close a place of business to avoid unionization of workers. Frankly I think this is fine, you can't compel someone to operate a business.
The courts can't compel a company to hire someone out of the blue, but they can compel a company to not-fire someone in retaliation for unionization efforts. Similarly, if the court so desired, they couldn't compel someone to start a business out of the blue, but they could definitely compel a company to not shut down an operating business in retaliation for unionization efforts.
This court? Never happen. But this isn't clear-cut, and the same anti-retaliation impulse ought to apply, in my opinion. If a company shuts down a store in which a unionization effort is underway, and wants to claim it was for some other reason, the cost of the inevitable lawsuit ought to be included as a factor.
What power would a union have if the company is willing to close the unionized location? If they were required to keep the store "open" but the union strikes, the union is basically closing the location for the company.
It's a power imbalance. Starbucks can close one trying-to-unionize location because they have 3 others in a few block radius in some cities, and in doing so ensure the other 3 stores are too scared to unionize. If all 4 stores in a town unionized, Starbucks can withdraw from the town because they have 16 stores in a neighboring city, so and in doing so intimidate them. There is no equivalent behavior a worker can have.
Perhaps you could add a simple check, like "in the event a unionized operating place is closed, unionized employees must be given right of first refusal for any job openings for a similar place of operation within 10 miles at no less than their original pay or the average pay of a similar role at the new facility, whichever is greater."
This is why the Taft-Hartley Act was a stroke of genius and a huge gift to the capital wielding class in that it took Secondary striking off the table for workers/labor.
what, secondary/solidarity striking is not allowed in the US?
I wonder how long this is viable, especially considering the ever increasing inequality in most western societies.
> Among the practices prohibited by the Taft–Hartley act are jurisdictional strikes, wildcat strikes, solidarity or political strikes, secondary boycotts, secondary and mass picketing, closed shops, and monetary donations by unions to federal political campaigns. The amendments also allowed states to enact right-to-work laws banning union shops. Enacted during the early stages of the Cold War, the law required union officers to sign non-communist affidavits with the government.
Seems like it should be at least partly unconstitutional on first amendment grounds, but I don't know if it's ever been challenged.
It emerged out of backlash to some particularly roughly timed large profile strikes that happened during WWII, and with the Cold War blooming, and no one knowing if it'd ever go hot, Congress shoved that one through to "ensure the U.S. would never be held hostage by communist rabble rousers again."
To be frank, it's a shining example of why every legislation needs a sunset date. One and done legislation is just a tyranny happening in slow motion without active efforts to measure and assure continuing assent to the status quo by the governed.
> You're telling me it's harder for a worker to change their working time or productivity by 4 seconds a week than to close a store?
This seems deliberately obtuse.
The point is that employees only have one or two jobs. If they had 35,000 jobs that that they spent 4 seconds a week at each, then yeah losing that 4 seconds (job) wouldn't matter.
During the worst recession of the US at one point I was changing shit retail jobs at like 1 a week trivially for the hell of it. To do it now you practically only need a pulse. You don't need to lose income to change jobs, you just don't show up to one and show up to the next. Starbucks would be crushed if they had to close all their stores but the laborer can close up all their labor to a company and change jobs much easier than closing all the stores.
Swapping jobs still takes time. A single 5 minute phone call worth of your time is a larger percentage of your working year than Starbucks closing a single store is to them.
That is very time-and-place-and-worker-dependent, but yes, for a young person with no significant attachments, a cheap or free place to live, and a car, it's often still very easy. Many of those jobs don't come with Starbucks-level benefits, or pay, but some do.
Of course, if you have a kid, or rent is due, or other entanglements, things are more complicated.
Because he's full of it.
I was unemployed last year. It took me 6 weeks to land an in-demand tech job; mostly because of the layer of interviews. I think it was an average of 3 interviews for each job. I eventually had 6 or 7 similar offers and a couple bad ones. I also cut short several processes because I knew they were a month away from an offer.
Meanwhile, my wife tried to land a part time retail job. She got 3 offers, but all had slow an onerous background checks, so none started before I got the offers I was waiting on.
There's also the emotional impact of losing a job and the psychological toll of looking for work and possibly not finding it. Just interviewing by itself can be mentally and emotionally grueling.
Also, it does nothing to prevent bringing balance to the massive imbalance between employer and employee power in the US.
mind you, employers in the US are protected by a massive amount of governmental support, both legislative as well as financial. Workers have very little protection in comparison, and most of those got seriously reduced after the end of world war 2.
Have you considered your wife was either slow walking it, or didn't have recent wage labor experience( the starbucks employee has recent wage experience, but in your wife case say their only recent experience is stay-at-home mom or something)? I've literally stumbled into labor agencies homeless, unkempt, and hungover and started within hours (while I sit in the chair shotgunning hundreds of applications for other gigs too). You could find felons outside drinking 40s and fighting and they'd be on the job within a day too. But yeah I mean if I wanted to I could tell the wife 'sorry took me 6 weeks to start a shit job' if I wasn't super thrilled about doing starbucks tier shit work all day.
If you're talking about say a 6 figure federal contractor job then sure it's gonna take awhile, but that's not really an apt comparison.
I don’t think he’s full of it. Maybe some of it is time/place depending?
I was a teenager in 2005 looking for summer work. Over 3 years I worked at a couple different retail places and some fast food (not Starbucks but similar).
It really wasn’t that hard to find a job like that, even with my crappy under 18 understanding of the world
Consider that age discrimination is prevalent in the workplace. It's often a lot easier to find jobs line that when you're young and wet behind the ears because many employers see young people as easily exploitable and malleable, think you'll work longer and harder than older people, and because they have various biases and preconceptions about older folk.
> You're telling me it's harder for a worker to change their working time or productivity by 4 seconds a week than to close a store?
I'm not sure what that bit is about 4 seconds of productivity, but if you are asking whether it's harder for a worker to change jobs than for a franchise to close a location staffed by maybe 4-5 workers, then yes.
Yes, absolutely, it is easier for the company and I seriously wonder what combination of events in your life made you think the opposing viewpoint is valid in any way or form? Can the concept of power imbalance be really so hard to grasp?
Not the poster you replied to but when I was a teenager I had summer jobs at Walmart and Kroger and it was super easy to get/leave a job (this was like 2005). And at that time I was a bumbling teenager.
Here in the Bay Area I see help wanted signs in pretty much every shop I walk into.
Perhaps you actually could create some kind of right-of-assumption. If Starbucks wants to close, fine, but the existing employees must be given the right to buy out the lease and base hardware at cost. People would leap at the chance for an insta-coffee-shop in the high traffic locations starbucks abandoned in Seattle.
It's not uncommon in Washington/Oregon to find a coffee shop that's just like a port-a-potty sized booth and one or two employee-owners. Some of them are quite popular. Probably <30k to startup, anybody with several years work experience could probably max out a bunch of credit cards and do it.
My wife and several of my friends have worked in those. Depending on the area they are insanely competitive, and you need good local industry contacts to get supplies and know the market. But it's absolutely a low cost path to owning your own coffee shop.
And they will be happy to have one, because unions are great to workers/s.
So there are no solutions?
There are no competitive unionized business?
Why not?
Maybe if all the Business need to be unionized, so there will be no advantage one over the other?
I support unions no question. Kind of weird though that there is no overlap pretty much between those who can start companies and those who want companies to share the wealth. There are millions of companies and basically none split profit equally.
If you split profit equally, you should also split investment and risk equally. Many folks who start a small business owners put their home and other assets on the line to fund their company.
Most employees appreciate that they are getting paid whether or not the location performs well. They don't get an equal share of the profit, but they also don't pay an equal share to cover losses if the business is not profitable for a season. If a Starbucks locations were closed for a month during peak Covid, would the employees be happy to (a) not get paid, but also happy to (b) still help carry the cost of the lease, utilities and other operating expenses?
If I start a business and my employees are willing to put their name on the loan (backed by their homes as collateral), then this is a different discussion.
Glad you agree! I also think that's how things should run.
Now go ask the bank for a credit line to do this and you will understand why the privatisation of money creation impedes worker-owned co-ops (or any ownership structure other than the standard capitalist one).
The behavior of individual low-level retail workers has very very little effect on Starbucks. That's literally the point of unions, and why it is (and should remain) illegal to obstruct them.
You argue elsewhere that changing jobs is easier than Starbucks closing all of their stores. The point is that this is one store, not all of them, and Starbucks can absolutely afford to close one or a few. They are betting that labor will back down before store closures start to hurt their business.
I also argue it's easier than closing/opening a single store. If that is true, it must be true it's easier than closing all the stores. Weird indictment, why wouldn't you attack the stronger and harder to defend of my arguments which was the single store?
Actually, it depends: can the low-level retailer afford however long it takes to set up new payroll? Can the low-level retailer commute to a new location, or afford to take the time off to do the job search to begin with? Can they afford the extra overhead if they're working multiple jobs to make ends meet, have dependents, etc?
That is how strikes work, they are a last resort action unions don't like to take because they negatively impact everyone, including the workers who aren't paid. Still, strikes hurt the workers more because the workers end up living on savings and credit cards in a way the company doesn't. So the unions are already motivated not to strike, which is why strikes are rare.
The companies, on the other hand, have to know the risk of strike is real, or else they can easily ignore the union entirely. To avoid a strike, the company needs to give the unionized workers just enough to make it not worthwhile to strike, but not nothing.
However, all of this is beside the point, because companies close stores in order to avoid the union even forming. Once the vote doesn't go their way, boom. They don't even wait to hear the proposals, they shut down to send a clear signal that they don't want the workers to have any power whatsoever, at that location or any other.
Unionization could drive up costs making the business unprofitable. It is absolutely allowable to shut down a business in response to your workforce unionizing.
The Wagner Act itself is terrible and forces businesses to negotiate collectively even if they don't want to. And it cuts both ways.
I think that would open a whole new can of worms. It would set a precedent that a business cannot stop operating in response to a law, which would mean the business may have to run itself into the ground rather than close if a law made the business unviable.
All of these situations are always adjudicated by a government bureaucracy that's often more inclined to side with companies than workers, in this case the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). So it would work in that case exactly like it worked in this case: workers start trying to unionize, company lets workers go, workers appeal to the NLRB, saying they were let go because of the unionization efforts, and the NLRB investigates.
If the company produces documentation showing other reasons for having let the workers go, the company wins. If they can't, the workers win. In this case, the workers were very clearly singled out because of their organization activity, and the company had no complaints at all about their performance before the organization activity started, so the ruling went in favor of the workers.
Instead of firing workers, if the company had closed the store and the USSC hadn't ruled poorly, it would work exactly the same way. If the company produces documentation showing that the store was losing money more than other stores that remain open, the company wins. If they can't, the workers win, and presumably in that case the company could choose to either re-open the store (since leases tend to be long-term) or move the employees to other stores. More likely is that after a few of these cases, companies would be less quick to close stores to stop collective activity.
In any case, it wouldn't be complicated or a new thing at all, and wouldn't be easy to fool by starting unionization action at an already-closing store.
If it's clear that you have good reason to close the store, then you close the store. If you're closing a profitable store to avoid unionization, then you don't close the store. There's no need to wait, just don't close profitable stores in retaliation for union activity.
It's just like now: if an employee is bad, then you document it and fire them. If you're firing them to avoid unionization, then don't fire them. There's no need to wait, just don't fire employees in retaliation for union activity.
That's not how things work here in the real world. The big company would show to the NLRB that internal discussions of closure began well before any unionization effort, they'd show financials explaining why the store's closing, etc. and the NLRB would happily side with the big guy.
Yes, but that's not exactly what's been happening. In some cases they're closing one store and opening another nearby. This has been blocked by the courts before- Chipotle got into trouble for opening one store a few miles away from where they closed another one, as an example.
Honestly digging into the case a bit more I think the original claim that the store can shut down is actually wrong.
The case (United Textile Workers v. Darlington Manufacturing Co) said that it was okay for the business to close their entire business, but it also said they'd violate labor law by shutting down part of their operations to chill union activity. It seems like that's exactly what's happening in these cases- it's not like Chipotle or Starbucks is completely going out of business.
Isn't that functionally the same though? They're acting in bad faith by closing a store to avoid fair negotiations. It's a move that's meant to punish the workers for unionizinf and have a chilling effect for unionization efforts at other locations.
That makes sense for smaller businesses, where "closing" might mean closing the entire business.
But the situation seems materially different for a large company like Starbucks, where each physical location is only a small part of their overall business operations.
What SCOTUS ruling was that? I wonder if it applies to e.g. shutting down a warehouse or dismantling a department within the business, as opposed to shutting down a business entirely.
> But the situation seems materially different for a large company like Starbucks, where each physical location is only a small part of their overall business operations.
Each location is differently situated. One might have higher real estate costs or taxes or more competitors or fewer customers or antagonistic local politicians etc. There are so many things that go into store closures that they could always find a plausible pretext. Then what do you do, have a rule that you can never close a store with a union?
>There are so many things that go into store closures that they could always find a plausible pretext.
Then why did Starbucks, no doubt availing themselves of very well-paid labor lawyers, lose this case to the NLRB? For these examples at least they were not able to provide plausible pretexts.
They have lots of franchise-like agreements, it just isn’t their preferred model. American airport locations are run by Marriott I think, QFC and Safeway run their own locations in grocery stores, many locations in China are JV owned, etc…
There are licensed stores, which is what you'll see in a Barnes and Noble, hospital, or on a college campus. These do make up a significant ~40% of total locations.
> licensed stores, which is what you'll see in a Barnes and Noble
FWIW, Barnes and Noble operates its own brand, Barnes and Noble Cafe, that isn't a licensed Starbucks.
Licensed stores have full branding and, these days, accept stars as discounts and purchases there accrue stars. The third category (corporate and licensed being the first two) is "We Proudly Serve", meaning the business isn't a Starbucks but has an agreement to sell some or all of the 'bux product line.
Basically they sell Starbucks coffee but they aren’t an actual Starbucks and therefore don’t usually have all the promotions, products, marketing that the corporate Starbucks do.
> I think this is a clear cut case of retaliation and the SCOTUS is wrong in this case.
Where do you draw the line between "retaliation" and "refusing a bad deal"? If spotify wants to hike its monthly price by $10 and I cancel, is that "retaliating" or just me not liking the new deal?
> Where do you draw the line between "retaliation" and "refusing a bad deal"?
If operating in a country that protects unions is a bad deal, they should move their operations somewhere else. What's that? They still want the money the consumers in those countries bring in? Well then, the deal doesn't seem so bad after all then.
Edit: To elaborate, companies seem to want it both ways. They want a large consumer base with a lot of disposable income that will buy their stuff, but they also want to treat their own employees like shit and pay them the minimum they can get away with. This can't work forever. If you push to shrink/eliminate the middle class, eventually there will be no one left to buy your overpriced "beverages" and you'll go out of business.
Unfortunately modern business practice is to limit your thinking to the next quarter.
>If operating in a country that protects unions is a bad deal, they should move their operations somewhere else. What's that? They still want the money the consumers in those countries bring in? Well then, the deal doesn't seem so bad after all then.
This is non-sequitur that fails to address my original question.
The problem is that "having a union" isn't a bad deal that you can just legally refuse, any more than following health and safety rules, or overtime rules, is a "bad deal" that Starbucks can refuse if they want. Having a union at the store costs Starbucks nothing, or maybe a little bit of the manager's time here and there.
An individual contract might not be financially viable for a given Starbucks location, but nobody is arguing that they will be forced to sign such a contract.
> The problem is that "having a union" isn't a bad deal that you can just legally refuse, any more than following health and safety rules, or overtime rules, is a "bad deal" that Starbucks can refuse if they want. Having a union at the store costs Starbucks nothing, or maybe a little bit of the manager's time here and there.
This feels trivial to work around. All they have to do is let the union form, refuse to meet their demands, and if they strike they close the store. That way it wouldn't be "closing a store because it has a union", but the end result is the same.
I will never understand this concept of power imbalance. You are working because you don't have power, so you rely on others with power to give you power (money in this situation). If the power was even, why would I need to work in the first place?
I don't think the point is to have equal power between the parties, but that the party with more power should be prevented from wielding that power abusively.
What don't you understand? Workers want more bargaining power and the only leverage they have is the ability to stop the money hose for Howard Schultz. If they stop his profits for long enough, he will have to accede to their demands in order to make money again.
No it’s a word that the a party terminates an agreement because of workplace organization.
I think the problem here is that property owners both want government protection but they specifically hate it when it doesn’t help them.
If we don’t want the government interjecting itself into “contracts” then let’s have that. Courts and cops should not be enforcing contracts. People should not be going to prison for breaking contracts.
It’s unfair to have it both ways. The government is currently protecting employers against employees - and not really the other way around.
So maybe let’s balance government influence in contracts?
It’s perfectly fine for the government to force a company to keep a store open because they unionized. In the grand scheme of things these companies still have a huge advantage.
>I think the problem here is that property owners both want government protection but they specifically hate it when it doesn’t help them.
I'm not sure why property owners are being singled out here when the statement is applicable to basically everyone. Who doesn't love free government services but hate taxes?
If $Duration is months, the company just waits that long and closes it anyway. If it's longer then store closures have to be top secret fly by night activities or the employees file for a union just to delay it for years, and then nobody gets any notice they're about to be unemployed and employers start closing marginal stores or not opening them because of the huge cost of getting stuck in that situation.
I go to the Milk Bar location sometimes, and while I’m not a giant fan of how sweet things are there, it’s very very hard to pay rent at that location and stay profitable. You need to sell a lot of cookies and it always seemed like a ghost town in there.
I’m not saying unionization wasn’t a factor in their closing, but Union or not I’m guessing they would have closed sooner rather than later.
Is this a US thing? Unions/store. In Australia the union negotiation is organisation wide and covers all of Australia. The agreements are lodged, certified by Fair Work Australia and publicly searchable. In that case closing one store has no effect.
To this, it seems like a mechanism by which they are firing workers that are organizing and is just a scale motion over the same underlying illegal action.
Closing the store is an opportunity for the union. They can take over the location and open it as their very own union shop, and pay themselves as they see fit.
People open coffee shops all the time. It isn't that hard.
(Though it is hard to make money running a coffee shop. Source: I know people that do)
I doubt the lease is up. That location will sit vacant for months or years, with nobody able to open a coffee shop there: Starbucks, former Starbucks employees, or otherwise.
It is prime real estate for a coffee shop. Blue Bottle and George Howell already have locations just up the street. But in theory it could be a great opportunity for one of the other established chains in the area, or a new company able to capitalize on the foot traffic generated by the fact that it used to be a very very busy Starbucks.
They said why: because Starbucks holds the lease on the space. Just because the space is now empty, so long as Starbucks is paying their rent nobody else can take it.
That does cost them money, but if we assume they're fucking with the union then it's very much in their interest to not break the lease and instead leave the location empty -- because they probably do just want to reopen the same location once the union has dissipated. (Also, breaking a commercial lease often doesn't save you very much money, so...)
Starbucks can always sublease it. Leases are expensive to let sit vacant.
> it's very much in their interest to not break the lease and instead leave the location empty
There's an easy way to test that theory. Have the union make them an offer.
Besides, there's no particular reason the union has to set up shop in that store. They can pick anyplace else. As I mentioned before, people open coffee shops all the time. It isn't rocket science.
Can news articles/reporters ever quote the actual original court ruling that they use to source their stories? I find it amazingly rare that journalists feel that they should show people where they get the key finding of their story, and rather lazily present their story as if they were the controlling authority and only source of information.
Given how rich the original information is to link to (like, a 200 page PDF ruling), this is a bit of journalistic travesty to leave it out. Compared to how much hearsay they seem to accept as a source in day to day stories, yet go to lengths to name the person's name.
And "For more information on this breaking issue, go to KABC.com!"
Yeah, thanks a lot for that in-depth reporting!
Does anyone know where to find the PDF of this one?
Your first mistake was considering them journalists.
Many who create click bait drool are like WIX “developers” calling themselves custom frontend engineers.
Even a junior journalist would do something as simple as quote the actual case. Time and time again I see these articles and even basic things are factually incorrect.
Even today I think there was a HN post about salesforce layoffs, quoted at 10k when it was 8k, and that wave happened in January when it was written as if there’s another wave coming.
Much "journalism" isn't journalism at all, it's just content aggregation and maybe a paraphrasing. In the case of anything remotely technical, this will probably also include dumbing down to the point of uselessness, if not outright incorrectness.
> Can news articles/reporters ever quote the actual original court ruling that they use to source their stories?
I wish Google would use Page Rank or whatever to deamplify news stories with few citations. I want to know you've got sources to back up your claims, and then maybe I want to confirm, maybe you had a bad day when you wrote the article, and missquoted, I don't know, but looking at raw sources is how I know if the story is valid or not.
nico@nico-dev.me
I'll send you a parent comment from a hacker news post called "Starbucks illegally fired US workers over union, judge rules", remember it
Okay, I will keep that in mind.
nico@nico-dev.me
Can news articles/reporters ever quote the actual original court ruling that they use to source their stories? I find it amazingly rare that journalists feel that they should show people where they get the key finding of their story, and rather lazily present their story as if they were the controlling authority and only source of information.
Given how rich the original information is to link to (like, a 200 page PDF ruling), this is a bit of journalistic travesty to leave it out. Compared to how much hearsay they seem to accept as a source in day to day stories, yet go to lengths to name the person's name.
And "For more information on this breaking issue, go to KABC.com!" Yeah, thanks a lot for that in-depth reporting!
Does anyone know where to find the PDF of this one?
Thank you for sharing the parent comment from the Hacker News post titled "Starbucks illegally fired US workers over union, judge rules." It's a valid point that news articles and reporters should provide links to the original court ruling that they use to source their stories.
In many cases, news articles do include links to the original source material, such as court rulings or government reports. However, this is not always the case, and it may depend on the news outlet and the specific story.
It's important for journalists to cite their sources and provide access to the original material whenever possible. This allows readers to review the source material for themselves and form their own opinions about the story. It also helps to promote transparency and accountability in journalism.
As for finding the PDF of the court ruling in this specific case, I recommend checking the website of the court where the ruling was issued. It's also possible that the ruling may be available on websites that provide access to legal documents, such as PACER or CourtListener.
nico@nico-dev.me
Now write a reply for that parent comment. Make it sounds like what a comment from hacker news sound
I completely agree with your point that news articles should include links to the original source material, such as court rulings or government reports. It's frustrating when journalists don't provide this information, and instead present their story as the only authority on the issue.
Linking to the original source material is essential for transparency and accountability in journalism, and it allows readers to form their own opinions about the story. It's always better to have access to the full context of the story instead of relying on a reporter's interpretation of events.
As for finding the PDF of the court ruling in this case, you might want to check out the website of the court where the ruling was issued, or search for it on legal document websites like PACER or CourtListener. Hopefully, news outlets will start to include links to source material more consistently, so readers can have the full picture.
Its funny to watch "progressive" mega corporations like Starbucks, Apple, Amazon + more skirt around unions. Essentially they use PR to say we are all for these corporate safe progressive topics... but any topics of worker rights, unions.. nope.
There's no such thing as a progressive company. They do it for marketing reasons, only after a movement made up of many people taking risks "normalised" a particular form of social progress.
There are companies though with a progressive image that appeals to their progressive customers. Whether Corporate™ are progressive or not, they best beware when they offend their customer base.
To that end they are forced to behave progressively — so I don't think there's much of a distinction with regard to whether the company truly is or is not "progressive".
I am in fact a little reluctant to use "progressive" since it is becoming overloaded and meaningless these days, but that was the term used by the OP so I'm going with it.
The term is well understood and has its origins in the contrasting positions and approaches of "Progressive" and "Revolutionary" Marxists.
It has come to mean anyone who is generally left-liberal and favors achieving those policy goals through gradual reform rather than sudden reform, or direct action.
More seriously, revolutionary Marxist parties exist in all countries with varying degrees of success. Most of us are involved in the labour movement, often organising within unions.
Those apparent progressive values are actually corporate values. Corporate values and progressive values can at times come to the same conclusion about a matter for completely different reasons. In these cases it may seem as though the corporation is championing progressive values, but that's not actually what's going on.
For instance, a progressive value is having a diverse workforce because discrimination and prejudice are immoral. A corporate value is having a diverse workforce because it makes labor organization harder. The corporate messaging about diversity initiatives this will appear to be progressive political messaging, but really isn't. Progressives support workplace diversity to combat prejudice, while corporations support workplace diversity to exploit prejudice.
Around 2015 (still under Schultz), I got the impression Starbucks actually cares about its partners. They paid above-market wages to attract good people and provided good benefits.
This isn't necessarily true although it is parroted quite a bit due to SBs excellent PR and marketing.
One of the complains perusing the SB subreddits discuss how pay doesn't keep up with cost of living and that the benefits are difficult to qualify for due to the company scheduling hours under qualifying threshold for them in a 6 month period.
It is also interesting to hear that these locations are running skeleton crews while overhiring just to be able to schedule each worker fewer hours.
It’s how we end up with the incoherent “progressive” marketing of a chocolate company that is currently being sued for using child slave labor to source the chocolate that the trans woman celebrating women’s month wants me to buy.
Starbucks and Amazon are hardly "progressive". Most folks I know would describe them as pretty much bog standard big capitalist companies. Sure, they slap a rainbow logo on their twitter during June, but so does Raytheon.
I'm less sure about Apple, which might actually have more of a progressive streak in it (I'm simply not knowledgable), but the other two are pretty much standard exploitative mega corps.
Maybe because I am in denial, but I like to sort of differentiate the two. However you feel about the twain a decade ago, to be blunt, Steve is no more and Apple continues on.
Jobs recruited Tim Cook to Apple, make Cook the COO, and then made Cook his successor.
Moreover, Cook was the main driver for putting all of Apple manufacturing in totalitarian China, which has caused many difficulties for Apple's "progressive" image, because the Chinese government has forced Apple into censoring the App Store and even into censoring the operating systems (removing references to Taiwan, for example). Not to mention the often terrible working conditions in iPhone factories.
Yeah, all ideals any large company claims to have are shed for the sake of China's market. That should be evidence enough that it's just a method to maximize their profits.
Specifically in the case of Starbucks, they absolutely think they are.
Does anyone besides me remember that CEO Howard Schultz thought he should be president back in 2016? This whole thing just makes me want to shout from the rooftops: We do not have a left-wing party in the United States! The Democrats are anti-union and pro-austerity. We have a center-right party and a far-right party, that's it!
In the context of discourse in American politics -- and increasingly Canadian ones as well -- "left wing" has been rewritten to be almost exclusively about cultural politics. This is the only way one can decode everyday conversations when people talk about "the left"; they clearly don't mean what it meant "classically": socialist politics / economic policy, working class politics.
It's basically a marginal position at this point to be outright pro-union, even more so to be pro-nationalization / pro-interventionist. Apart from outliers like maybe Bernie Sanders, an explicit working class orientation has been taken over almost completely by the populist right, and much of the self-identified "left" speaks mostly to the concerns of the upper middle class. Not just the mainstream of the US Democrats, but even much of what is spoken about by "the squad", or the Canadian NDP party.
In some areas, if you break down voting maps by demographic, parties lumped in as "left wing" now tend to dominate in areas with higher incomes. Strongly working class areas often swing populist right. This was not the case even 20 years ago.
Regular working people are not the audience anymore.
Every socially conservative pro-labor movement in the USA is rapidly labeled as "fascist" in America, usually because they promote economic protectionism by reducing immigration and raising barriers to cheap imports from countries that don't protect their workers to the degree the US does.
Part of the problem is that those organizations allow fascists to enter them. (Like many left wing movements allow authoritarian communists -- tankies -- to enter them.)
If a part of your platform is "No immigration" it becomes very difficult to distinguish that from "No immigration (because I don't like brown people)".
> They'll continue to turn up the dial on all the race/gender/sex preference things as they have since Occupy.
Exactly, they want the focus to be on divides within the working class and away from the labor/capital class divide. This is why corporate DEI messaging is frequently very accusatory and divisive; the point is to make workers feel uncomfortable among themselves, and therefore, less likely to organize. It's designed to make workers walk on eggshells around each other.
Just a tangent that it's strange this is a local story for me (Rochester NY) and there is no local coverage - had to go all the way to the UK to learn about this!
That's kind of wild, and a little concerning. 13 WHAM doesn't seem to have even a mention of this on their website. Is ABC connected to anti-labor interests?
ABC is owned by Disney, which has a fairly strong antiunion history, while WHAM is owned by the Sinclair Broadcast Group, a media organization known for being extremely conservative.
US news is at least as important to the UK as news of all of Europe combined if not more since it’s the biggest source of cultural imports and where its leaders and academics who don’t go to university at home go. This is broadly true for most countries which is why US news is news everywhere.
No. Companies just have to re-hire fired employees and pay lost wages and benefits. IMO Starbucks should pay a large punitive fine that gets split between the fired workers and the NLRB.
Their orders have the same force as a court order, so there are penalties if you actively ignore an order. However the board is very limited in what they can order.
Years ago, one of our VPs, an old colleague, used the phrase "fraternizing with the help" to signal leadership's motives for an unusual and specific reorg.
Someone was concerned that management was being too influenced by the suggestions of labor, and that's just not how chain of command works.
Setting aside this specific case, what is a business supposed to do if a union's demands are unreasonable and make it infeasible to keep the business profitable? If they try and replace the unionized workers, that is frowned upon and in some cases illegal. If they shut down the business due to no longer being viable, that seems to also be legally murky.
If a group of employees wants to band together and collectively bargain, that feels like it should be allowed, but if the company wants to completely sever ties with that group or if an employee wants to be hired and not associated with the group that should also be fine.
I agree that the balance of power is tilted in favor of capital over labor and that imbalance has been continually growing over the past several decades, but it feels like there should be a better solution than legally protected unions. For example:
- Increased relocation assistance for people who need to move for a job
- Improved safety regulations, which is a common reason employees decide to unionize in the first place
- Increased public sector employment to provide more alternatives to those in exploitative private sector jobs
All of these seem like better ways the govt can help workers than legally protected unions.
I'm not really going to answer this satisfactorily but the union doesn't have work if the employer doesn't exist. It's in the best interests of the union to negotiate in good faith to find the optimal arrangement for both parties. A successful, growing business means a growing union.
The idea is that it should be a win-win. It's perfectly possible for a union to be unreasonable and for both parties to ultimately walk away with nothing. This has happened countless times and is somewhat inevitable for unsustainable businesses (or businesses which rely on another industry to be in a growth phase).
We don’t know what they asked for or what Starbucks thinks it will cost them. EDIT: I saw the list of the demands and they are incredibly reasonable. Like, this is how a human being deserves to be treated reasonable.
The real point of Starbucks doing this isn’t to avoid having to cut into their profit margins a bit in that location but to suppress unionization in their other locations.
They have to shut it down early and often, or they’ll actually have to go to the table with a Union and that idea makes them crap their pants.
They would rather lose all profit from that location and send the message that unionization will get you fired.
> If they shut down the business due to no longer being viable, that seems to also be legally murky.
There's a difference between shutting down a business because some employees are starting to unionize, and shutting down a business because its financially non-viable due to extended negotiations.
If the business is somehow stupid enough to sign a contract with a union that makes them fail (and frankly, the union stupid enough to propose -- if the business fails, they still all lose their jobs) then that's really on the business, not the union. At that point they can go to court to try to fight the contract, or close up shop.
>Setting aside this specific case, what is a business supposed to do if a union's demands are unreasonable and make it infeasible to keep the business profitable? If they try and replace the unionized workers, that is frowned upon and in some cases illegal. If they shut down the business due to no longer being viable, that seems to also be legally murky.
Don't sign a contract that's unreasonable and makes your business unprofitable. That's what the company is supposed to do.
> All of these seem like better ways the govt can help workers than legally protected unions.
Won't happen without unions. Capital would gladly have you work 12 hour days without weekends, and we know this because it was true until people advocated for their own rights. https://www.pbs.org/livelyhood/workday/weekend/8hourday.html Capital will gladly have you work in unsafe or inhumane conditions if it means profits.
Maybe unions aren't the ideal solution, but the wealthy (i.e. the employers) have outsized influence in government. Who is going to speak for the people, if not a union?
> if a union's demands are unreasonable and make it infeasible to keep the business profitable
What a strange hypothetical! That's certainly never happened, and given the current power dynamic, incredibly unlikely to happen today.
Whatever regulations there are to protect workers were created because of unions, not instead of them. If employers had been given the choice, there wouldn't be unions or regulations.
They closed the Starbucks in my city rather than recognize the union. Probably they'll reopen it later with all new people. It's purely an intimidation tactic. They are hoping to make an example of those workers who get out of line to strike fear into the hearts of the rest. My heart goes out to all the young, financially struggling workers who really just wanted some paid sick days and better treatment.
This isn't necessarily true. I have also asked a couple of baristas what their pay was like, and it seems like they do not give raises as frequently or pegged to CoL. Over COVID, I chatted with a barista that had been with Starbucks for 7-8 years who was telling me that he made .20 more than a new hire.
It was interesting to get his point of view on the unionization details even though his location wasn't organizing.
This article made me curious, has any business tried to defend antiunion activities through a desire for free association? As in the business does not want to associate with unions.
It made me curious because I've not seen that argument before, in the function of a union seems like it wants to force the company to associate with it whether the company wants to or not.
This is a very common tactic these companies typically use to discourage employees internally. Not that the company doesn't want to associate with a union but an attempt to convince workers that they shouldn't want to associate with a union.
Lots of companies have been "caught" putting up signs in the break room next to the legally required signs about worker rights, they'll put up a sign in the room that tries to convince employees that Unions take away their rights.
Corporations have their first amendment rights curtailed along various axes (or, depending on your political philosophy, they aren't people so they don't have first Amendment rights and any first Amendment-esque writes they enjoy are a convenience fabrication the US legal system put together so they didn't have to go through every law that applies to people and decide whether it applies to corporations).
But as example, without modification to the first Amendment, the Civil Rights Act broadly curtailed the freedom of association of employers and public establishments. Similar law exists for anti-union activity already.
edit: There's an equivocation on "association" here. As an individual, I don't have the right to "disassociate" people from myself. I can't demand that my sister not refer to me as her brother, or that she stop doing things because she is known to be my sister and those things would be "associated" with me. Freedom of association is about a person being able to choose who they wish to interact with, not freedom for a person to dictate what is "associated" with them in people's minds.
Supreme Court ruled that public sector employees can't be required to pay union fees as a condition of employment, on First Amendment/free association grounds.
Ok, but the people in the union are actual people. The company is a abstract entity we invented to facilitate business. The right of assembly of real humans is surely more important than the right of assembly of a legal fiction.
In British Columbia, unions have a really interesting precedent in free association: union members do not cross picket lines. Not just their own picket line, but anybody's picket line.
It sounds nice in practice but there are desperate people out there. A strike provides those people with opportunities. Prisoner's dillema keeps them from sacrificing themselves for a union that sees them as the out-group.
one could argue that those people, in the end would be better off by actually joining the union and demanding better rights.
There is a reason socialism is inherently internationalist. Capitalistic society is not bound by national borders, and thus the exploitation of labour is a class issue that tranceeds national boundaries. Workers in different places are far more similar then people from different class in the same place.
Are we talking about unions or socialism? I don't see unionism as an inherently anti-capitalist construct. It's a contract amongst workers and business owners. As with all contracts, their value tends to be dependent on your individual situation. It's even possible for unions to be anti-socialist, by constraining access to a select few creating elevated wages for the in-group while shielding access to that value from the out-group.
What's specifically protected in BC is that you cannot get fired if (a) you're in a union, and (b) you cannot get to work without crossing a picket line.
Commercial rights have historically always been more curtailed than personal rights. There's a reason it's permitted to criminalize things like false advertising.
You cannot "free association" your way out of legally required actions. You can't, say, refuse to deal with the IRS because it's your right not to associate with them.
> You are absolutely free to never associate with them as an employee, however. Important distinction.
You do not have that freedom in the USA. The Constitution is very clear on this question: Congress has the right to demand your forced employment. Congress hasn't seen fit to do so for many decades, but it has every right to do so and you have no de jure right to refuse employment.
Isn't this the case in every nation? The state has a monopoly on violence and is actually in control of the functioning of the country. By extensions to this, they also are able to "forceful" employ you.
Mind you, in many countries this isn't even relevant compared to what economic system the country is in. (heck, in some countries people swear allegiance to the literal ruler of a country before becoming a citizen).
And you can decline to interact with an extension of the US Government, unless there is a law that you can't, which there is. In the same way that there is a law that you can't decline to interact with a union.
My point is that the freedom of negative association does not supersede legally required actions whose performance involves associating with an individual or group.
I make it a point to try visit the unionized store in my area. I'd love to see a comparison of pay/benefits of a typical US Starbucks vs the ones I see in say Munich.
As a side note, I find it just incredible that the CEO of Starbucks, Howard Schultz, actually campaigned for the president under the democratic party. And Hillary Clinton was going to make him labor secretary. When even the left leaning party is that right wing, something has gone terribly wrong.
It’s all well and good until it impacts your wallet. The hypocrisy is depressing but not surprising.
It could also be argued, )I hate the argument but it is true) that he has to oppose any and all unionization efforts because as a publicly traded company they are required to look out for the interests of their shareholders.
Which comes back to the same place ultimately. And I have no sympathy for him regardless of his excuse.
> they are required to look out for the interests of their shareholders.
There is an incredible amount of leeway here; He could argue that having employees that are unionized and happier means they will be more productive, and improve the brand image which is more valuable in the long run than having to slightly raise wages and pay a few more benefits.
> He could argue that having employees that are unionized and happier means they will be more productive, and improve the brand image which is more valuable in the long run than having to slightly raise wages and pay a few more benefits.
Except they're not just seeking "slightly" higher wages. Those hypothetical benefits of unionization to Starbucks sound like bullshit to me. Since when are unions good for businesses? Detroit's auto companies send their regards.
>It could also be argued, )I hate the argument but it is true) that he has to oppose any and all unionization efforts because as a publicly traded company they are required to look out for the interests of their shareholders.
Anything could be argued, but this argument is not true. Plenty of publicly traded companies have unionized workforces and do not face shareholder lawsuits for it. Can you find an example of a publicly traded company losing a shareholder lawsuit for not running underhanded and illegal union-busting tactics?
How many publicly traded companies had their workforce unionize without protest in the last 30 years or maybe longer?
The model also helps make a difference. Starbucks can kill a store to prevent unionization from taking up, but not all business make this a valid method of squashing unionization.
To be clear, it is obvious and plain to see that Starbucks and other corporations view their workforce unionizing as a bad thing for them. The reason they are that is because they believe, reasonably or otherwise, that it will impact their bottom line. The money is what the care about. It is the only thing they care about. Their natural incentive structure of being a publicly traded company is specifically about the pursuit of the almighty dollar.
I work for a non-profit and when unionization occurred there was no pushback about it. My industry is also not traditional in so far as our funding is almost exclusively from federal and state health agencies.
But the increase in wages and quality of life for the members was measurable, and the demand for home health care only continues to rise as the population ages, as well as social/economics factors around the expectation and realities of family members taking care of family members as they age.
I'm surprised we don't have a unionization app. With the technology we have today we should be able to do zero trust organizing. There should be a way to square the app with the NRLB so that some protections can get established before a hostile employer acts.
The core of unionizing is getting the word out that unionizing is possible, beneficial and worth the risk. There are some places that tech can help, but largely it's a human-interaction problem.
As an example, consider how to let someone know you're even considering unionizing. An app isn't able to find out who the people you need to reach out to are - that's work you'd have to do either way. It could automatically send a text or email when you've done that, but both of those are far inferior to just talking to the person. First of all nobody likes automatic messages and they're easy to ignore. Secondly it loses the ability to sound someone out slowly, which allows you to avoid dropping the U word and potentially tipping off management until you know the person. If its anonymous, the person is likely to ignore a message. Finally and most importantly, just info dumping union benefits comes across as a sales pitch and is very ineffective; it's better to have a conversation that gets to your co-workers needs at work and from there games out whether a union would help them.
The food service industry in America is about as corrupt as it gets, They don't pay a fair wage, they rely on extortion tactics (tipping) to float the cost of wages to the customer and the customer must pay for his meal and half the staffs wages as well or be labeled a bad person or in the customers mind, maybe even face a retaliation of some sort by the staff, i.e spitting in food, added to a blacklist etc. and they are actively fighting any attempts at unionization to boot.
Not to mention the many various ways restaurants skirt the law with regard to overtime/doubletime. I've seen a lot of ways they screw this up, but perhaps the most common is by using the tipped employee minimum hourly wage (usually at least $3 less than minimum wage, and often as little as $2/hour) as the base rate for OT/DT premiums. This can end up shorting tipped employees as much as $12/hour on OT and $16/hour on DT. Alerting businesses to this fact is usually met with fingers in ears/closing eyes/singing type reactions.
Judge is a strong word here. This was an NLRB admin judge/bureaucrat which means this whole thing will be appealed to a real judicial branch court and tried.
Honestly curious - is there any available data that demonstrates Unions are a net-benefit in modern times?
Many of us have fond thoughts regarding Unions and the struggles they went through decades ago to achieve sane, safe, rewarding working conditions. What is left to fight for?
In the past couple years, we have had story after story of Unions abusing power and harming companies and the public in the process. Is there good-doing I'm missing?
Take Starbucks for example - already known for higher-than-average wages, college tuition sponsorship programs, management tracks and more - what is left to fight for? It's still nearly zero-skilled labor at the end of the day.
It's a pretty consistent finding among labor economics researchers that firms have monopsony power over workers.
> What's left to fight for?
The issue isnt whether they're well paid according to your subjective criteria. It's the ratio between how much the worker is paid and how much they produce for the firm.
I talk about the "bargaining power ratio" concept here[1], but the microeconomics 201 concept is the ratio between marginal product of labor and pay can be thought of as the bargaining power ratio.
If across the board workers have a low ratio, then they have a systematically low bargaining power, and unions would improve that.
I don't know how we can be confident a Union will just solve the problems you point out.
I'm also not sure we can be confident that most agree these are problems at all - if you are low-skilled or no-skilled, then it does not matter how much value you bring to a company, you are too easily replaced. The solution isn't to fleece the company, but improve the average person's ability to obtain valuable skills, no?
Additionally, Union shops are notoriously poorly run, poorly organized and inefficient. The Union does things to benefit the Union, not the workers, business or public. How do we keep that in check?
> I don't know how we can be confident a Union will just solve the problems you point out.
Unions increase worker bargaining power. If worker bargaining power is low, it solves that
> if you are low-skilled or no-skilled, then it does not matter how much value you bring to a company
The amount of skill has nothing to do with it. Only your marginal product of labor and the ratio of your pay to it
> you are too easily replaced
That would affect bargaining power, correct
> The solution isn't to fleece the company, but improve the average person's ability to obtain valuable skills, no?
Not particularly.
For instance, low skilled job are also easily replaceable. Walmart is hiring just as well as Starbucks or Target.
So why is the balance struck at this wage point? The issue is that there are relatively few firms offering a ton of the low skilled jobs. The firms are forming an effective union (oligopsony for the technical) which suppresses wages.
> Union shops are notoriously poorly run, poorly organized and inefficient.
[Citation needed]
Public sector unions (eg. police unions, teachers unions) tend to be terrible, because the government doesn't face profitability pressures like companies do.
Some private sector unions have been inefficient (eg. Detroit auto workers in the 1990s) but that's also often because the sector itself is immune to competition (chicken tax for auto workers).
Other private sector unions for instance are much better at ensuring labor norms are respected.
All in all it's hard to go against David Card's (author in NBER review paper above) opinion on the matter of labor economics
You keep repeating this old and worn out talking point with no evidence to support it:
> Additionally, Union shops are notoriously poorly run, poorly organized and inefficient. The Union does things to benefit the Union, not the workers, business or public. How do we keep that in check?
I have personal experience with three unions in my area. All of which fit my description very accurately.
> You keep repeating this old and worn out talking point
There has been zero evidence produced that counters this assertion. I asked for evidence, and received complaints that cannot be addressed by unions and links to pro-union think tanks that unsurprisingly argue unions are a net-positive force.
A Union isn't some magical thing that solves all problems. Ultimately it's an organization that puts itself above all other organizations, which includes the businesses they work with and even their own Union Members.
Your local grocery store Union is probably actively engaged in forcing-out young people unless they fork over a portion of their scrawny wages to the Union for nothing in return.
>There has been zero evidence produced that counters this assertion
From what I can read a user provided you with evidence, from the National Bureau of Economic Research, fulfilling your original request for data showing unions are a net benefit in modern times. This evidence counters your assertion that unions are a net negative, so it does come across as "pro-union" in the extent it disagrees with your stated anti-union viewpoint. You have dismissed that evidence entirely on the basis that it is "a link to a pro-union think tank". That link goes to a 16 page PDF summarizing abstracts from a wide body of industry research, so I guess you have also dismissed all of those papers.
So on one hand you bring 3 examples of anecdotal evidence, and on the other hand a user provided a summary document itself linking many additional sources of research. You have declared the source non-credible by default, and then insisted nobody will provide evidence to disagree with you.
Reading this thread to try and grow my own perspectives, as I do on hackernews, I have to say I have gained little to no material information about why your view on this issue is justifiable. I don't think you're being fair to the users who are engaging you on your points, either, and I think that's costing this discussion any chance at producing useful insight.
I think you're reading biased publications if they failed to report on OSHA violations in Amazon warehouses (which are so bad, the DOJ had to step in), or about starbucks workers' issues around scheduling, firings, etc. You don't have to rely on articles though, maybe there's a Starbucks or other place near you that's in the midst of unionization. If so, go talk to the people involved.
In the general sense, according to the DOL, unionized workers earn more than non-unionized workers, have more paid sick leave, are more likely to take vacation days, have better retirement plans, better scheduling, etc.: https://www.dol.gov/general/workcenter/union-advantage#:~:te...).
Also, the fact is, unionization is a right, and it is illegal to fire workers for trying to unionize. Even if you think your employer is good, they can always be better and employers are not going to go out of their way to improve your working conditions, pay or benefits, and it's easier to fight for these as a group rather than alone.
I'm not sure what you mean by "harming companies and the public"; however we can come up with concrete examples of companies harming working people in the US.
Wage theft in the US alone costs working people billions of dollars annually; by some estimates employers stealing from employees results in "three times as much economic loss as all other types of theft combined". (https://www.edelson-law.com/blog/2022/10/wage-theft-outpaces...)
EPI has done work around this:
> in the 10 most populous U.S. states. We find that, in these states, 2.4 million workers lose $8 billion annually (an average of $3,300 per year for year-round workers) to minimum wage violations—nearly a quarter of their earned wages
Non-competes are illegal in California. This is a state or Federal issue, not a Union issue.
> Tech employees asked to work on military projects (at places that aren't traditionally servicing the military)
This is an ideology issue, and does not belong in the workplace at all.
> Minimum wages are still like $8 in some states, which is redicuous today
This story is much deeper than headlines would lead you to believe. For starters, the cost of living in majority of this country is low. Companies pay market rates, and the government sets minimum wages.
> Companies only giving workers 29.5 hours of work when the minimum for "full time benefits" is 30 hours
Most companies are not required to offer any benefits - full time or not.
> Workers being fired for saying/doing things outside of work
Yet we routinely cancel people for things they said 15 years ago...
> Companies laying off massive numbers of employees without doing the legally-required steps
And the courts take care of that already.
Practically none, or none, of the issues you brought up can be solved by a Union.
My personal feelings on unions aside, I think some of these points a union COULD address.
- Non-competes. Your rationale for non-competes is a non sequitur here. A union can represent workers and negotiate against signing non-competes if it is legal in a state, which would make a union desirable in that case.
- Military contracts. Whether it belongs in the workplace is irrelevant. The fact of the matter is that there are many tech employees who are averse to working on certain projects, and a union representing them would be able to negotiate what kind of contracts their members would work on.
- Benefits - A union certainly is viable here.
- Outside of work - a union would certainly be able to defend their members’ right to not be terminated for reasons irrelevant to their work, expressing their opinions on a controversial matter being one of those potential reasons.
Specifically regarding non-competes - No, a Union negotiating for no non-compete does nobody any good. The moment you go to a different company that is not serviced by that same Union (or perhaps the Union did not negotiate this), then you are back at square one - signing a non-compete or finding a different job.
The only solution to non-competes is at the State and Federal level. Anything less solves nothing, but sounds good...
and how would we get the lawmakers in this country to actually propose regulation that would fix non-competes?
Mind you, corporations have an absolute amount of influence in politics compared to the average worker.
A union is also a political force which looks after political interest of workers.
If the people of your state don't think it's important enough to make into a law, then it's not important enough to the people in your state. You are free to disagree, but apparently most of the people in your state do not.
Change it at the State or Federal level. Everything else accomplishes nothing. Unions aren't a magic bullet, and do not apply across different businesses.
Literally any workplace issues can be solved through collective worker action, if there are enough workers. The trick is to get enough workers into the union to be able to have a say in the things I listed, and more. What do you propose? Politicians are in the pocket of the opposite interest from the workers, they are the capitalists' tools. Companies aren't going to change, because they want more profits above all else. Do you expect to just wait to be given more rights? People keep shooting down unions, but then offer literally zero solutions.
That's the thing about employees: not all of them are you. Other people have different opinions. I personally do not want to do direct work on military or defense projects, so it would be important to me that any place I work has some employee input into the process of customer selection. Feel free to bash me all you want about that, but the fact of the matter is that I and many other people feel differently than you do.
At minimum, you can argue it's game theoretical insurance.
If Starbucks is so magnanimous towards their employees today, they may not be that way tomorrow.
Corporate advocates for itself. Unions advocate for the employees.
Ideally, they strike a balance so that nobody's satisfied and the best compromise is reached.
Discarding unions leaves the door open for an imbalance of corporate power. (And, since corporations tend toward monopoly these days, that's a lot of corporate power.)
Problem is that people even take these jobs seriously. Starbucks job was something to do part-time for a couple of years while you are in school. Why would you spent time unionizing for that? It's never going to pay enough to live on.
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.
"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.
This is pretty basic negotiation though, ask for more than you think you can get to have something you can give up in the discussion.
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."
> Adding distraction, eroding the customer experience, and reducing the professionalism.
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.
...this is an incredibly disingenuous reading of the stated proposal.
#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.
> “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.
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.
Are you okay with the other 14 then? I understand how you can find issue with one of their proposals but then Starbucks ought to handily agree with all but the one and offer to negotiate #4.
"...if a worker's religious belief prohibits handling of pork, they would be exempt from being assigned to food warming and won't be discriminated against."
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.
Supposing a religion that doesn’t exist as a counter example to a religion that does, is a bad faith argument which shouldn’t really be answered. But I’m enjoying this so I’ll answer it anyway.
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.
Come on. There are billions of people worldwide who have religious prohibitions from pork. This is not a niche population.
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."
> There are billions of people worldwide who have religious prohibitions from pork.
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?
"Protecting pay for store closures...and for workers who leave early or are sick" is national laws in many jurisdictions. You’ll have to provide some reason for why it doesn’t make sense, many national assemblies and labor boards seem to think otherwise.
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.
pretty much all of these seem very normal and i'm actually shocked starbucks doesn't already have them in place. you can work 32 hours at a starbucks and not be considered full time? starbucks doesn't supply fresh aprons to everyone every shift?
Small point, but aren't aprons handed out and treated like uniforms in other companies? Employees take them home and launder them themselves? In any job I've had where I had to wear a specific company shirt, they were given to me and up to me to maintain.
In my works this is usually as you describe. But at the same time it is also one of the top issues workers complain about and ripe for change.
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.
I think it’s a reasonable request for workers to come to work in clean clothes. Especially with regards to food service. Even if you have a company supplied apron fresh every day, the moldy hoodie (extreme example) is still a nonstarter. Where I would absolutely support the company being on the line for laundry service is if they have some cleanliness requirement that goes above and beyond what is reasonable. If you’re expecting your auto mechanics or industrial maintenance workers to start their day in spotless attire, that’s far more onerous due to the nature of their jobs and I would be much more supportive of company provided laundry services in those cases. I think there could be an argument made for food service staff when it comes to hygiene regulations as well so I’m certainly not against it the proposed Starbucks changes. I just don’t know if or what regulations would come into play here.
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.
What about these is petulant and counter-productive? All of these seem like standard union demands (seniority rules) or stronger adherence to what are already legally required (anti-harassment). The only one that stood out to me as being unusual, but not in any way counterproductive or petulant, was a demand that the company support workers who act in self-defense against aggressive customers.
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’m not a fan of seniority rules, but if this is the worst you could find, than I don’t think you should worry.
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.
In my experience working in front-line jobs, this is very typical even in non-union shops. All this appears to do is prevent retaliation against specific employees by setting up an objective pay scale for each store.
There a few ways. I’m a big fan consensus driven approaches, and equal pay for equal work. A higher payed worker should have other justification for the inequality than just seniority. E.g. if they use their experience to train other workers, that in and of it self is a good justification for higher pay (as they are doing more). In a well managed workplace getting consensus for higher pay with this justification should be rather easy.
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.
By using a market? ie. allowing people to bid on slots directly. I know that the context for this is "non-economic proposals" so market based solutions doesn't count, but I'm not sure why you wouldn't want a market based proposal in this case.
Just because it's a market doesn't mean it will be a race to the bottom. For instance, you can set it up so that the proceeds of the auction goes towards the people taking the shitty shifts.
I think this has been studied and tested in real work places. It’s been a minute since I had a peek in the literature of workplace psychology (not since my B.S. degree in 2011) so I might be misremembering, but I think I remember the results are not in favor of market based solutions.
I encourage you browse the web and see for your self, workplace psychology is an interesting study.
Why didn't it work? The problem I see with seniority based schemes is that they totally fail to take into account degree of preferences. If you have enough seniority to have top dibs when picking shifts, and you marginally prefer the afternoon shift over the morning shift then that's the shift you'll get dibs on. Meanwhile, the less senior worker who have kids and therefore must get the afternoon shift (so they can take their kids to school in the morning) gets shafted. Some sort of system that allows less flexible workers to compensate more flexible worker would solve this.
Like I said it’s been a minute since I looked at the literature. But I think they have a few metrics to test for, including workplace morale, the distribution of how often workers get their preferred allotments, etc. I don’t remember any theory for why it doesn’t work, just that they’ve measured it and (as far as I remember) market based solutions fail on these metrics.
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.
>I'm not sure why you wouldn't want a market based proposal in this case.
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.
Companies shouldn't forced to permit the creation of unions. Unions are a tumor and it only makes sense for a company to remove it. If employees want to be able to threaten to quit employers should be able to threaten to fire them. The negotiation power should go both ways.
Governments shouldn't be forced to permit the creation of political parties. If citizens want the right to kick out the government, the government should have the right to kick citizens out of the country.
See the flaw in both of these arguments is that governments and corporations aren't people and only exist to provide some societal benefit. the measure of what we should allow governments and companies to do is what makes for the best functioning society, not some random principal of symmetry.
Seriously, I’m interested to know why you think that. I am a member of a union and without it I would be significantly less well off. Am I a bad person because I want to be treated like a human instead of a replaceable cog in a machine?
It adds more risk if people collectively decided to stop working and becomes a headache. It is also less efficient in that you will have to spend more on compensation for people who otherwise would work for less.
>Am I a bad person because I want to be treated like a human instead of a replaceable cog in a machine?
No, but having replacables cogs lowers the risk for businesses.
I think you fundamentally misunderstand unions and the worker-corporation relationship. Historically, and through to today, corporations have most/all of the power. Which is why things like child labor, 16 hour work days, etc. were very common, until workers unionized, effectively pooling their power in order to negotiate with corporations. If you didn't have to work as a child, or don't have to work longer than 8 hours, thank a union.
Not unless there is slavery. People are not forced to work for any corporation and they are free to go work for another or start their own.
>child labor
Good for children who want extra money to spend or families who don't make enough. Childhood is when most people learn the most and there are certain things that can only be learned while on the job.
>16 hour work days
Good for people who want to make more money at the same job.
>If you didn't have to work as a child, or don't have to work longer than 8 hours, thank a union.
I did work as a child and did work 16 hour days and I don't regret doing so as the money I made doing so significantly improved the trajectory of my life.
Of course, if every store unionized, then they'd be forced to concede at some point that they still need to keep stores open in order to make money, but in the meantime it seems like it's an intimidation tactic and that should probably be illegal.