A place to discuss positive changes that can make work more equitable, and to vent about current practices. We are NOT against work; we just want the fruits of our labor to be recognized better.
Our Philosophies:
Our Goals
I love being a union member. Every few years they just negotiate me a better wage. If my manager acts like an asshole I bring my rep to a meeting. My manager tried some shit with me a couple of years ago, so I just filed a workload report and she had to meekly explain herself to my rep and why it wouldn't happen again and what plan she would put in place to ensure it didn't. It's so nice to have enforceable rights.
This is a math problem. $1/hr for 40 hr/wk, 52 wk/yr for 10,000 employees = $20.8 million per year. If a company can prevent that with $20 million in one time anti union spending then they will because it's simply cheaper to do so.
It's not about the money. It's about power, control and submission.
Stoping a union is a one off cost.
Increasing wages adds to costs for every future year.
If you spend hundreds of thousands once, you could instead spend a dollar each on 100 employees for ~80 years. They don't work that long usually, but just in case
What tactics do companies use to prevent unions? How do you fight these?
Divide people, threaten them with punishment for organizing unions and discussing wages. Fire organizers. Misinformation etc.
The reason for this is pretty simple: necessity.
Companies have a fiduciary duty to maximize profits for shareholders.
If no union exists, that means depressing wages as much as possible while meeting staffing needs.
If a union is forming, it means spending as much as you need to stop it since, if you don't, you'll be unable to depress wages over the long term.
When a union exists, well then they have to negotiate to continue operations and so workers get paid more fairly.
Join or organize a union if you can.
Only public companies have that 'duty'.
Co-ops don't, their duty is to maximise wellbeing for all workers in them and concurrently society.
They have a fiduciary responsibility to the corporation and the shareholders. Increasing salaries to retain talent is part of this responsibility. However it is common for CEOs to mostly focus only on shareholders - mostly because their income mostly comes from shares.
This is why you always hear “they have a fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders “ and nothing else. It greatly lines their own pockets to perpetuate this.
It also depends on the state the company is incorporated in, but yeah that's true.
And it is a duty to the corporation (legal entity), notably not to the workers themselves; so while the interests of workers and the corporation may align sometimes - you don't have to do what's best for the workers if it isn't best for the company.
You still need to operate lawfully, and you can't pay so little that you can't hire/retain anyone, and you need to pay enough that you can hire people skilled enough to do the job, but you need to pay (ideally) only that amount and no more. Anything else takes away from profits and, you could say, makes the company less likely to succeed - if the company doesn't succeed, then no one would have jobs. Or so they'd argue.
The same as for goods, the price of labor is treated by employers as "what the market will bear". For goods, that means higher prices, for labor it means lower prices.
Capitalism. Minmaxxing human livelihood.
If not millions
Lol yeah. I have a friend who started a movement to unionize a local botanical garden/performance venue years ago. They napkin mathed it out that roughly 1.5M has been spent on the union busters, as the execs have just kept them "on retainer" for like half a decade now, occasionally doing displays of force whenever murmurs start up again about unionizing.