If they don’t have the money, they borrow it against the collateral of the business. It’s the same way everything in business is funded to start. Get the contract signed, take a loan to buy the materials, build the thing, get paid, and pay back the loan. In this case, they pay back the loan by not paying the workers more, not giving raises for a few years or whatever, and not hiring new employees for a while.
I was radicalized when I worked (as a supervisor) for a big box electronics store, and there were staff interested in joining a union.
Boy let me tell you how many anti-union trainings I had to attend. And the way they villified and attacked the person who was the “leader” of the people interested.
I’m not sure exactly what they were expecting from me/us as a leadership team, but I came away from that with a crystal clear understanding of how scared corporations are of unions. And so I’ve been staunchly pro-union since.
No no no, they only care about the best interests of their employees! That’s why they spend so much fighting unions. It has no profit motive whatsoever. Because, obviously, the union won’t be able to secure any better wages or benefits anyway! So there’s really no reason to unionize. Ever. Don’t even talk about it. Definitely don’t talk about it with your co-workers. Definitely don’t leave union literature on the break room table. Certainly don’t bring up unionizing to a few people you trust.
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.
Man that’s so nice. I would love to have that
Not perfect, but it’s so nice just to really be yourself at work because you don’t have to impress your manager.
its also nice that you can’t be fired because so-and-so doesn’t like you or your attitude. You can even yell “pedophile protector” at the President of the United States while on the job, and still be sure you have a job the next day haha.
To be fair most of my managers would agree with calling him that, but we’re not American.
If they’re only spending hundreds of thousands to stop your union, you need to try harder :P
I was once years ago talking to a guy who ran an industrial shop. In the area there were a lot of other similar shops that had gone union, his wasn’t. And when asked about it, his answer was ‘everyone around here that’s gone union has deserved it. I pay my guys above prevailing wage, I don’t overwork them, and when they need time off I give it without a ton of HR paperwork. That costs a little more but it’s worth every penny because I get the best workers, and when the union comes knocking, it’s the workers who tell them to shove off.’
A number of years later the company was bought out. I only assume that guy left, because a Google search shows that shop is now union and employees gripe online about how management is continually squeezing their pay and working conditions.
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.
Yeah, I was reading this OP, wondering if the poster thought that the end result of successful unionization would be one worker getting a $1 raise, lol.
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
Your math is right but scales are off.
Dollar raise a year? Yeah, $1 * 100 * 80 = $8000, and to a lot of businesses that’s peanuts. It’s also peanuts to the individual employees, if you work full time federal minimum wage you make $15600, an extra dollar wont make a difference there.
Increase hourly wage by a dollar, to the employee that’s an extra 1 * 40 * 52 = $2080, and to the business that becomes $1 * 40 * 52 * 100, that’s $208,000 annually they’re paying out.
That’s what they aim to stop
True, although I was at a dollar raise a month. The framing in the story was purposefully “I just ask for sth. very small” so that’s how I read it. Dollar raise per hour is much more meaningful, but quite a significant increase
The reason for this is pretty simple: necessity.
CompaniesCorporations 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.
<3 Co-ops. I’m a union member at a co-op. It’s as good as it gets for a working class person in the US. Seeing the light was the beginning of my radicalization. Add a little theory and the great awakening was complete. 🫡
Sadly not a member of one, though I’m a union member. How is stuff in there?
Requesting time off is just a formality. There’s no harassment for using sick leave. Around 3% raises every year, usually, it’s negotiated. We still have a pension with rule of 85. Stand by pay while on call. Full wages paid while serving on jury duty. Some rarer benefits would be around $2k paid towards hearing aids and lasik.
The ability to leave work at work is priceless. There’s a line drawn in the sand and it’s respected.
We’ve had some employees paid to retire early, but I’m unaware of any layoffs throughout the history of the company.
It’s pretty wonderful. It’s the way everyone should be treated regardless of where they’re employed. Or unemployed. The profits over people bullshit has gotten outta hand.
True! Co-ops are great
How did society get in the equation? If they’re maximizing the wellbeing of their workers, how are non-workers (society) benefitting?
When workers are not exploited, there are fewer in precarious situations. Consider the following scenario.
You have to work 12-hour long shifts, 6 days a week. Travel to and from work takes one hour each way. You need to sleep 8 hours. Eating takes up an hour (let’s say 30 min breakfast&lunch, 30 min dinner).
That leaves you with effectively 2 hours a day that’s for yourself. And that’s excluding meal preparation times, so you’ll likely prefer to microwave. And if you’re a parent, you have even less time. You also don’t have much of a “weekend” to recover. So you cut on sleep and that will directly impact your wellbeing. That won’t help raise children in a safe environment. Nor will other coworkers and people be that thrilled to deal with a constant grumpy person. And nor do you want to be this person!
Now, how much do you then make? Let’s say you make $10 an hour. You’ll thus earn $720 a week, but most of that will go to groceries, travel costs like petrol/electricity, energy and utility, and rent/mortgages. So you’ll en up with barely any reserves to stock up… so if there’s a crisis, you’re fucked, and need to go into debt - and who will profit from that? The banks and CEOs, again.
Let’s say also that there are 1,000 employees, of which 900 workers, 75 mid-range and 25 CEO-board. The workers earn $10, the mid-rangers $15, the CEOs $115 an hour. Together, that all makes $13,000 an hour.
Most of the profit made, goes to the CEOs. When we divide income far more equally and remove those excess bonuses, and enable shorter travel times by good urban planning, we can imagine a scenario like this:
You’ll work 4 days a week, 6 hours a day, 30 min both ways total for travel. Dinner can now be prepared instead of microwaved, and that’s healthier and cheaper, so let’s say food total takes 1.5 hours now. That leaves you with 8 hours for yourself. Much better.
You work 24 hours a week, of which most hours now productively spent at work instead of dozing off and counting the hours. And due to co-ops distributing the income much fairer among all, you might earn $20 an hour.
Let’s now assume there are no CEOs, only workers who all can decide, although some do the day-to-day administration and can be directly recalled.
All earn $13 an hour. The workers significantly benefit, while the mid-rangers also benefit from the much better work-life balance. It’s also conceivable that with this improved live standard, they will be able to produce more, and eventually, go beyond $15 an hour for all… perhaps $20.
Hence, a co-op not only improves wellbeing for all, but also for society. Reduced healthcare costs, reduced travel time costs and waste of fuel, and so on. But in my view, wages are part of the problem; a gift economy with a give-it-forward system would be ideal, with market co-op democratic socialism (with independent trade unions) a close behind.
Remarkable how the answer hinges on this fantasy union magically retroactively changing city planning.
Capitalism. Minmaxxing human lives.
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.
It’s not about the money. It’s about power, control and submission.
It’s both. Trust me.
Having worked in a union shop where we were constantly told we should think ourselves lucky to have a job and there was no money for raises or any other benefits for more than a decade, and they even broke us in bankruptcy proceedings, but when faced with a huge worker shortfall they started throwing huge wage bumps, bonuses, and rapid career advancement tracks to attract new people…fuck them. The money is always there when it matters to them.
It’s ultimately about money though. If they believed ceding power/control to workers would get them more money, they’d do it. Workers are rarely invested in corporate success unless their pay is also tied to it. And even then, they’re not nearly as invested as the founders and initial investors.
There is something to preventing the union in the first place. In the same way they oppose single payer health care. They pay out of the nose, more than civilized countries’ employers pay for better health insurance, but they oppose it out of general dickish principle. They are good tribal pricks, and that is what the tribe expects. That follows to almost all of the tribes too, it’s only our little junior tribes that the big tribe has nothing but contempt and fear and hate for, that supports paying less money for more and better health care.
Because of Tribal Loyalties, same as with Unions, it’s the principle of the matter and they don’t want to be seen as the first ones to cave. Then John Galt might not bring them to liberatiland where they obviously prosper because they are so much more capable than all of the schlepps they abuse by virtue of being hired as a dickhead higher up.
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.
Appealing to self-centeredness is one way.
Oddly I saw this and thought it was a pro union ad because that’s pretty cheap
Unions aren’t even that expensive, here they cost about €4-20 a month, depending on your net disposable income and whether you study or not. At worst, that’s €240 a year.
Take into account that with a union I might get a 5% raise instead of 3% on €30k, and it more than pays for itself (an extra earn of €600, minus union fees that still yields an extra earn of €360).
If you work full time (~2080/yr), then $700 amounts to $0.33 (33¢) per hour, or about $27 per biweekly paycheck. Any union worth their salt will certainly get wages increased by more than that. Unfortunately, for a lot of people at or near poverty, that $27 makes a huge difference.
Same thing with fighting anti-union activity by your employer - yeah, it’s federally protected and you’ll likely win in court and get back pay, but few can afford to not get paid for the intervening months while it works its way through the system.
Yep this is the main line of attack.
“UnIoN DueS wILL sTeAL yOUr wAgEs”
$700 per year is 37 cents per hour, and you’re sure as shit to get a better raise than that every year in a union (on average).
Every sign like that just needs a little sticker: “That’s $x.xx per hour and they work to get you better raises”
Propaganda defeated
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.
