Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Apple Store Managers Being Trained On "Union Awareness"
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
I take it you aren't a just over minimum wage unskilled worker that doesn't really know about employment law and how to make sure you don't get the rough end of the stick all the time? Just because a union doesn't suit you doesn't mean they have no value to anyone. Unions don't have to drag companies down, in the UK they still have a lot of value as has been mentioned already.
I'm not saying Apple are a bad company to work for by any stretch, and I can see why people would want to joint a union if they feel it makes their job more secure. Unions are just like any other insurance for the people that pay for them.
Right because the employee benefits system in Europe is so efficient and not a drain on economies at all.
From the reuters article:
It seems to me that a store clerk with limited experience/skill shouldn't be complaining about making 41% more than the area's minimum wage. If he doesn't like the pay he's receiving there, he should change jobs or careers. His pay is not unreasonable for his set of skills.
It seems to me that a store clerk with limited experience/skill shouldn't be complaining about making 41% more than the area's minimum wage. If he doesn't like the pay he's receiving there, he should change jobs or careers. His pay is not unreasonable for his set of skills.
You want Joe the garbageman teaching your kids or do you want a qualified teacher with a Masters Degree? If you want the teacher with the Masters degree then why do you insist on paying them less than Joe the Garbageman?
Employee benefits don't drain the system at all, its the abuse of benefits that is the problem.
Yes, yes, not female and not many in the industry but yes they get their maternity time, yes and they do exist without a union.
Unions had their time and place. There's a lot of things wrong with them on many different levels.
Does the fact he gets paid a bit more (41% of SFA is still SFA) mean he shouldn't look to defend that living? Are they actually complaining about the wage, or are they looking to make their futures more secure? They wouldn't be looking at a union if they didn't think they had something to worry about.
Why should someone's vocation dictate what they expect to get paid? Teachers should want to teach so they can teach not so they can make money. Don't get me wrong they should be able to make a living off of it but a lot of them expect to much out of it. Same with doctors where they should become doctors because they want to help people not to make $X amount per year.
It's the problem with society that people choose their vocations on what want to make per year instead of what they want/what motivates them. Most people choose a way of life to make money when they should choose what their passionate about.
Many may disagree when unions (such as teachers unions) stand together for negative things - like resisting the firing of poorly performing employees, but that doesn't mean that unions are a horrible problem and should be gotten rid of. Case in point:
I know someone who works as a museum educator for a city museum. She has a graduate degree yet earns less than $40k and hasn't seen any sort of pay increase in over 3 years. This is living in an area where monthly rent for a single bedroom apartment is easily between $1000-1200 (that's $12,000-14,400 per year just on rent!) Meanwhile, healthcare costs continue to rise, and the city keeps passing them to the employee.
Her department budget has been cut and cut and cut, with the city now demanding another 6% cut. The city offers no employee parking, instead directing employees to paid lots that cost $6-8 per day.
Why shouldn't her and her fellow employees be able to band together and demand better treatment? In my mind, if the rights as an employee are violated, then the employee should always have a chance to bond together with fellow employees to face the greater power (the employer). We all know that quitting and finding alternate employment simply isn't an option most times (though it may be some of the time).
Shocked that this would be voted down into the negative. All you did is lay out some basic historical truths, then humbly acknowledge that unions can be flawed (as can any institution), but that flaws do not make something worthy of complete abandonment.
My goodness, what a commie! /sarcasm
Sadly I suspect macrumors, like much of teh internets, is overcrowded with "conservative" parental basement dwellers.
When we get rid of all the bosses' unions (chambers of commerce, the National Restaurant and Pizzaman Sexual Predator Association, etc.), then we can get rid of the workers' unions. Not before.
(Flame away, dorks).
I am neither conservative nor a parental basement dweller (a parent, but I turned our basement into a rec room for the kids), but I don't have much patience for most unions. They certainly had their place (and some still do) and had a very positive influence in affecting worker's rights, but unfortunately many of them have become bloated and bureaucratic versions of the corporate overlords they fought so hard against.
Unfortunately unions have become just as much of a problem as corporations when it comes to workplace reform. Workers getting promoted based on nothing more than seniority and incompetent workers continuing to collect paycheques and making things miserable for the workers around them who need to pick up the slack. And this is coming from a worker's viewpoint.
My wife recently went back to a job she had left two years before, but the job is now unionized. And I can tell you she would get out of the union in a second if she could. They've actually made her job MORE difficult and limited her pay. She's actually trying to get her job de-classified as union so she can make more money and not have to deal with them.
I do find it rather sad that you would immediately label someone who disagrees with you as a "conservative parental basement dweller" simply because they disagree with your opinion. And even before you're heard the reasoning.
Oh yay
That's right, unionize it. Then an iPad will cost 50k plus tax. Always somebody bitching about what they don't have and wanting what somebody else has. I'm sure there are good unions, and I'm sure there are unions that are not run by corrupt or organized individuals with the sense of a donut hole, I just don' t see them in my area so I have to comment based on local experience. That is...corruption, greed, entitlement, and overpaid undereducated apes.
That's right, unionize it. Then an iPad will cost 50k plus tax. Always somebody bitching about what they don't have and wanting what somebody else has. I'm sure there are good unions, and I'm sure there are unions that are not run by corrupt or organized individuals with the sense of a donut hole, I just don' t see them in my area so I have to comment based on local experience. That is...corruption, greed, entitlement, and overpaid undereducated apes.
You're noticing that, eh? Most of this comes from propaganda and myths that have been swirled around and recirculated so many times as to become "truth." See below:
Yeah, ok.
That is a bit like saying I have all the basic rights and freedoms of a U.S. citizen, but I never served in the military to defend those rights and freedoms. Therefore, the military is unnecessary to secure those rights and freedoms.
You are the beneficiary of the struggles of others.
More directly on topic: the article isn't clear as to how Apple conducts these presentations. I hope they are a neutral "here's what you can and cannot say/do so as to not run afoul of the NLRB" type presentation, and not the "a union will eat your babies" drivel Wal-Mart foists on its employees.
Only by those who like to pull sickies, can't do the job properly.
Unions once had their place - when they had the worker at heart - those days were over in the 1960's in the UK.
Unfortunately, passion won't pay bills. Also, passion doesn't offer much by way of health insurance, and it surely won't do much to help pay off the student debt that a doctor undertook to become a doctor.
It seems that, if one were to take your premise as true, the US would have been falling apart during the mid twentieth century, when unions and union membership climaxed, but those were boom years. Unions have been in steady decline for the past thirty or forty years. Seems like you would expect the US to be doing better than ever.
I think it must be because of other stuff that the US is falling apart.
IMO, there was a time when unions made sense. It protected employees before we had employment laws. All companies provide those benefits you listed and others, like protection for pregnant women, have actually become laws.
Nowadays, unions are more extortionists who protect bad employees from getting fired.
You must have missed the part where I said they should be able to make a living off it, but that's ok you had to ignore that to attempt to make a point. I also don't see what health insurance has to do with it and the fact they we charge each other at a premium price to educate each other is a whole subject on itself...
I'm going to fly in the face of probably 90% of the people here, but unions IMO are pretty bad in this day and age.
For example, let's consider the teachers union at my local highschool. They tell all their union members which way to vote in elections, they force membership on all employees, and they take excessive fees to support their own agenda, which may or may not be what the union members actually want. They recently had a strike in which many of the teachers did not approve; the issue was of course salary increases-- they are already paid much higher than any surrounding school district but hey, they want more money.
It's through this zeal for money that they can break industries; look at the US auto sector. There they had absurd wages, crazy pension plans, and all around unreasonable expectations for being an auto plant worker, and thus they jeopardized many of the manufacturing centers involved. The same thing happened with the steel industry-- again, low education low talent laborers demanding excessive pensions and salaries and look at where the industry is now; it's overseas.
Labor unions had their point and purpose back when labor laws either didn't exist or weren't being enforced. Now is not that time; they serve as nothing more than money making political platforms. If you really want "change" in the workplace, get some more labor laws, not unions.
For example, let's consider the teachers union at my local highschool. They tell all their union members which way to vote in elections, they force membership on all employees, and they take excessive fees to support their own agenda, which may or may not be what the union members actually want. They recently had a strike in which many of the teachers did not approve; the issue was of course salary increases-- they are already paid much higher than any surrounding school district but hey, they want more money.
It's through this zeal for money that they can break industries; look at the US auto sector. There they had absurd wages, crazy pension plans, and all around unreasonable expectations for being an auto plant worker, and thus they jeopardized many of the manufacturing centers involved. The same thing happened with the steel industry-- again, low education low talent laborers demanding excessive pensions and salaries and look at where the industry is now; it's overseas.
Labor unions had their point and purpose back when labor laws either didn't exist or weren't being enforced. Now is not that time; they serve as nothing more than money making political platforms. If you really want "change" in the workplace, get some more labor laws, not unions.
I'm sorry; I didn't mean to ignore any of your points. I was merely pointing out that "passion" isn't much of a basis for motivation. My argument would be that doctors should be paid more than enough to "make a living" off of it. They go to school (and very difficult school at that) for a great deal of time, and at great personal and financial expense. The only way to justify that hardship to some kid who's staying in and studying, and going broke, while his friends are having a blast enjoying their twenties, is to offer a substantial profit motive.
The same goes for teachers. If we want the best schools, the best students, and ultimately the best future for our society, we should offer substantial profit motives to recruit the very best instructors and administrators. Or we could do what we've always done - which is to offer teachers the opportunity to just scrape by - and get what we've always gotten.
There are companies that were never unionized supplying those benefits, and entire countries where unions never became powerful also supplying those benefits. There are also companies that have gone out of business or closed all their factories (leaving thousands without any jobs or benefits) due to the rising cost of supplying those benefits. Add that to your history reading list.
Unions did succeed in providing benefits to workers. With that success came power. With that power came corruption of their original beneficial nature. With corruption comes the need to tear them down.
Now, instead of a big monopoly coal mining company bullying a bunch of workers, now you have big monopoly teachers (etc.) unions bullying around a bunch of tiny school districts (etc.). These school districts are then forced to pay ever higher salaries even while cranking out stupider students who are less and less equipped to compete in an information economy.
These union monopolies need to be kneecapped to save the U.S. economy.