A union is only as effective as it's ability to inflict financial pain on the company the employees work for. A handful of people at one Apple store has essentially zero ability to strong-arm the company. Meanwhile, the employees will start to wonder why they're having to pay union dues when they aren't getting paid more than they were if they stayed out of the union.
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President Biden Praises Apple Employees in Maryland for Unionizing
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Not sure where I have said I held billionaires in high regard for the simple fact that they’re billionaires. I do hold the notion of individual liberty and private property in high regard and based on the Marxist claptrap, you do not.
LoL anybody remember the flash in pan idiot that preceded angela?
But let’s not forget, store compensation and policies are a management team effort from finance, personnel, legal, loss prevention, merchandising, these constraints are delivered to the sales channel to implement.
Nobody is saying green energy is bad. I'm a huge advocate for green energy, especially solar. I think it's very cool. And nobody is saying anything you just said. Green energy is good and eventually we will get there someday. Someday being decades away. You can't uproot the country's primary source of energy overnight when it's ingrained into every level of life. The way it's being forced upon everyone that can't afford it right now in the first place by rich people who aren't affected by any of this who also refuse to stop flying private jets and gas guzzling cars living very fossil-fueled lives of hypocrisy and not walking the talk ... people like Obama and Bill Gates talking about rising sea levels as they buy 40 million dollar beach front properties ... and so on and so forth. People aren't stupid. People are logical. This can't happen right now in the way that they want. It's not reality. It will happen someday. Just not now. And now we're in a recession and they're still suggesting we buy insanely expensive cars.
No doubt the product was subpar. It tends to get that way when the core of your business becomes union negotiations. Just a little shift in focus. Plus not everyone is working in the same direction. When times got tough, unions would strike. That’s not exactly gonna help the situation or overall health of the company. I remember quotes from people in the local paper saying the union would rather risk the plant going under than to have to pay any healthcare premiums. We’ll, the plant went under not too many years later.
Fully agree with both your comments.
It should be noted there is a logical extension to both of them them tho:
- first paragraph is also how monarchies came into being;
- second paragraph is also what happened to GB midlands auto sector those storied brands rested on laurels (with terrible relations between management and trade unions) until they folded, consolidated, were rescued from the precipice by foreign OEMs (Ford, Honda, BMW, Peugeot, VW, etc.)
Ps always liked your nickname it brings to mind the classic Two Ronnie’s skit!
How is the final product better or even affected by this decision? All the Apple Stores do is sell you stuff not design or manufacture it. You could literally fire everyone at that store and replace them with vending machines and the end result is the same product in your hands.
That's the whole point. It doesn't matter that prices go up if your pay is also going up. What all the corporations like Apple want, is for your pay to stay stagnant, while the prices they charge go up, and the pay packets of the billionaires go up. The Maryland employees said no thanks to that little idea.
Dude, I'm not from USA and fossil fuel is not good in any angle. If you still don't see it now after so many scientists explained why then I guess you will not understand it here either. So sure, keep going. One day you will be surprised
That's great, I will be on the edge of my seat waiting for this beautiful 20-30 year transition to be fully realized.
Pain at the pump now is for the greater good, is the argument.
it went from 'not Biden's fault' to 'he has a vision.'
You're really digging Klaus Schwab's rhetoric I see : you will own nothing and you will be happy!
Ironically, the rest of the western world thinks that the US needs it the most. We all look aghast at the US's horrid working conditions, astoundingly low minimum wages, astounding lack of annual leave, woefully expensive health care system, jaw dropping student debt, and mind blowing lack of care for the downtrodden and unfortunate. It's supposed to be the world's leading economy, but in so many ways it's more like a poor 3rd world country.
We are all like wtf, how do you let yourselves get so completely sh*t on by employers and corporations so badly. We read the comments of these articles about unions, and see the number of people upvoting and downvoting, and our eyes pop at the pure brainwashing that the billionaire owned media has achieved in turning ordinary workers so angrily against the very things that will improve their own lives. People in the US actually vehemently, angrily, vote in favour of policies that enrich the billionaires, and impoverish themselves. They do so with flag waving, nationalistic pride, as if ensuring their own ongoing poverty and virtual slavery is the definition of freedom.
What Unions have done for the American worker:
The Weekend
In 1870, the average workweek for most Americans was 61 hours — almost double what most Americans work now. Yet in the late nineteenth century and the twentieth century, labor unions engaged in massive strikes in order to demand shorter workweeks so that Americans could be home with their loved ones instead of constantly toiling for their employers with no leisure time. By 1937, these labor actions created enough political momentum to pass the Fair Labor Standards Act, which helped create a federal framework for a shorter workweek that included room for leisure time.
End of Child Labor
“Union organizing and child labor reform were often intertwined” in U.S. history, with organization’s like the “National Consumers’ League” and the National Child Labor Committee” working together in the early 20th century to ban child labor. The very first American Federation of Labor (AFL) national convention passed “a resolution calling on states to ban children under 14 from all gainful employment” in 1881, and soon after states across the country adopted similar recommendations, leading up to the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act which regulated child labor on the federal level for the first time.
40 hour work week
“The rise of unions in the 1930′s and 1940′s led to the first great expansion of health care” for all Americans, as labor unions banded workers together to negotiate for health coverage plans from employers. In 1942, “the US set up a National War Labor Board. It had the power to set a cap on all wage increases. But it let employers circumvent the cap by offering “fringe benefits” – notably, health insurance.” By 1950, “half of all companies with fewer than 250 workers and two-thirds of all companies with more than 250 workers offered health insurance of one kind or another.”
8 hour work day
Unemployment Benefits
Workers Compensation Laws
Employer-Based Health Coverage
Family and Medical Leave Act
The Weekend
In 1870, the average workweek for most Americans was 61 hours — almost double what most Americans work now. Yet in the late nineteenth century and the twentieth century, labor unions engaged in massive strikes in order to demand shorter workweeks so that Americans could be home with their loved ones instead of constantly toiling for their employers with no leisure time. By 1937, these labor actions created enough political momentum to pass the Fair Labor Standards Act, which helped create a federal framework for a shorter workweek that included room for leisure time.
End of Child Labor
“Union organizing and child labor reform were often intertwined” in U.S. history, with organization’s like the “National Consumers’ League” and the National Child Labor Committee” working together in the early 20th century to ban child labor. The very first American Federation of Labor (AFL) national convention passed “a resolution calling on states to ban children under 14 from all gainful employment” in 1881, and soon after states across the country adopted similar recommendations, leading up to the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act which regulated child labor on the federal level for the first time.
40 hour work week
“The rise of unions in the 1930′s and 1940′s led to the first great expansion of health care” for all Americans, as labor unions banded workers together to negotiate for health coverage plans from employers. In 1942, “the US set up a National War Labor Board. It had the power to set a cap on all wage increases. But it let employers circumvent the cap by offering “fringe benefits” – notably, health insurance.” By 1950, “half of all companies with fewer than 250 workers and two-thirds of all companies with more than 250 workers offered health insurance of one kind or another.”
8 hour work day
Unemployment Benefits
Workers Compensation Laws
Employer-Based Health Coverage
Family and Medical Leave Act
Ha ha, nice satire. Corporate Apple leading the way indeed.
The focus of the Detroit OEMs was not on unions, in fact when the OEMs started treating the union as a partner, everything including profits soared.
OEM’s were sometimes distracted by petty incompetence at the top of the company.
Anybody remember GM chairman James Roche making a public apology, and paying a sizable settlement, to Ralph Nader after it was revealed GM had spied on Nader and tried to discredit him with a honey trap? All because he wrote a book criticizing safety…
Anybody remember Ford personnel making intrusive visits to family homes to decide if employees were meeting Henry Ford I’s family value standards? Or Ford’s Harry Bennet’s goons beating Walter Reuther bloody (or the drive-by assassination attempts at Reuther’s home?).
These kinds of actions didn’t improve product or quality and cast long shadows over employee relations.
What caused detroit it’s biggest problems was under investment in keeping plant & product fresh and new technology and fighting every regulation that came down the pipe (FMVSS, smog, unleaded, CAFE, airbags, etc. it was always, “we’ll go broke if this becomes mandatory”.)
If Detroit had embraced regulation and used it as a barrier to entry, foreign OEM’s with smaller capital budgets would have been delayed entry.
Instead not doing this, and not keeping up with quality trends and techniques led to quality slippage and hat opened the door for foreign competition.
As for companies like Blackberry, they committed the fatal sin of not developing touch screen first, and then laughing for years at the concept. There is a business maxim that says be the first one to develop that which disrupts your business before someone else does and takes it from you.
Neither Detroit OEMs nor blackberry respected that maxim. Detroit lives on starvation rations after ceding 3/4 of its domestic market and blackberry went bust after losing all of it.
None of this was really due to unionizing as the union doesn’t make product design or strategy decisions.
What? What are you talking about? What socialism? Google these services and look at their pricing. If you don't need car every day you save tons of money. Most cities have it and we use it quite often here in Montreal. Same goes for Vancouver, London etc.
In fact, in Europe you can get by without a car as the infrastructure is very good. In London I prefered not driving as its always a nightmare to find a parking spot + congestion charge etc. makes a trip way more expensive than hoping on a tube and be in the center faster.
Of course, if you need car every day than the cost is different and its probably better to own it but overall in the end, car ownership will be reduced as more and more car services will run and will make it cheaper.
Don't know your situation but maybe evaluate it and see if things like Communauto is not a better option.
In fact, in Europe you can get by without a car as the infrastructure is very good. In London I prefered not driving as its always a nightmare to find a parking spot + congestion charge etc. makes a trip way more expensive than hoping on a tube and be in the center faster.
Of course, if you need car every day than the cost is different and its probably better to own it but overall in the end, car ownership will be reduced as more and more car services will run and will make it cheaper.
Don't know your situation but maybe evaluate it and see if things like Communauto is not a better option.
What always got me was the white collar types who denigrated the unions yet weren’t honest enough with themselves to admit that their pay and benefits improved in lockstep with union wins so as to keep the white collars from organizing.
Instead, they who worked in comfortable surroundings, and didn’t engage in body wrecking repetitive labor tasks, begrudged blue collars for wanting a fairer bargain from employers.
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Only three groups of people make money with unionization in the US:
- Union leadership
- The mob
- The Democrat party
First it starts with creeping ignorance when universal free public primary education is chipped away at for near the last half a century (not to mention never achieving free secondary education), then the masquerading of hard right wing themes as balanced news while degrading relatively center left ideas as radical and gateways to communism and deliberately conflate with center socialist approaches to confuse and stoke fear (LoL Western Europe has been living better and better under democratic socialism for 75y, where’s that communism that the USA conservatives have been warning of?)
It all ends in stupidity and insanity where a segment of society with a group psychosis want billionaire tax breaks (muh trickle down) while their roads and bridges crumble and they pay too much for most things because of weak competition and government capture (just look at medical, ca 2x more per capita than the next closest Switzerland, and worse average outcomes than countries far down the list).
Two stores being unionized means nothing. One measurement will be how many agree to have union dues taken out of their wages or if they do not have a choice, how many of them complain. They will quickly find out the only group who cares about the union is the one receiving the dues.I'm going to laugh my ass off when Apple shuts down the store or refuses to agree to anything they demand, let them go on strike, then replace them.
Apple could just close the store and then hire new employees making note of those who did not vote to unionize.
Apple Stores don't just sell products, they also provide services. Last time I went to an Apple Store, it was because I was having an issue with my MBP. The Genius Bar folks resolved it, which is something you can't get from a vending machine. But you know that.
Glad we’ve cleared up that Left policies are garbage, even when the GOP employs them.
Yeah that "mocking all caps" thing came back faster than I thought it would too. 🤣