Yeah, they definitely can’t afford to pay retail employees a bit more with their 43.7% margin 🤣.
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Apple Agrees to Improve Working Conditions for Retail Employees Amid Unionization Efforts
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This is not remotely true. I'm in a union and without it we wouldn't get annual cost of living raises (or any of the other raises), and we wouldn't have health, dental, and vision insurance.
I feel like you've never actually been in a union and are parroting nothing more than political talking points from anti-union parties. Unions literally built the middle class in this country before they started being stripped away.
Everyone wants a percentage of those profits. everyone wants to rob someone who has achieved success. what will Apple do? if costs increase, they will shut down retail sales in physical locations. shopping centers are already on the verge of collapse. product prices will also increase. you have to learn that you are the ones paying the shop workers.
True it’s federal labor law that makes the union contract trump a states right to work law.
But the point was a company can’t fire an employee Willy nilly in an unionized shop even if the state is a right to work state since the contract dictates termination process.
This is for the US, so I can’t speak for Australia or other countries
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Yep people would be outraged if they had to pay an extra 10 cents for their pizza in order for employees to get healthcare!
oh wait…. The opposite reaction occurred…..
But yeah I have little sympathy for corporate greed.
If I were an Apple employee, I'd want the stores to be bigger, or more stores.
There's way too many people per square foot. Even as a customer I find it really stressful to go to an Apple Store two times a year. I'm sure some employees end up developing anxiety issues on long term.
There's way too many people per square foot. Even as a customer I find it really stressful to go to an Apple Store two times a year. I'm sure some employees end up developing anxiety issues on long term.
Not in my experience. A large Union supplied bus transportation and payments to many union members to support a candidate for U.S. Senate. They held signs and shouted support. Some union members were not from the state of the Senate candidate. Some union members admitted to me they were going to vote for the other non-union supported candidate.
That doesn’t disprove my post…. Did the money for the buses come from members dues or donations?
One can’t( or at least shouldn’t) be compelled to participate in a union political event. If the union did, that is wrong and speaks to corruption within that union.
Unions are not perfect and be corrupt just as much as big business. It’s up to the members to make sure corruption is fixed and hold their elected union officials accountable.
The union only cares about getting Apple employees dues in return they get crappy benefits and no representation unions were needed long ago but not needed anymore.
Ditto: If one Apple rep could not answer or fix a problem they would get someone else. There are people/employees that may want to work 6 or even 7 days a week. Treat people the right way, recognize them for going above and beyond their position requirements and try to be NICE. I worked retail PT for 15 yrs and it can be brutal or really good. Unions are NOT the way to go and I hope that Apple starts listening MORE. Unions talk the talk but don't walk the walk based on what I and other co-workers have experienced.
All you anti union commenters - some truth of course but good luck with your working conditions without that threat of a union. The fact that Apple is improving working conditions and pay specifically following the threat of unionization has to suggest to you that maybe unions have a potential for positive impact for employees?
I live in Arizona... with some of the highest job growth in the country. Lots of good paying jobs here. Companies flocking here. Also coincidence that we are a "right to work" state? Unions have no real power here... and they are not needed. Unions are a relic of the early part of the last century when they served an actual purpose for the employees. Now they are just a money fountain for those at the top of the union.
I've witnessed a couple of vociferous encounters with 'customers'. Having some form of security to deal with them in a quick and positive manner i could see being a great idea. It's disruptive and potentially dangerous to deal with outraged and illogical/agitated people. Protecting employees and other occupants of the store at the time would be a great idea.
Not calling for armed guards, because too many malls already have overly munitioned guards standing at their doors. Apple doesn't need people in tactical body armor (yet) but just having people there to deal with outbursts, things get tight when you are told that your MacBook Pro is not covered for what apparently happened to it, costing potentially thousands to replace. People seem to have a short fuse, sadly.
Not calling for armed guards, because too many malls already have overly munitioned guards standing at their doors. Apple doesn't need people in tactical body armor (yet) but just having people there to deal with outbursts, things get tight when you are told that your MacBook Pro is not covered for what apparently happened to it, costing potentially thousands to replace. People seem to have a short fuse, sadly.
Unions are, basically, organizations thatforcefuily withdraw "dues" from workers' checks, where the employee wishes or not and the uses this forced tribute to support lazy "union reps" who make more than any other person in the building.
Parasites, they are.
Parasites, they are.
It’s not JUST about being able to afford it, though. If Apple were a private company (like that company that famously decided to pay all their employees $70,000 a year*), they could pay whomever whatever they wanted. As a publicly traded company there are restrictions on what they’re able to do in this area.
*Granted, Gravity Payments only has somewhere between 100-200 employees.
Some of the stuff my last company did to employees makes me glad we are unionized.
Employee did something all based on current procedures, was non-threat, non-life threatening, etc. But company still did not like what the employee did because they had to answer to the company we contracted with. So they punished the employee for it. Union stepped in and put a stop to the discipline action.
Sorry, I think unions are very much necessary still today.
Because this way they can get away with doing the bare minimum once rather than making ongoing improvements as needed. The workers should definitely still be unionizing, because the threat of a union was the only thing that forced Apple's hand in the first place.
I have had the pure joy and amazement to work several union jobs in my career on this planet.
One, the union was 'owned' by management. They worked with management to 'weed out' people they didn't like. They permitted hazings and some illegal activity to happen, on premises. Quotas were on all 'jobs' yet oddly, quotas were set so low that i was able to break quota by lunch, and would need to be reassigned to another 'job' for the balance of the day. They finally put me on a machine that worked at a set pace, and I still somehow broke quota. I did not survive their ridiculously long probation period, as management wanted me out (because I was too productive?). I found working there so incredibly mind numbing, and people were causing life changing injuries to themselves to get out of working. People were also fired for no apparent reason, which was ballsy. It was very cliquish too. Yikes...
Another union job was at a small regional 'big box' store. I was 'laid off', and someone in the local store decided to call some people back without notifying corporate HR. Hah hah, not funny. 'What are you doing here?' after working nearly all of a week, without pay, until they decided to pay us, and then fire us. (There were three others involved. The union was silent on the whole thing. Management said we alll 'just showed up looking for money')
Another union job I worked at was just stunning. It was at a Big Ten University, and the way that the administration treated this one union (clerical technical) was shameful. They used the gamut of dirty tricks. Denying vacations the day before they were to start, inserting, and removing things from their employee file, assigning people to dead end jobs, punishing employees for taking breaks, faking employee evaluations, and on and on. they tried the first one on me before taking a very expensive (for me) vacation. I was able to shame my boss into 'allowing' me to go on the vacation I had been approved for months prior. The other main union was much more subservient to management, which I was able to transition to, and the change was interesting. The CT was primarily hourly wage, and the other was totally salary. The university usually didn't approve overtime for the later, but expected the CT employees to work overtime for 'credit' on future pay periods, and then would deny them. Yeah, they rode roughshod over the CT members. It was ridiculous. I was contacted by the union after the attempted denial of vacation scam, and they had me go to HR to see what was in my file. There were a couple of things that I didn't know about that a prior department had inserted in my file. So childish. They even forced a strike (prior to my hire) and had people infiltrate the replacement workers to hobble operations to 'prove' that CT workers were sabotaging operations during the strike. Nice. One guy in a department, after I was hired, bragged about being one of those fake replacements. Brilliant... He was a class act, not...
Unions have a place in employment, but unions are a group of people, and not a machine. Some unions, as I explained here, are very productive and help their members/employees, other unions are covertly, and often overtly caustic/malignant and not at all productive for ensuring employee health and welfare. That first union job I had? The company eventually went bankrupt, and disappeared in a massive amount of state labor department investigations for wage theft and intimidation. Most people were shocked, but I felt profoundly sad at the loss of employment and the treatment of so many people. *shrug*
From an article I read a few years ago, at the Tragic Kingdom, the people walking around in those costumes were required to wear company under garments, and work in stifling costumes that were cleaned twice a year. I'm sure they stunk to high heaven. After people started complaining, Disney started firing people. They started making efforts to unionize, and Disney reacted with underhanded efforts to intimidate employees, but then finally gave in and allowed people to wear their own undergarments and actually cleaned the costumes after each use (supposedly). The threat if a union should not have been required to get those common sense changes! Working in 'company underwear' that is not cleaned, and having to work in other employees stench? Seems to be something that would already be in place for employees. Good grief!
There are ZERO restrictions on a public company on how they pay and treat their employees.
Now what I think you meant that a public company has to answer to shareholders and return value for their investment. While that is very much true, this is what is getting us in trouble all the damn time. The short term focus on quarter performance, the stock price, etc. Wall Street expects infinite growth. God forbid Apple makes a $20 billion profit this quarter while they made $21 billion same quarter last year sending the stock price tumbling. Companies need to focus on the long term. Make good products, people buy said products, they profit, stock price will be high, and shareholders are happy. Instead they just march to what they can do to make sure profits continue to increase which leads to stock price increases even if product/customer/employee suffer.
Tesla is the perfect example of this. Stock value of Tesla is through the freaking roof. But this has led to poor customer service, poor quality control, and employee burn out because Tesla needs to show deliveries increasing every quarter. For example, current policy is you have 3 days to take delivery of the vehicle. If you can't, the car is given to someone else. All so they can pad delivery numbers every quarter. Instead of the long term, they are focused on making sure they deliver more cars than the previous quarter cause with the current expectation, if they don't the stock will collapse even if they actually slow down to make sure the factory can output vehicles that are built well, implement/change current customer service policies that will make customers happy, and not put a huge strain on their employees( assembly workers not going fast as possible to assemble the vehicle, the service centers not being overwhelmed with fixing the build issues from the factory, etc). And I say all this despite loving my Model 3. But this whole focus on the stock price leads to abuses.
Just curious if any of these were Right to Work states because corporations do have a lot of control over the union in those cases.
And, on the other side of the equation, imagine someone that needed a job so badly that that’s what they were willing to put up with.
AND the SEC. If the management decided to give every retail employee a starting pay of $70,000, that would be an added $4,550,000,000. Because of the impact that would have on the stock price, the SEC would be looking into it.
I’ve read of publicly traded companies that wanted to “do the right thing”, but there’s currently no incorporation framework that allows them to be public and “do the right thing”. If I remember correctly, they were trying to get a new organization structure “approved”? Now there’s one MORE thing I’ll be searching today LOL!