Do you seriously believe people with little to no skills and education should be paid whatever they think they deserve?
Not necessarily. It could also mean that the person wasn’t interested enough to find out what the union was doing. If the union was why the company offered a 401k AND the union is why the company was forced to have those silly meetings to tell everyone how
What risk is the employee taking, exactly? If the company doesn’t make money, the business owner makes no money. But guess what? He still has to pay his employees that week.
On one hand the union would get more power, one the other hand, union employees would be subject to collective bargaining agreements, which may not work out well in the long run. Incentive pay out the door.
Perhaps a more family-friendly approach...
No offense, but I disagree. I believe how companies treat their workers is directly related to how valuable they think executives are to the company. In 2000 you could make six figures in retail with a high school diploma. But as 2010 approached that number shrank. Then we had a weird culture shift where retailers wanted a BA/BS degree to do retail jobs. But as they found those workers they simultaneously wanted to pay them less and less.
Yes we all know there's benefits to unions, but let's not ignore how some have become legit mobsters. Like the teachers union where teachers who have committed crimes (sometimes on students) can't be fired. They're removed from the classroom, but are still paid to spend working hours in these rooms with other "sequestered teachers". Not to mention to crap they pulled during covid when kids are the least affected.
I think an employee deserves a wage where they don’t have to rely on government support to get by. Do you like subsidizing Walmart’s crap pay with your tax dollars? I don’t. Every single company out there paying wages so low that their employees require government assistance are effectively stealing money from tax payers to pay their employees. A Walmart store only needs one store manger and is probably the only person in the store making 6 figures. Most of the rest of the 300+ employees are going to be low level cashiers, stockers, and sales associates. As with any business, you need far more indians than you do chiefs. Even if a Walmart store is full of quality workers, there are only so many decent paying positions to fill. Even department managers at Walmart only make around $15/hour. A typical Walmart store has likely only between half a dozen to a dozen positions where the pay is not crap to crappier.
Nobody said there weren’t bad unions. No different than how there are terrible companies to work for. And what crap was pulled?
Right, two of the big three going under had nothing to do with the US economy collapsing in 2008. It was all the unions. ?
And news today says just that: Apple issues sweeping raises. Nailed it. 😉
Sorry, Charlie.
Every union is different. Some are good some are bad. The latter is not an indictment of the former. If I wasn’t already in a good paying job, I would much rather take my chances with a union than not.
Cool, you have an anecdote. What’s your point? Your example is simply that of a poorly run union and nothing more. Why would people unionize solely to protect the most worthless and lazy among them? That just means they have to pick up their coworkers slack. People unionize because they want fair wages and to not be fired on a whim. There are far more examples of large profitable companies paying their non-unionized workforce garbage wages than there are of unions doing nothing beneficial for their members. If members really don’t like their union they can disband it.
As a cashier? As someone who stocks the shelves? (Because those are most of the people that are working retail.) Six figures… at least $100,000… ? I know someone making six figures in retail today, but she’s in charge of the sales floor transitions. Going from store to store and leading crews that do the work. BUT I’m intrigued and can use a search engine, so I plan to educate myself!
I wouldn’t say that the vast majority of retail employees have ever been “happy”. Satisfied that they have and can keep a job in order to pay some bills, yeah, but happy seems too strong of a word. The fact that retail employees are STILL unhappy isn’t really a surprise to me.
My questions were retorical. No, they don't.
I can't speak for cashiers but I was a bagger. The average tip for taking bags to a car was $5, and it took less than 5 minutes to bag and carry them. Not as good as waiting, cause that brought it $300 to $700 a shift.
I agree that the real money was in retail sales. If you are paid a commission you will do very well, and SPIFFs added a bonus to that. I used to make over $300 just upselling socks when I sold shoes. When I worked at Radioshack after high school I made just shy of $8k a month. Anyone who sold phones before 2010 knows that $100k was reachable, but after that, it got harder, not because there were fewer customers (there were more) but because the pay was reduced significantly.
Again I disagree. I was very happy when I worked in retail, and most people I met in retail were happy. There was a time when if you had an industry you liked, you could find pleasure and pride in being at work. That directly translated to being happy.
If your frame of reference is German works councils (Betriebsräten), then I get why you have a hard time understanding this. I've worked as a manager at union and non-union shops in the USA and Germany, and the difference between the two countries is night and day. German works councils are staffed by actual adults who negotiate hard on behalf of the employees they represent, but who also care deeply about the long-term health of the company and see themselves as partners to management. German managers tend to see it that way, too. The USA unions I worked with were complete clown shows. A local union official (petrochemical industry) once told me that he could not care less whether the company swam or sank; he only cared about his workers. What a short-sighted imbecile, and his views were far from atypical.