> We also had a lot of safety issues at that store that were not handled well. I don’t know how to deal with someone overdosing or people verbally abusing us every day.
Why don't companies invest in better managers? It seems like it could help make their stores operate more efficiently and at the same time it would reduce the chances that the employees form a union, which is costly to the business.
If employees unionising is particularly costly to business, could it be because the employees are being exploited?
If paying your lowest tier workers a living wage and good benefits would disrupt the business, could it be that your business relies on suffering to exist?
Businesses typically pay market rate. If this rate creates suffering situations, it's a problem of the market, not particular employer.
If living wage is substantially different from the market rate, employer cannot afford it without going out of business. Employers don't have infinite money, they have checks and balances. Paying employees more would require different pricing model, for example. If your pricing is far enough from what customer is ready to pay, customer is not paying and you end up out of business.
Basically, employer's responsibility is to pay market rate, not living wage. If there's a disconnect, it needs to be addressed on the legislation level, not individual employer level.
I've always assumed it was because of what I perceive to be an overall decline in workplace training. Employees are supposed to come fully trained, so they can hit the ground running. The only training done is the absolute bare minimum required by law, if any is required at all.
Is it possible to calculate the possible return on investment in training? Maybe? It is most certainly possible to calculate the cost of training, and that sum comes right out of profits, so it doesn't happen, given the other is unknown. This is the way of things in corporate America. Profit above all.
Apologies for my cynicism, but I'm finding it harder and harder to exist in the status quo.
It's because in corporate, people managers are promoted from excellent ICs. However, not all good ICs are good people managers.
Software is lucky that we can go Architecure route for promotion instead of a Engineering Manager route. This is not the case for most other professions.
If you are a great manager do you really want to solve the "homeless guy overdosed in the bathroom" problem every week? Especially given that you can't practically do anything about it as the restroom policy flows down from corporate?
It's all responsibility and no authority. You probably don't even have much discretion or visibility when it comes to how employees are rewarded.
Bonus, it pays considerbly less than anything else you can do.
> "Why don't companies invest in better managers?" …
Because the more you invest down at the levels where it really matters, the less you have left to line the pockets of the ultra-rich alphabet soup at the upper levels. Gotta pay for those multi-million dollar "bonus/severance packages" and all that junk somehow right?
It seems to me that this is an open and shut case of violation of federal law.
Where are the AUSAs when you need them? Prosecutorial discretion wielded so plainly means that people very obviously do not have equal protection under the law.
I guess there is probably some struggle because they said she stole something, so they have "reasonable cause" to terminate her. Can't speak to the others fired with her, but I assume they've come up with some other "legitimate" reason. As far as the legal aspect, it seems like she is in the process, and putting out news pieces is probably to help attract attention of higher actors, like the AUSA. I wouldn't say it's a matter of more/less equality, it's a matter of visibility of this single person which she seems to be working on.
> We also had a lot of safety issues at that store that were not handled well. I don’t know how to deal with someone overdosing or people verbally abusing us every day.
I guess I don't understand the ask here. Starbucks should be more authoritarian and discriminatory? Does no one remember the bathroom fiasco? I'm not sure what management is supposed to do other than call the cops more often.
There was a similar article about Medieval Times workers trying to unionize because guests were bad. But I guess I never thought that one of the roles of customer service unions is also unionizing against customers.
I feel like a lot of unions are implicitly anti-customer. The employer has an incentive to better serve the customers in order to get more of their money but the union/employees main incentive is to get a bigger share of the take from their employer.
As a result, she was fired and lost stable housing and health care.
It's cruel that stable housing and health care are tied to employment. Employers have enough power as it is, they don't need to lord the basic needs of health and shelter over us, too.
Housing isn't tied to employment and isn't like health care. Health care not being separated from jobs is a real issue, and I am shocked more businesses don't push to decouple it as well as it doesn't help anyone.
Earning a pay check or other source of income is absolutely has a causitive relation in being able to pay one's bills to the majority of adults if we're going to be pedantic. Certainly not in all cases, but in most cases, much like healthcare (you can get Obamacare without a job)
Off the top of my head, first, quitting a job means losing benefits that are tied to employment. Second, Starbucks is not unique with these issues. Third, the fed is raising rates, in part to try and slow down hiring.
Also, please understand, finding another job means someone else walks into that same bad situation. Some people are OK with that, others see the bad situation and want to take an active role in fixing it. Organizing labor is fighting for a cause larger than yourself. Unions have earned us 40 hour work weeks, an end to child labor and other safety regulations. It's not about finding work for yourself, it's about making work better for all your colleagues.
Right but you would only quit assuming those benefits don't outweigh the duties of the job.
I think quitting can also have the effect of making work better for your colleagues. Starbucks will either have to be continually training new hires(however minimal that might be) or deal with less than ideal employees. That is until they improve benefits to remedy their situation. Which they will assuming it hits their bottom line.
> It's not about finding work for yourself, it's about making work better for all your colleagues.
This one is an interesting point that I have a couple of (unanswerable) questions about. She cared enough to want improvement, did she ask for some of the things she mentioned as perks of unionizing (like the music change)? She mentions that she was in the process (?) of a raise when she was fired, so presumably they saw some value in her (or just wanted to push her out of unionizing). I wonder what sort of options were available for a single store in a large, franchised company.
For some of the "location issues," what sort of things would she have wanted the company to provide? What benefits with unionizing would help with (e.g.) the OD issue? It seems like this store was going to be a non-ideal location with or without a union, perhaps seeking out some sort of "hazard pay" arrangement would have made it worthwhile for the employees.
My real question, I guess, is whether this was something that could have been worked out, as a group, with the employer, rather than unionizing. A company will in almost all cases be hostile towards a move toward unionization, but I wonder if there could have been, or was, any negotiation that would have been satisfactory for both parties.
In an ideal sense, yes. Unions as we know them (including in this case[0]) tend to operate as separate entity / business. There are the employees, the employer, and the union. The three often have little or no overlap, so it just becomes another layer of communication / cost of business. They will likely be able to negotiate the things the employees wanted, but it comes at a non-zero cost to both sides. By contrast, if the organizing group had gone directly to the store management, what would the outcome have been? It's entirely possible it would have worked out the same, and it's possible they did that first - it's not mentioned in the article if their concerns were first voiced to management, or if they went straight to unionizing.
To some people (myself included), forming a union contract is an improvement in itself, even without any immediate changes. If conditions are already good for workers, unions can help keep them good.
Could you expand on why you feel this is the case? If conditions are "good," in my opinion, adding a union would likely add tension between employer / employee and add costs to both sides. I guess if nothing immediately changed, it would likely only add cost to the employees in the form of union dues, I'm not sure if a company typically pays for the pleasure of having a union.
Not always possible. Unions have a great history of improving employee safety and pay. Why shouldn't people try to form unions? Not everything has to be for the benefit of the bottom line of a business. Business owners live in a society and enjoy its benefits as well. A healthy middle class is a good thing, although I'm sure there are certain economic theories that don't favor the wellbeing of the many over the profit hoarding of the elite. I am a moderate capitalist. I don't believe in capitalism at any cost like a lot of HN participants I suppose.
The typical "penalty" to a US business for unlawfully firing a worker for protected union activity is simply being ordered to reinstate the worker. Because there is zero punitive risk, the first step is often to fire the worker(s).
If the government were serious about correcting the massive power imbalance between capital and labor that is currently destroying American society, one of the first steps should be implementing financial penalties for retaliatory termination that are so severe they make the CFO not want to get up and go to work the next morning.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 94.5 ms ] threadWhy don't companies invest in better managers? It seems like it could help make their stores operate more efficiently and at the same time it would reduce the chances that the employees form a union, which is costly to the business.
$$$$
But they should.
If paying your lowest tier workers a living wage and good benefits would disrupt the business, could it be that your business relies on suffering to exist?
Which, honestly, maybe it shouldn't.
If living wage is substantially different from the market rate, employer cannot afford it without going out of business. Employers don't have infinite money, they have checks and balances. Paying employees more would require different pricing model, for example. If your pricing is far enough from what customer is ready to pay, customer is not paying and you end up out of business.
Basically, employer's responsibility is to pay market rate, not living wage. If there's a disconnect, it needs to be addressed on the legislation level, not individual employer level.
a low market rate means that there are a lot of poor schmucks willing to work for scraps.
if a business can not survive without paying a living wage then it should not exist in the first place. no amount of legislation can fix that
Is it possible to calculate the possible return on investment in training? Maybe? It is most certainly possible to calculate the cost of training, and that sum comes right out of profits, so it doesn't happen, given the other is unknown. This is the way of things in corporate America. Profit above all.
Apologies for my cynicism, but I'm finding it harder and harder to exist in the status quo.
Software is lucky that we can go Architecure route for promotion instead of a Engineering Manager route. This is not the case for most other professions.
Which is honestly better than bringing in corporate managers who have no experience anyway.
It's all responsibility and no authority. You probably don't even have much discretion or visibility when it comes to how employees are rewarded.
Bonus, it pays considerbly less than anything else you can do.
Because the more you invest down at the levels where it really matters, the less you have left to line the pockets of the ultra-rich alphabet soup at the upper levels. Gotta pay for those multi-million dollar "bonus/severance packages" and all that junk somehow right?
Where are the AUSAs when you need them? Prosecutorial discretion wielded so plainly means that people very obviously do not have equal protection under the law.
I guess I don't understand the ask here. Starbucks should be more authoritarian and discriminatory? Does no one remember the bathroom fiasco? I'm not sure what management is supposed to do other than call the cops more often.
There was a similar article about Medieval Times workers trying to unionize because guests were bad. But I guess I never thought that one of the roles of customer service unions is also unionizing against customers.
It's cruel that stable housing and health care are tied to employment. Employers have enough power as it is, they don't need to lord the basic needs of health and shelter over us, too.
Or at least, it used to.
Also, please understand, finding another job means someone else walks into that same bad situation. Some people are OK with that, others see the bad situation and want to take an active role in fixing it. Organizing labor is fighting for a cause larger than yourself. Unions have earned us 40 hour work weeks, an end to child labor and other safety regulations. It's not about finding work for yourself, it's about making work better for all your colleagues.
I think quitting can also have the effect of making work better for your colleagues. Starbucks will either have to be continually training new hires(however minimal that might be) or deal with less than ideal employees. That is until they improve benefits to remedy their situation. Which they will assuming it hits their bottom line.
This one is an interesting point that I have a couple of (unanswerable) questions about. She cared enough to want improvement, did she ask for some of the things she mentioned as perks of unionizing (like the music change)? She mentions that she was in the process (?) of a raise when she was fired, so presumably they saw some value in her (or just wanted to push her out of unionizing). I wonder what sort of options were available for a single store in a large, franchised company.
For some of the "location issues," what sort of things would she have wanted the company to provide? What benefits with unionizing would help with (e.g.) the OD issue? It seems like this store was going to be a non-ideal location with or without a union, perhaps seeking out some sort of "hazard pay" arrangement would have made it worthwhile for the employees.
My real question, I guess, is whether this was something that could have been worked out, as a group, with the employer, rather than unionizing. A company will in almost all cases be hostile towards a move toward unionization, but I wonder if there could have been, or was, any negotiation that would have been satisfactory for both parties.
This is exactly what a union is. Employees negotiating with their employers as a group rather than individually.
[0] https://sbworkersunited.org/
If the government were serious about correcting the massive power imbalance between capital and labor that is currently destroying American society, one of the first steps should be implementing financial penalties for retaliatory termination that are so severe they make the CFO not want to get up and go to work the next morning.