The union wave continues to make inroads at some of the country’s biggest companies.
The New York Times reported:
Apple employees at a store in Oklahoma City have voted to unionize, becoming the second of the company’s roughly 270 U.S. retail stores to do so.
The result, announced by the National Labor Relations Board on Friday night, suggests that an initial victory by a union at a store in Towson, Md., in June was not an isolated development in an organizing campaign that dates back to last year.
According to the labor board, 56 employees voted in favor of the union and 32 voted against. The workers will be represented by the Communications Workers of America, which has members at AT&T Mobility, Verizon and media companies like The New York Times, and has sought to represent tech-industry workers in recent years.
AGGRESSIVE ANTI-UNION CAMPAIGN
Sara Steffens, the union’s secretary-treasurer, said in a statement that workers at the store, known as the Penn Square location, had faced an aggressive anti-union campaign, but she predicted that “Apple retail workers across the country will continue to organize, especially after this momentous victory.”
Apple said in a statement that “we believe the open, direct and collaborative relationship we have with our valued team members is the best way to provide an excellent experience for our customers and for our teams.”
SUPERVISORS’ DECISIONS OFTEN OPAQUE
In interviews, employees at the store said that they received solid benefits, like health care, stock grants and paid family leave, and that their pay had improved over the past several months. The company recently raised the minimum starting wage at its stores to $22 an hour and said it had increased starting wages by 45 percent in the United States since 2018.
But workers complained that supervisors’ decisions about hiring, pay and job assignments were often opaque and said a union would bring greater transparency to their store.
(Reprinted from Labor 411 and the New York Times.)
- Share this story:
-
-
-
-
-
-
-