So, a few of us have been unhappy for a long time and we have been working toward figuring out what it would take to unionize.
Last Saturday, someone came to the bakery and put flyers under everyone's windshield wiper on their cars. Naturally, some of those cars were management, and more importantly the owner.
Today we had a meeting where they tried to do that "you don't need a union, we can talk if anyone has any issues" thing and a bunch of us laid into the owner about a bunch of things and called him out for trying to stop using organizing.
We have a contact with the local union rep and we are setting up a meeting with them next Friday.
I was wondering if anyone has any insights into what we can expect to happen in the next few weeks. The boss wants to sit down with us troublemakers, and we figure we might as well. It's not going to sway us from our goal, if anything, it will be another chance to slap the boss around again.
Here are some of our issues. I don't know what things fall under the scope of what a union can do for us.
We work long, unpredictable hours in a non-climate controlled baking facility. It's often over 100°f in there.
Our manager uses her weapons grade incompetence to micromanage us into a state of absolute chaos every day, often to the detriment of the product, which we get blamed for and have to remake.
We never know when we are getting a raise, and it's all vibes based numbers anyway. Lower than industry standard.
We recently got into a position where a huge company got majority shareholder status and they want us to double our output.
The facility is unsafe and a lot of our equipment doesn't work, making the job very hard to do.
There is more stuff that I will bring up if I can think of it. I'm writing this after a 13 hour shift of standing in front of the oven. My brain is melted.
Any advice or experiences you want to share would be great!
If you win, that will be a
Conquest of Breadmakers
More seriously though, as a union member here’s my semi-qualified takes on your comrade’s concerns:
Both the stability of hours and the worksite quality are things you could reasonably get out of a contract. Hell, the union’s lawyers may just straight up be like “these are unsafe conditions, you can address these or we can get OSHA involved.”
Unfortunately, getting a manager replaced is not gonna be in scope unless she’s done something criminal or violated EEO laws. At best, maybe some standardizing of practices.
That’s the central point of any union contract: set rules and schedules for pay raises.
Hard to say what effect unionizing would have on this without knowing the specifics of what they’re looking for.
Major thing I would note, management likes putting up counter offers that sound nice, have upfront perks, but if you run the numbers you’ll find that the workers end up getting less over the life of the contract than the original demand. Be prepared to do the math.
Thanks for the input. At the end of the day, I wouldn't mind if the manager stayed in her position, but there need to be standards and practices and follow though on those. A huge problem we have is there are no enforcement mechanisms because we are always short staffed and firing even a shitty worker just makes a little more work for us, and the next person might not be any better.
We aren't necessarily concerned with stopping the company form making more bread. We just need people and equipment. We always get the job done no matter how many people show up or what measures we take with the equipment. It usually turns a 9-10 hour day into a 14-15 hour day because of the bottleneck. They don't care because it gets done and they just assume we can work with nothing at full tilt every day.
The owner that we will be going up against us actually a pretty good guy. I honestly think he's just not aware of a lot of our issues because my manager and her supervisor hide things so they look good. I'd be willing to give it a shot airing our grievances to him, but again, whatever is promised is unenforceable by ourselves
I guess you know better than me, but this seems really suspicious. There are lots of gladhands out there that are really personable (in a more skilled way than just some smiling suburbanite car dealer) and absolute bastards, especially among the owning class. You say there are obvious holes in the concrete floor, has he just never checked in those areas? Would a good person not either do even the most cursory inspections or have an uninterested employee do it for him?
I could be totally wrong, I just wanted to raise the idea.
You're right about that. He has to be aware of the holes. They are constantly "being addressed" with half ass fixes that last a day. Another problem is we are so busy and there is no space that the new concrete patches get run over by racks hours after being poured. We can either do the job or fix the concrete as it stands. They won't even shut down for a couple of days just to fix it
I disagree. In a situation where "a huge company got majority shareholder status" they will have zero loyalty to some low level manager. If the organizing focuses on her, they will drop her like a moldy pickle. Or if they want to be nice, move/promote her elsewhere. But honestly I think she'll just get canned.
This is something I think we could get done extracurricularly. There have been people coming in to check out the new asset from the parent company and I feel like they might just see it. It's pretty obvious and she's been extra incompetent lately. We are losing a lot of bread and you can tell we are under staffed. Also, there are obvious holes on the concrete floor
It’s entirely possible that if the new ownership gets wind of how bad she is, they’ll fire her. But it’s unlikely that they would formally give the union a veto over management picks in the contract.
Management rights are usually ceded to the company by unions. There's absolutely no reason they have to though. A contract could include that managers have to be approved by a bargaining unit. Approving the contract could be conditioned on the termination of a manager. Basically nothing is outside the scope of bargaining.