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!
Your issues are classic union issues and can absolutely be addressed in a contract!
A sandwich chain up in Seattle won time-and-a-half for whenever the kitchen gets above 82 degrees https://inthesetimes.com/article/working-people-homegrown-sustainable-sandwiches-strike
Some contracts have requirements that the boss has to get the schedule out two weeks in advance and give full-time hours to people with seniority.
Unions also have bully boss trainings about how to push back on bad bosses
All of your grievances are things you guys can address collectively
Time and a half for hot days is a great idea. We are considering asking for more pay when people call out as well. So the company has budgeted for x amount of people to work that day. Well there are two call outs a day. Why cant we split that money up? I mean, we have to work 20% harder....
alternatively you can try to have them pay 1-2 people (depending on the size of the operation) some amount to be on-call each day and stay in town/sober/not go to the theater who are the designated fill-ins if people call out (or any other reason for unusual workload). this adds some overhead but it makes everything run more smoothly.
They tried making us do the "on call" thing until someone pointed out that they had to pay us to be on call. They didn't like that very much and ended the program after a few days
lmao yeah that's a well-deserved "fuck you, pay me"
Ime having someone being paid to be a substitute (even if it means losing staffing) is better because then management isnt putting pressure on people to not call out.
Another way to address staffing is to write in hour minimums for employees that are higher than you normally get, that way theres just more people around generally.
The time-and-a-half rule is almost never used because once it was in the contract, manager immediately installed amazing air conditioning
Hour minimums are a good idea. There are too many people that take advantage of our less than lax attendance policy and they need to be replaced. The other side of that is just having more bodies. The new company that took us over is bringing in their own HR which is awesome cause the current lady is a racist, mask off toadie for the owner.
HR departments are also more labor law concious and less likely to just fire everyone than random small buisness people, but they're also less likely to be intimidated by threats about ULPs, its a mixed bag