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!
Keeping it to demands is good.
I'm not sure what you mean by the owner rolling over but in early stages management usually tries to appear friendly and nice so they can delay, hire union busters, and try to convince the workers that they don't need a union. Sometimes organizers interpret this as weakness but it is actually an often-successful social ploy. I've seen unions get decertified with this tactic.
If you do this meeting, high turnout is essential and so is making popular demands that management will balk at. Management is never your audience, they are the enemy. Your fellow workers are your audience: those already committed need energy and those unsure need to become committed. You are in a race to get cards signed.
If you don't already have cards signed, this would be a good moment to ask for voluntary recognition. If they refuse (99% chance they refuse), you get as many people to sign cards as possible in your immediate follow-up session / as people leave.