Beyond Unions?
posted by Krayon Scribbel on July 15, 2002
Nope.
Comments
so which one of you posted as Overlord?
I think the first thing the workers should demand is the right to sleep wtih each other's spouses - just like the executive team.
(see, i told you guys he would fit right in.)
who's the madison stl? my guess is that his/her head is gonna roll. and i wouldn't be surprised at all if they closed the store to head this off.
As far as I know, it's still Josie Bartow. I sure as hell hope I'm wrong, she's one of the good ones...
My guess is, they'll agree to everything, wait for the fury to die down, and close for reasons of "economic decline". Feel the love, Madison.
Whatever happened to Christopher and Susannah Frischman-Phillips-Phillips-Frischman? Weren't they at Madison for a while?
Gotta say that I am terribly curious about this whole situation. My knee-jerk reaction when I heard this yesterday was -"cool!" But I wonder if that is really the situation. I'm glad to see Mackey sweat, and I'm glad to hear that the Madison folks were able to pull it off, but I have no first hand experience with Unions, and wonder if they are really all that great (in operation, not theory.)
There is a real likelyhood of this happening at my store, and I want to have a well thought opinion when it comes around. (specially since I stand on the management side of things.)
Does anybody have opinions one way or the other about Unions? Anybody have an idea as to why one would be good/bad for WFM? DaveM, what was your experience like?
everything you need to know about unions can be found out by watching this.
Understand that I think unions are a good thing in principle. It would be nice to think that there's no need for them, but I don't believe that. There are still plenty of people who would happily fuck over and abuse their employees to make a few bucks. At the same time, I'm very leery of many unions and I resent working in a closed shop, where I don't have a choice about joining the union. (Yes, I did take the job and the responsibility for that resentment.)
Here's my experience with the two-bit union of which I'm a member. The Anchorage Council of Education is a small union (300-400 people) that is comprised of everything from custodians to security guards to instructional support staff to information technology staff. This is one of the biggest problems we have. Our pay scale goes from $20k to $80k and across dozens of professional fields.
The IT staff in the Anchorage School District are paid pretty low wages, by industry and geographical standards. We all knew that when we were hired, and we all took our jobs anyway, for various reasons. But our wages have been falling ever further behind the industry standard every year, making it harder and harder to justify the low wages with things like lots of time off and a relaxed work atmosphere. To compound the problem, most of us have job titles (required by the union) that are out of synch with the industry. Our job titles harken back to the days of mainframes and structured programming, and have very little to do with modern programming practices. For example, my title is "Programmer Analyst". According to my job description I should know Fortran.
So for the last couple of years, we've been approaching the problem from a few different angles. Every step of the way, we've been blocked not only by management, but by our own union.
We tried to get us all bumped up a couple of notches on the payscale, based on the actual work that we do and the current market value for that work, ignoring the job title issue. The school board agreed, recognizing the value that we bring to the district. The superintendent agreed. Human Resources agreed, in principle. The union said "no", insisting that we (the IT staff) could not get the raises that we wanted unless everyone in the union got equivalent raises. Nobody in management was going to agree to that.
We then tried create new job titles at higher positions on the existing payscale, thinking this might make everyone happy. The union said "no". Their stance was that we might just be creating positions out of thin air just to get raises, that those changes in job title were not warranted. I won't even try to explain management's bizarre, logically circular reasoning for their refusal of this proposal.
Along the way we've investigated what it would take to pull out of the union altogether and have ourselves classified as "exempt". Apparently an act of the state congress. I'm not kidding. In all of Alaska's statehood, we could only find one group that successfully managed to get out of a union, and they were doing it to join another union.
I currently pay about $650 per year to be in ACE, and I'm not convinced that I'm getting my money's worth. I know a few people who are classified as "exempt", and they have dandy insurance (no better or worse than ours), they have just as much time off, and they can negotiate their own salaries.
There's a guy that works in my department named George who carries the job title "Senior Systems Analyst". He's worked for the district for decades. He should know more about the legacy systems than anyone here. He makes over $80,000 a year. I have two interns working for me that can program circles around him, and all he can do is bitch about how he never gets any training. None of us get any training. (I've been to exactly one week of training since I came here, and it was for Unix, which I don't use on a daily basis, but there was an empty seat that had already been paid for.) We all learn from books and the web. This guy has actually told me not to work so hard, it sets the bar too high and management will come to expect that level of committment. We can't fire him because of the union contract. He used to be the union president.
Of course, not everyone in ACE is like George. There are plenty of hard-working people who like what they do and do it happily despite their low pay. But this kind of stuff makes it really, really hard to show up to union meetings and feel good about it.
All that said, I do feel that my union's biggest problem are its small size and wildly diverse collection of professions. I could easily see joining a union that understood what I do for a living and was specifically working to improve my industry.
Wow. Thanks for your well thought out anwer, and the time you took to reply.
"In a pathetic attempt at asking for forgiveness and a second chance, John Mackey, President and CEO of Whole Foods Market Inc. secured a victory Wednesday night for the Madison Whole Foods employees who want to form a union at their store.
In a marathon three hour meeting, Mackey warned that voting for a union would, in effect, turn the Madison store and the employees over to "the dark side." No joke, he actually used an explicit analogy to "the dark side" - "anger, fear, resentment, mistrust," will ruin the unique culture of whole foods, according to him." more
i think we know what john is TRYING to say
check out the angle of the photo. that was taken by an employee in the audience. very nice of them to pass it to the press.
oh. and apparently Josie isn't there anymore. Mackey swapped out the entire Store Leadership Team six weeks ago when this was brewing.
I hope she has the $$$ saved and good sense to tell WFM to kiss her ass. I've seen more than one "management restructure" in my WFM life; it's much like a hooker working for a different john (no pun intended).
Some interesting comments from WFM'ers in the NE region:
https://madison.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=6450&group=webcast
Comments for this entry have been closed
That's a hell of a note! I have to say that while I have mixed feelings about unions (especially the one I was forced to join to get my job here), I'm glad to see it succeed. It'll be interesting to see what happens around the company.
Posted by: mccreath at July 15, 2002 03:17 PM