this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2025
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My store is dropping cards very, very soon. Wish us luck! (hexbear.net)
submitted 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) by FutureUnionEnjoyer@hexbear.net to c/labour@hexbear.net
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We are about to make the news, lol. We'll probably be voting in about a month.

It's been six months of work since this all started, and we've got probably 40% of people on our side. We've lost 10 employees in the last couple months. Some retired, some were fired, some quit, including two people in the OC. So it's been a bit of a rollercoaster.

A terrible manager who helped kick off this whole thing by being awful got fired. The old store manager who helped kick this off by backing up the terrible manager retired. We were hoping it would lead to positive changes, but of course not. The new regime has been continuing to harass an injured employee for who knows why, so fuck 'em. We are filing several complaints with L&I and the NLRB, and a couple of us will probably be making enemies for life with some in upper management (although a few of us have already been pegged as troublemakers and they are clearly trying to make us miserable enough to quit), so I hope we succeed.

We haven't been able to sit and talk to about half the store, so it's not exactly where we wanted to be and is kind of risky, but unless everyone else breaks to the anti-union side we should be good. Thankfully we haven't run into a lot of anti-union brainworms, but a lot of people are scared to talk about it or are treated fine so don't see the problem we are trying to address so have been dismissive. Still lots of us are burnt out with the store in general and are only staying to vote on the union, so we figured we should go for it now, before there's another 5 people gone and more new people to talk to. When we drop cards and we can be way more open when talking to people.

I know it's not a very radical union, and the changes we can expect will likely be positive and necessary but mundane, but the people we've worked with in our local UFCW have been awesome and I appreciate their time and effort. I know its' their job and they get paid for it, but they've been taking a four hour round-trip a couple times a week to help get this done.

Praying to Saint Fidel to grant us his luck.

timmy-pray fidel-si

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[–] Weedian@hexbear.net 11 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Hell yeah, good luck! I recently joined the teamsters

[–] FutureUnionEnjoyer@hexbear.net 6 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Thank you!

How has your experience been with the teamsters so far?

[–] Weedian@hexbear.net 4 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

Good so far. My job has a pension plan and a new contract just got signed giving us better healthcare benefits and raises that backdate a few months with more frequent raises coming. By next year the base pay will be $7/hr higher than it is now.

[–] FutureUnionEnjoyer@hexbear.net 3 points 2 weeks ago

That's great. There is another store similar to our in my state that went with the teamsters and they are having a hell of a time for some reason. I'm not sure if management is just throwing a fit or the teamsters don't have enough experience in those types of stores. We passed on the teamsters because the local police station is unionized through them and we didn't want to be associated with cops.

[–] ratboy@hexbear.net 8 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Good luck comrade! rat-salute-2 I helped organize my workplace; I quit very recently but it sounds like the contract was ratified last week! It was an insane struggle, if you'd like to chat about it hit my DMs and I can share with you/maybe give some advice!

[–] FutureUnionEnjoyer@hexbear.net 3 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

That's awesome! It's crazy how difficult it can be to just do something good for people.

[–] ratboy@hexbear.net 3 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Yeah, it was definitely a learning experience for sure. My union rep was not supportive at all; at the best of times he felt inept, at the worst a total opp. So me and my comrades did literally everything by ourselves which I'm very proud of, but the bosses did everything in their power to crush us. It's shocking what people in power will do to their workers even if they are in the social service sector. Yearlt raises for the ED, but not for thee

[–] FutureUnionEnjoyer@hexbear.net 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Any advice for the speaking to people on the fence before the vote?

[–] ratboy@hexbear.net 4 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

In my case, the morale and distrust in management at my job was so low it wasn't too difficult to get a majority of people to sign cards without a fight. However, there were a few people that took a LOT of conversation.

At my job many of us were very close so with one person in particular, myself and another organizer had many long, painful conversations with them. Sat in my office crying and arguing about it. Eventually that person signed a card but it took a LOT, and we were very comfortable having hard conversations together.

If you have fence sitters that are fence sitting due to fear of retaliation, it could be good to maybe try to have a very robust, public union campaign. That way, management may be less inclined to discipline employees since it could be way easier for you to claim union busting and file unfair labor practices. We did ours secretively and I really wish we didn't, but we got cards signed nonetheless.

If you aren't already, becoming VERY versed in the ins and outs of union cans/cannots can go a long way. We created some myth busting documents and disseminated them to people on top of trying to have in person conversations about those things.

We also had a couple of mixers which were low stakes potlucks where we got to hang out, free from manager surveillance, and also discuss union stuff. For the first one a couple of us did a presentation on why we thought unionizing was a good idea, what we had learned about unions, and I was also able to get a comrade from another agency who was in the middle of organizing their workplace to come and talk about their experience and opinions on unions to the larger group. A couple of people who were lukewarm felt much more encouraged after that!

I highly, HIGHLY recommend reaching out to EWOC Emergency Worker Organizing Committee. You'll get hooked up directly to a volunteer who will help answer questions, connect you to other union comrades, set up meetings with union lawyers and help with the initial organizing strategy. The dude I was connected with was amazing and still contacts me once in a while to ask if I can share my experience with unionizing with other people in the same field who are considering unionizing their workplaces. Cannot recommend enough.

If you'd like I can send you some of the websites I used to deep dive on organizing/bargaining strategy/etc. that I found helpful

[–] FutureUnionEnjoyer@hexbear.net 3 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Thanks, and yeah, I contacted EWOC and they helped a lot, and we have been working with competent organizers in the union we are trying to join. We are pretty well prepped for the next few weeks. We've been inviting people to meetings for the past several months to try and talk to as many people as we could before managment says anything, and have been fairly successful, but we will be opening up to everybody soon when we file cards for an election.

We've been trying to be discreet because a lot of people have been targetted for reasons that look like union busting, so we didn't want to invite reprisals on anyone. When we are public we are hoping to sway enough people to get a majority. I think we are almost at a majority of people who signed cards now, but we want to win with a stronger showing than 51%.

I was just wondering if you ran into any significant brainworms that stood out. Currently some people are treated really well, and some are treated like garbage. So we've run into the occasional "the leapords won't eat MY face" type bullshit. There's always gonna be those types of people so what can you do?

[–] ratboy@hexbear.net 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

sorry for takin forever to get back to you. I think the biggest brainworms were definitely the people who were closest in proximity to power. Folks who were close friends to other antiunion people, bosses, etc. The worst offender that never ended up coming around was best friends with the supervisor. But I think getting ahead of their anti union propaganda with accurate information is absolutely crucial to keep brainworms from spreading. The biggest things were people thinking that the union is an outside entity that controls what you do and would totally change the amount of autonomy we had at our work, as well as union dues. People kept spreading that it would be like 200-300 dollars, and everyone bought into it. But then we had to explain that it would only be around such and such amount. You need to already have, or find, a counter to everything. And I think with the loss of autonomy thing, people assume that every single union works like a plumbers or electricians union when they don't. Those unions have very rigid rules, seniority, etc. If you can impress the amount of flexibility you can have in building up YOUR union, and get people to come and help write up proposals, I think that could be huge. Get everyone as deeply involved as possible. We didn't have much luck with that but we always offered to have people come to our in person meetings, gave constant updates from the table, asked for feedback etc

[–] FutureUnionEnjoyer@hexbear.net 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Thanks! That seems to be how it's lining up. Anyone close to upper management is a hard sell, although a few people are coming to meetings. We've been writing off a lot of people who have management aspirations and don't seem to even have a good idea of what a union is and don't care, and they also seem to think the solution is to get better people as managers.

There is definitely a perception among people we haven't talked to that a union is an outside organization taking over that we are trying to stress is not the case. Thankfully we have a couple pretty good union organizers working with us who have been great at handling this stuff.

We just had our busiest union meeting ever tonight. Even though a few people who attended aren't 100%, we've had good interactions.

Everything is public now, and it's trickling out to local news. Our GM just hired an incredibly expensive out of state law firm, and right now they are trying to exlude team leads and include people from finance and others who work close to the GM. The board agent found that unusual, lol.

Hopefully this will pay off and we'll have a better place to work as a result. I'm hopeful but we also live in hell, so...

[–] ratboy@hexbear.net 2 points 6 days ago (1 children)

That's great that the skeptical people are joining meetings, I think that's super important, especially if they have a chance to ask union reps all the "gotcha" questions they want, because in my experience they just won't respect your responses no matter how informed you are. Keeping them engaged even if it's frustrating is a great thing. If you have talked to the people who have management aspirations, have you tried to frame unionizing as a way to build trust, hold current management accountable if they don't leave, or just a very transparent, clear way to come to an agreement if the managers actually have their employees best interests at heart? I feel like if a manager/business owner really wants to treat their employees well, they have nothing to hide and while the negotiation process is cumbersome, can be a way for everyone to get on the same page. So why hate on it?

I think the fact that you're already getting news coverage is a good sign. Cozy up to any journalists that seem trustworthy, start an instagram page, talk to your union organizers about writing up press releases and when/if it would be strategic and blast them out to as many news sources as you can. Again, talk to your organizers, but I believe it is fair game to make anything public that is factual. They hired that expensive law firm? Research the firm, see if they are notorious for union busting. See if you can find out what their rates are to be put on retainer. Make a post about it. Post about how they are already trying to exclude other employees.

For the record (you may know this), any employee who does NOT have unilateral discretion to discipline, hire or fire employees should be eligible to join a union. So, lets say a team lead has a discussion about performance with an employee, but they have to bring that problem to the manager, and the manager or HR are the ones who decide on discipline for that employee, the site lead is still eligible for unionization because they aren't making the final decision. So off the bat, knowing nothing, it sounds like all of those positions should be able to unionize. And when you win your election (you will!) the NLRB makes you submit all union eligible job titles to them, so management doesn't really have a say over that at all.

I have good feelings about this from what you've told me, so exciting, you got this!

[–] FutureUnionEnjoyer@hexbear.net 2 points 5 days ago

Thank you!

We are almost at an agreement with the list of eligable employees. The union people think were in a good place, but we still have some convincing to do. A lot of people were caught by surprise, including our GM who hasn't made a public comment in a week. Looks like the vote will take place in about three weeks.

[–] Sickos@hexbear.net 5 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Hell yeah comrade! Solidarity!

[–] sloth@hexbear.net 2 points 2 weeks ago

soviet-chad