Picketing at Greenway Market?
jeffl said:
It's in the union's best interest to spin things in their favor. …
The amount of credit you give or don’t give the UFCW is entirely up to you.
DanDietrich said:
i always find it funny when someone claims that union dues offset the benefits gained by a union contract. …
Also, I can be fired only for just cause. My nonunion colleagues don’t have that protection.
DaveSchmidt said:
jeffl said:
It's in the union's best interest to spin things in their favor. …
The amount of credit you give or don’t give the UFCW is entirely up to you.
DanDietrich said:
i always find it funny when someone claims that union dues offset the benefits gained by a union contract. …
Also, I can be fired only for just cause. My nonunion colleagues don’t have that protection.
The difference between union and nonunion depends where you work. In some places, there's not a lot of difference. Depends on the field.
jeffl said:
The difference between union and nonunion depends where you work. In some places, there's not a lot of difference. Depends on the field.
... and the employer.
joan_crystal said:
jeffl said:
The difference between union and nonunion depends where you work. In some places, there's not a lot of difference. Depends on the field.
... and the employer.
that's more to the point.
If people know, as jeffl and Joan say they do, of nonunion employers that come close to the pay and benefits that union workers in the same field enjoy, I’ll just add it’s possible that those union contracts influenced what the nonunion employers felt they had to offer to compete for labor.
Union workers more likely than nonunion workers to have retirement benefits in 2019
October 25, 2019
Ninety-four percent of civilian union workers and 67 percent of nonunion workers had access to retirement benefits through their employer in March 2019. Access means the benefit is available to employees, regardless of whether they chose to participate. Eighty-five percent of union workers and 51 percent of nonunion workers participated in an employer-sponsored retirement benefit plan. The take-up rate—the share of workers with access who participate in the plan—was 90 percent for union workers and 77 percent for nonunion workers.
I don't understand the strategy of the UFCW.
Without further information, the flyers/pickets seem to put the onus on the employer for the absence of a union shop, which might be the case if the employer engaged in union-busting. But has that happened?
Or, is this part of an effort by the UFCW to unionize the workers at Greenway?
When targeting non-union grocers, if the concern is the monetary impact on the unionized stores, Greenway is insignificant compared to Whole Foods and Trader Joe's, which is where probably more than half of Greenway's business would go if it were shut down by a consumer boycott.
No, never Trader Joe’s! They have been involved in actively union busting
Amazon has been involved in union busting both at its product warehouses and at Whole Foods.
There were four picketers this afternoon handing out the same flyer Dave S posted above.
paulsurovell said:
There were four picketers this afternoon handing out the same flyer Dave S posted above.
What was their answer when you asked them about their strategy?
One of the GW employees told me that there are 6 non-management employees at GW. He said, "These are 19-year-olds who don't know what a union is." He couldn't understand the strategy either.
I chatted with the two pickets outside Green Way this morning. As I understood them, the strategy is not to unionize Green Way workers or to close the store. It’s to get Green Way to match the wages and benefits that the UFCW local has fought to lift and that it believes should prevail in the industry in this region. In addition to improving things for Green Way workers, this would help the UFCW: If nonunion supermarkets don’t feel pressure — including from the customers the UFCW is trying to inform and encourage to shop elsewhere — to lift compensation, it makes it harder for the UFCW to hold on to and hopefully add to its gains at union supermarkets when it negotiates a new contract next year.
The two rank-and-file UFCW members I spoke with did not have the numbers to illustrate exactly what the compensation gap is, but they affirmed that there is one.
One of the guys mentioned a previous, sufficient contract that the Green Way market’s owner declined to pick up and could easily reinstate (ETA: the Kings contract, I assume), but I couldn’t confirm that.
If you continue to have questions, go ahead and ask the pickets if you see them and can spare a couple of minutes. They didn’t bite.
paulsurovell said:
When targeting non-union grocers, if the concern is the monetary impact on the unionized stores, Greenway is insignificant compared to Whole Foods and Trader Joe's, which is where probably more than half of Greenway's business would go if it were shut down by a consumer boycott.
It’s possible that Green Way’s compensation is an outlier even when compared with Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s. Or Local 1262 may have decided that a locally owned market could be prodded more effectively than Amazon or Aldi Nord. Feel free to ask an informational picket, if you haven’t already.
i always find it funny when someone claims that union dues offset the benefits gained by a union contract. I pay 2.5% dues. Non union people in my field earn almost the same wages. But I have a pension. They do not. I have an annuity. They do not. I have health insurance. They do not. And most importantly, I have a job steward I can report safety concerns to and they get addressed. So yes, I pay dues.