After years of relentless union busting — costing the company nearly a quarter-billion dollars, in one estimate — Starbucks Workers United has now forced the corporation to negotiate. It may prove the most important organizing breakthrough in decades.
That raises a question I’ve been wondering about for a while: why do we keep hearing about unions for specific companies, and not “all baristas” (or even “all fast food workers,” for that matter)?
Gotta start somewhere. Other baraistas and fast food workers might look at what’s happening and decided to fight to unionize themselves. Just give it time
That’s very country specific and historical. It depends on how it was started hundreds of years ago and what laws were written back then.
Generally, the idea of union agreements is that working terms need to be introduced in agreement rather than forced by law.
The original intention was to not make the government decide wages and working hours, but instead to allow employer and employees to agree without interference from politics.
There are other more politically regulated ways to do it though.
F.i. France, which is known for strong protests, doesn’t actually have a high percentage of unionised workers. However, their laws make it mandatory for all companies to follow the union agreements. While this sounds great, it’s also the reason why they protest angrily every time something is changed, because the unions can’t control what the non-members do. So instead of negotiating, they end up fighting.
Another example of things being different is in Sweden and Finland where they have layered agreements, where any company registering to operate in a given sector is legally obliged to follow the agreement for that sector. The individual union agreements comes on top. Whenever the union agreements in a sector have the same terms, those terms are then risened to the sector agreement, that everyone has to follow. This is a good way to do it. They also introduced this models with experience from other countries first.
It’s extremely difficult to go back and change the way it’s done on this basic level. For a lot of countries it would be a radical constitutional change.
You are the only person I’ve seen ever (and consistently) abbreviate “for instance”