At this size, shuttering a store in retaliation for unionizing should result in the corporate death penalty. If Apple doesn't want to deal with unions, then they can feel free to make the point moot, by giving their employees an ownership stake in the company.
> At this size
Size has nothing to do with it. Just because a company is large doesn't mean it needs to start making poor business decisions.
> corporate death penalty
That's a bit extreme. If you want to be seen as objective, this kind of inflammatory rhetoric will only work against you.
> Just because a company is large doesn't mean it needs to start making poor business decisions
To be clear this is also inflammatory rhetoric disguised as what some would have you think is ‘common sense’.
Is it not possible that employees forming a union could be bad for business?
It certainly is, and I would imagine letting the children chained up in your sweatshop go would be bad for business too. On the bright side, their eyes won't be adjusted to the sunlight, so they won't get very far.
Yes, you can frame this as "bad for business". Contrary to what all the armchair economists online will say, you should never just do what's good for business. If we did we would be seeing crimes against humanity. And we do, just not here.
Its always a balancing act. Often what's good for business isn't good, and what's bad for business isn't bad. You need more robust reasoning than that. Because if that's all you're relying on to form your opinions, you have no substance.
When Apple chains children up in sweatshops, please let me know.
My point is that "bad for business" on its own doesn't really mean much. Often people can't see the holes in their arguments or beliefs. But when you enlarge the view and take it to its logical conclusion, the holes become obvious.
And my point is that a store deciding to unionize could negatively impact the business. Calling for the death of the company, and inciting images of child slaves in chains is not an argument against that. It's an appeal to emotion.
It's not an appeal to emotions, it's a logical argument.
You're saying "well okay it could negatively impact business".
I'm replying "that doesn't mean anything, and sometimes negatively impacting business is very good".
It's not enough to just say something. You need to explain WHY. So what? Who cares? If you don't answer that, I'm sorry, you don't have an argument and anyone wise would choose to not listen to you.
It's bad for business. Okay let's assume that's true. So what? What's the big idea? What's the cost versus the benefit?
> sometimes negatively impacting business is very good
This is an oxymoron.
But they are willing to close stores for the specific purpose of no longer being in the jurisdiction of a specific court. So this is not a stretch at all.
https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2019/2/22/18236424/a...
So if a company is about to close an underperforming store and the employees get wind of it, all they have to do is sign union cards and the company has to keep the store open forever?
No? That's not what the person you're replying to said, nor what they meant, nor is it a logical implication of what they said.
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> But that's just pointless because there are a thousand other reasons they might want to close the store and there is no way to prove it
That's the exact point where your argument breaks down. It is possible, sometimes, to prove that a company closed a store because of a union. See the recent Starbucks trial. In the end, they were only saved by the SCOTUS, who isn't exactly uncontroversial at the moment.
> It is possible, sometimes, to prove that a company closed a store because of a union.
The "sometimes" is doing all the work there. Sure, if the company writes an email that says "we decided to close this store because the employees unionized and we're trying to deter that in other stores" then you could prove it, but then they could just... not do that, and close the store anyway.
Maybe read up on recent union busting cases. Starbucks, Tesla, Walmart, Amazon... It's a lot more nuanced than that.
And note I'm replying to someone claiming it's impossible to charge companies with union busting at all.
> It's a lot more nuanced than that.
Which is kind of the other problem. You end up trying to mind read the intent behind some possible innuendo with an ambiguous meaning, because the outcome isn't determined by what they do, it's determined by what they write down.
> And note I'm replying to someone claiming it's impossible to charge companies with union busting at all.
If it's impossible to charge companies that have better lawyers but still use the same tactics, you still have the same problem with the law, because then those companies will have a competitive advantage and the others would either learn to do the same or lose their market position.
I believe in labor disputes the standard is a preponderance of guilt. You don't need proof at all, just the inclination they could have had bad motives.
Luckily, executives have a habit of occasionally putting their blatantly illegal deals in writing (e.g. the recruiting cartel, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...).
Beyond a certain size, it becomes hard to pretend you're doing it for one reason while actually doing it for another. Especially if it becomes a pattern.
> Luckily, executives have a habit of occasionally putting their blatantly illegal deals in writing
This is the weirdest way to have laws though. It strongly implies that the person putting it in writing didn't know it was illegal, because otherwise they wouldn't have put it in writing. But then you're never enforcing the law against people knowingly breaking the law, you can only ever enforce it against people who didn't realize it was illegal.
That seems like a bad design. In particular, it rewards a corporation the more evil it is, because the ones who know they're breaking the law are the ones who get away with it.
> Beyond a certain size, it becomes hard to pretend you're doing it for one reason while actually doing it for another. Especially if it becomes a pattern.
The pattern thing also doesn't really work.
Suppose some of your stores are in high crime areas and keep getting knocked off. The employees in those stores don't like the risk and form a union so they can demand bulletproof glass and hazard pay. The company looks at those stores and the insurance cost is getting out of hand and shrinkage is high and the stores just aren't profitable. So they close the stores.
Now you have a strong correlation between the stores that form a union and the stores that close, but it's because union formation and store closures are both caused by high crime, not because the company is purposely closing the stores that form a union.
> It strongly implies that the person putting it in writing didn't know it was illegal, because otherwise they wouldn't have put it in writing.
Just because someone created evidence that didn’t have to exist doesn’t mean they didn’t know their actions were illegal.
On Chris Hansen’s latest predator sting show the suspects frequently acknowledge, in writing, the age of the decoy and the sex acts they want to perform. They also take steps to create alibis, suss out if it is a sting, or otherwise avoid getting caught, which indicates clearly that they know what they are doing is illegal.
The sting show is obviously setting up a situation in which the suspects who know they're breaking the law think the evidence is only in the hands of their co-conspirators who have the same incentive to conceal it as they do.
Major corporations know that their emails etc. are discoverable regardless of whether the recipient is trusted. It's also not even necessary to disclose the true intention to anyone else in the company, unlike a situation where they're trying to enter into an intrinsically illegal transaction with a third party. The manager can just come up with a rationale for closing the store all on her own and then tell everyone else that it's happening.
We don't have card check unionization in the United States.
Forming a union is much more difficult than you propose.
It's just an expression. The point is, what happens after a union is formed?
It's not relevant. Unionization takes months at least but usually years. The workers at this store in Maryland had their first vote in 2022. The campaign started in 2021. The NLRB moves like molasses and heavily favors employers.
If workers had a notion that their store was underperforming, there's no way anyone could unionize fast enough to prevent it from closing. So it's not a realistic hypothetical. In fact, the company would probably close an underperforming store sooner if there was a unionization drive and would have plenty of time to do so before certification.
> In fact, the company would probably close an underperforming store sooner if there was a unionization drive and would have plenty of time to do so before certification.
Presumably closing the store in response to an attempt at unionization would be the same thing?
Legally, closing an underperforming location in response to a unionization attempt and after a successful unionization are completely different situations.
After unionization, what is required when closing a store is written into the negotiated contract.
The contract isn't really the issue. It's what the law should be.
The parties could put nearly anything they want into the contract. But if the company intends to close the store then they'd just not accept anything in the contract that makes it difficult to close the store, and if the workers go on strike then they were going to close to store anyway.
Plenty of unionized companies close locations. What happens is usually covered by the union contract.
Unionizing a workplace is insanely difficult. It requires tons of bureaucratic work (to meet the standards set by state labor agencies) while also trying to get a large number of people who probably don’t know each other well, if at all, to all agree on a few things, all while risking their employment. This work often takes years. And all of this organizing work is unpaid labor on top of one’s regular job (which is already likely underpaid/overworked, hence the organizing effort). There is no “all they have to do is sign union cards.” The scenario you pose is practically impossible.
utterly absurd