There is a recurring pattern where companies fight any kind of worker representation and unionization as hard as they can, paint vivid doomsday scenarios why it's actually bad for workers - and create the impression that it is futile because the company will never "play along" and just sabotage forever or even close locations etc. And when the organizing succeeds, the company often actually accepts it and lives with it, trying to make the best out of it (rather than keeping on fighting a losing war) and it turns out to not be so horrible after all.
If you are ever involved in organizing - expect this pattern.
maybe this is just a small sample size, but Seattle and Orlando have lost a few local businesses months after the employees unionized.
- Homegrown: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/seattle-sandwich-chain...
- Dandelions: https://www.orlandoweekly.com/food-drink/dandelion-community...
- Starbucks (multiple locations): https://edition.cnn.com/2022/11/22/business/starbucks-closur...
Starbucks is a great example because it seems like they gave up now: https://jacobin.com/2024/02/starbucks-workers-united-master-...
The other two are examples of relatively small businesses that look like they either decided to burn everything to the ground and go out of business rather than accept a union for ideological reason or were failing independently of that.
I can only speak to the Homegrown location in Redmond, but I'm not surprised it's closing down. The location just doesn't make sense to me there at all - if they were half a mile south there's Amazon and Microsoft offices there that would be close enough for workers to grab lunch. If they went east by a mile there's a business park right there. Yes they are close enough to both that they could still get that foot traffic, but people would also pass by 10 other places on the way they'd stop in instead. They also open at 10 so no way to grab breakfast (or lunch) on the way to work, and close at 6 which is too early for folks coming back from work wanting a small dinner.
There's a park right there, and lots of people hanging out after work are grabbing ice cream from a place that's in the same building - that's the kind of establishment that makes sense in the location they are in (the ice cream place is not a sweat shop either that is only able to survive by underpaying workers: as far as I can tell their starting wages are 21/hr, they have 100% employer paid health insurance premiums, paid vacation and sick time, and a ton of other benefits - Homegrown's benefits were worse despite the union). There's 2 other cafes that have sandwiches nearby, and for one they are open starting at 7am so you can actually have breakfast there before work, two, Homegrown charges 15 for a sandwich which gets you a full meal at both those other places. From a quality standpoint the other 2 also feel more like a proper meal than fast food.
If this is the way that they ran all of their locations, then really there is no surprise here, union or not.
Completely shutting down a successful business for ideological reasons is odd. I can't imagine someone building a profitable business for years and then suddenly shutting it down b/c he disagrees with the staff he hired.
If he is unhappy, he can at least sell it.
As far as, "independently failing" I'm also skeptical that staff at a visibly failing business would feel comfortable to unionize.
If the company was not competitive enough to meet the unions suggestions, it was probably not a successful business.
As the parent implies here, typically union standards are incredibly generous. They're not difficult or costly to meet. Often it is painted as though a union is asking for the world and then some, and then you read the print and its... a COL adjustment. Which 90% of businesses do, anyway. Or something of that nature.
I'm being presumptuous here but from what I've seen, its trivial for a company to flourish with a union. Ideologically though, most American companies are opposed just because.
> it was probably not a successful business.
yes, that is exactly the anti-union rhetoric: if you form a union, we can't continue business and you will lose your job.
Restaurants have famously thin margins. If the profit margins are 5%, then a 1% increase in expenses (due to union demands) results in a 20% reduction of profits.
Unions can drastically increase operating costs for a business. When I was at a trade show in las vegas a few years ago, I had to work with a "lighting guy", "setup guy" and a "cleaning guy" to plug in a couple lamps for our display, b/c each role was unionized.
The problem with profit margins is that they're often artificially low in order to fuel business expansion, which may not be necessary.
I actually managed restaurant business. Our labor cost target was 15%, and food cost 30%. Then operating expenses like electricity, water, rent... I'd estimate there's 20% of revenue left over. Was our profit margin then 20%? No, because we were constantly buying new stores and random things we don't need. For example, a 16,000 dollar automated flattop grill that barely works, when we already have a flattop.
I'm often dubious of the "capital" that businesses purchase. Point being, profit margins are not really a good measurement of much. I can burn money and have low profit margins, if I wanted.
It is illegal to close a store for unionizing. It can be devilishly hard to prove that’s the case, but if the workers do, the NLRB has the power to force a store to reopen.
> There is a recurring pattern where companies fight any kind of worker representation and unionization as hard as they can, paint vivid doomsday scenarios why it's actually bad for workers - and create the impression that it is futile because the company will never "play along" and just sabotage forever or even close locations etc.
Ex- used to work at Target. Watching anti-union videos was part of onboarding and quite regularly required at store meetings.
Idk, this is the decade of history in the making every week. And companies have long since stopped hiding under a mask of politeness. I wouldn't trust past trends to determine this decade's fate.
same with third-party App Stores or any other thing like that