Why All Tech Company Apple, Google And Starbucks Are Going To Unionizing Now For The First Time

Inside Towson Town Center, Apple Store employees made history. Thousands of Amazon workers in New York have voted to unionize. Starbucks workers’ fight to unionize gaining traction across the country. For decades, union membership has been on the decline. Yet in the last few months, workers have had win after win in a surge of unionization unlike anything this country has seen since the Great Depression.

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A lot of it is concentrated amongst young workers, sometimes college educated young workers, often working in low-paying service sector jobs. So overworked, underpaid, overeducated workers. Unlike decades past, this movement isn’t isolated to arduous manual jobs like auto and factory work. It’s also hitting retail and big tech: frontline workers at some of the country’s biggest progressive companies.

There’s now first-ever unions at some 200 Starbucks, an Apple store, Amazon, Google, REI, Trader Joe’s, Kickstarter, and a gaming division of Microsoft. Those are all places that nobody thought could be organized. Yet as union efforts take hold, these big companies are fighting back hard. The CEOs of all of these big companies are horrified by what happened at Starbucks and they’re thinking this is what we want to avoid at all costs.

What started it all was really social media, getting the idea of unionizing. We talked to workers inside the unions forming at Starbucks and Apple and asked labor experts why, now, organizing is proving fruitful not only at arduous workplaces like Amazon, but in the unlikely realms of retail and big tech.

To understand how this unlikely movement took hold, let’s take a look at what it takes to form a union. When a group of employees decide they want to unionize, the first step is for them to collect their colleagues’ signatures on authorization cards. Once they get at least 30% of workers to sign, employees file a petition for an election with the National Labor Relations Board. If the majority of employees vote for the union in the secret ballot election, it wins, although both sides have a week to file objections to how the election took place. Then it usually takes months or even years for both sides to negotiate in good faith and reach a first contract.

The wave at Starbucks started in December with a store in Buffalo, New York, where workers voted 19 to 8 to join the large established Workers United union. In one example of the benefits a big union can bring, Workers United has created a $1 million fund to support Starbucks workers who lose wages as a result of organizing activities. It has been very tense within our store. A lot of partners still do not feel safe from being terminated.

And that goes for myself. The movement spread fast. Within six weeks, about 20 other stores filed for elections. Eight months later, about 40 elections have failed. But some 200 of Starbucks’ 9,000 U.S. stores have unionized, including this one in Manhattan where we met barista Laura Garza. I am necessary. I have been working here during the pandemic and I am of value. So yes, we should start a union. Garza has been with Starbucks for 22 years and helped organize her New York store, which won its vote the same day as the Amazon Labor Union, the first official union at Amazon in the U.S. ALU, ALU, ALU!

These movements are gaining traction amid what labor experts call a perfect storm: four decades of stagnant wages; a pandemic that’s brought record profits for companies and frustration for workers; lots of jobs, not enough applicants; and a pro-union administration. In May, Garza and organizers from Amazon and elsewhere were invited to the White House to discuss their efforts with Vice President Harris and Secretary of Labor Marty Walsh.

The next day, Secretary Walsh said in particular that Starbucks should just come to the table with its partners and work together to collaborate. Six months after the first Starbucks win, Apple got its first union at one of its 270-plus U.S. stores. Workers at an Apple store in Towson, Maryland, voted 65 to 33 to join the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers in June. Tyra Reeder is one of them. Being part of a tech company this big, it’s very easy to be intimidated and, you know, come off as ungrateful, which is something that we want to make known: that we are not ungrateful.

We’re doing this because we love our jobs. We’re doing this because we see longevity at Apple. Unlike at Starbucks, the union movement at Apple has been slower.

Three other stores have taken steps to unionize, although one in Atlanta withdrew its election petition. It filed unfair labor charges with the NLRB claiming Apple required workers to listen to anti-union messaging. Unfortunately, these union-busting campaigns do have an impact and they can scare people.

And so in Atlanta, the Apple workers decided not to try to go for an election right at this moment. Sara Steffens helps run the Communications Workers of America, a large union that helped organize the Atlanta store and workers at Google. In March, Google Fiber contractors in Kansas City held an NLRB election, becoming the first to officially unionize under what’s known as the Alphabet Workers Union.

Nearly 1,000 other Google workers have also signed cards to join the Alphabet Workers Union in what’s called a minority union, meaning they haven’t officially gone before the NLRB and held a vote. There’s a lot of research that shows that most Americans want unions. They just don’t want to go through this scary union-busting process.

Indeed, more than two-thirds of Americans now say they support unions, the highest approval they’ve seen since 1965. Yet actual participation remains at a multi-decade low, hovering at 10.3% in 2021, which is down from 10.8% in 2020 and way down from 20% in 1983 and nearly 35% at its peak in 1954.

Although it’s too soon to know if the decline will reverse in 2022, the first three quarters of the fiscal year saw a 58% increase in official attempts to unionize, exceeding the total number of election petitions from the year before. In the months that usually pass between when workers file for an election and when they actually vote, big companies can spend millions on campaigns to dampen support for the union. Both Apple and Starbucks have retained Littler Mendelson, the largest employer-side labor law firm in the country.

And that means they have similar talking points, often bringing up the union as a third party hungry for dues. Many people think, well, I don’t want to be paying 100 bucks a month to a union. And that’s why union representation has steadily declined. They use this term third party. You guys don’t want to bring a third party into the store.

But like, hey, we are the third party. In May, a memo was leaked showing Apple’s anti-union talking points instructing store managers to tell workers they could lose benefits and career opportunities if they unionized. Apple declined to comment on the allegations about union busting, instead telling CNBC in a statement, “We are fortunate to have incredible retail team members and we deeply value everything they bring to Apple.

We’re pleased to offer very strong compensation and benefits for full time and part time employees, including health care, tuition reimbursement, new parental leave, paid family leave, annual stock grants, and many other benefits.” In May, Apple raised the starting pay for retail workers from $20 to $22 an hour, a 45% jump since 2018.

Unionized workers are asking for $26 to $28 an hour. I definitely think this was a tactic to kind of say, hey guys, here’s $2, please shut up. You know, that’s kind of what it felt like. Then in May, Apple’s VP of People, Deirdre O’Brien, put out a video to all retail workers discouraging unionizing. We have a relationship that’s based on an open and collaborative and direct engagement, which I feel could fundamentally change if a store is represented by a union under a collective bargaining agreement.

She also visited the Towson store after it filed for a union election. That’s not something that I’ve heard happening at our store ever: somebody of that much stature unannounced, walking through our store after we do something like announce unionizing. So it seemed like it was kind of a union-busting tactic or a scare tactic.

At Starbucks, former CEO Howard Schultz returned to the role in April amidst the union wave. He has a history of opposing unions. Schultz spent early weeks visiting multiple stores for collaborative sessions with baristas. Meanwhile, Workers United has filed more than 250 unfair labor practice charges, claiming Starbucks engaged in surveillance, fired workers and closed one store in Ithaca, New York, in retaliation for voting to unionize.

Starbucks has said it will bargain in good faith and told CNBC in a statement that claims of anti-union activity are categorically false. One federal judge in Arizona also ruled in favor of Starbucks when three pro-union workers claimed they were wrongfully dismissed. It’s very surprising that Starbucks is fighting this because the reason that we all joined Starbucks is because of its image as a progressive company. They attract particular kinds of employees who share those progressive values and often their customers, too, share those progressive values.

So in a sense, Starbucks has hired exactly the type of employee that’s making the union drive so successful and so dynamic. Starbucks is known for providing extensive health care benefits to part-time baristas, including coverage for some expensive treatments like IVF, often not covered by service jobs.

In May, Starbucks announced wage increases and increased training, but only for stores that haven’t unionized. Starbucks issued a press release stating, “The law is clear. Once a store unionizes, no changes to benefits are allowed without good faith collective bargaining.” Google has also been accused of fighting back, with the NLRB finding it “arguably violated” labor law when it fired employees for speaking up.

The Google Fiber contractors also faced anti-union messaging in a letter from the contractor that said, “everyone will be stuck with the union and forced to pay dues.” In a statement, Google told CNBC, “Our employees have protected labor rights that we support and we’ve long had contracts with both union and non-union vendors.

No one is treated differently whether they choose to join a union or not.” If unions weren’t effective for workers, companies wouldn’t fight them so hard. They know that workers will make more money, first and foremost, when they organize and choose to join a union. Workers in unions make on average 16.6% or nearly $200 more per week than non-union workers.

This is significant at a time when inflation is at a four-decade high, with wages stagnant for that same period of time and income inequality on the rise. None of us make a livable wage. There are many partners at my store that have 2 to 3 jobs. But critics say the labor shortage gives power to workers whether or not they have a union. There are so many new jobs out there.

My message is: there are people there who would hire you on a different schedule and probably at a higher rate of pay. Meanwhile, the pandemic brought a big boost for many of these companies. The last quarter of 2021 was Apple’s biggest ever, with record revenue of nearly $124 billion. I don’t think people realize how much money that is. And for the amount of training we do and the amount of help that we provide and services that we provide customers, our current pay is just, it’s not cutting it.

At Apple, in addition to more pay, workers are asking for more time allotted for each customer they’re fixing issues for and better opportunities for career advancement, like moving into corporate jobs. My job is not just being a technical specialist. I’m a marriage counselor. I’m a therapist. I’m a punching bag sometimes. We are the line of defense for Apple.

And even being technically retail, we’re very skilled workers.

We do a lot of training and sometimes you just don’t feel as valued as we should. The high turnover rate of workers moving on to other opportunities, some experts say, is one reason unions don’t always make sense in retail. The people who voted for the union now are probably going to be out in a year or even a few months, and you’ll get this group of workers who haven’t voted for the union who are going to be having the dues taken out of their paychecks.

At Starbucks, the union wants a boost to the current starting salary of $15 an hour, along with more staffing at what they say are understaffed stores and more say over their schedules. They also want improvements to benefits similar to what Apple workers want.

They’re going to be asking for more comprehensive mental health benefits as well, as working during a pandemic has been enormously stressful.

Beyond improvements in their own stores, unionized workers at both Starbucks and Apple are also hoping their wins have ripple effects across industries that until now have seemed immune to organized action.

I hope that we can be a resource and then be motivation for these other stores to unionize. Stand Your Ground. Make your voice heard. Whether they want to listen or not, now they have to.