But late last week, they suspended the election. Rhodes and colleagues were expected to be the first Apple store to vote on joining a union this Thursday. The stresses unleashed by those forces also have roiled the tech sector, helping employees emboldened by a tight labor market win support for unions in the video game industry and at an Amazon warehouse on Staten Island.
Unionization has been on the rise at Starbucks, REI and Dollar General as employees feel the squeeze of inflation and tire of pandemic risks. Two decades after redefining retail with sleek architecture and concierge tech support, Apple is being confronted by the industry’s latest trend: organized labor. The exchanges cut to the heart of a contest with implications for some 272 Apple stores across the United States. “Any time someone asked me a question,” she said, “he would come with an opinion about unions that didn’t apply to us at all.”
But as her boss pushed back over dinner at a Sheraton Hotel, she could sense that support beginning to fray. Rhodes’s advocacy helped garner support from 70 percent of the store’s 100-plus workers for a union election. She had championed the union because she thought it could boost hourly pay and increase full-time opportunities for a largely part-time staff. Rhodes, a 26-year-old union organizer, considered the roughly $4 more per hour that Apple paid relative to other stores insufficient.īefore a recent promotion, she supported herself by bouncing from part-time work helping customers with iPhones to a second job delivering Amazon packages to a third shift loading boxes at FedEx.
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It was among a series of arguments he made this month at an off-site meeting ahead of the store’s vote on whether to join the Communications Workers of America union. Seated at a hotel conference table across the street from the Apple store where she worked in Atlanta, she listened as her boss suggested to a dozen colleagues that they should be grateful to be paid more than other retail employees. ATLANTA - Sydney Rhodes’s frustration was rising.
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