This vote is part of an organizing wave sweeping the nation as workers increasingly band together to demand higher pay, better benefits and more negotiating leverage with their employers during the pandemic. In New York, the first Amazon warehouse voted to form a union in the spring. Dozens of Starbucks stores across the country have unionized, and labor movements have pushed into outdoor retailer REI and video game maker Raven Software.
Workers in at least two other Apple stores are trying to organize, including at a store in New York and one in Atlanta, which became the first location where workers filed documents with the National Labor Relations Board. But the Communications Workers of America withdrew its request for an election there last month, saying in a statement that Apple’s “repeated violations of the National Labor Relations Act have made a free and fair election impossible.”
At the time, the organizing group sent a message to workers at the store, saying it would reset and “continue this fight.”
Several companies, including Amazon and Apple, have been accused this year of “union busting” or employing tactics to discourage or intimidate workers from joining unions. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)
Apple Store employees in New York said this year that some workers were taken aside by managers and given a speech about the pitfalls of unionization there. In meetings, managers warned that unionization would mean the loss of benefits such as the ability to do stints at Apple’s corporate headquarters.
Apple, which has more than 270 retail locations in the country, referred to a previous comment it’s made about the unionizing efforts.
“We are fortunate to have incredible retail team members and we deeply value everything they bring to Apple,” spokesman Josh Lipton said in a statement before the vote. “We are 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.”
Workers in Towson told The Washington Post last month that they hope forming a union will give them a seat at the table on scheduling, pay, coronavirus safety measures and more. Some said that Apple had been too slow to increase pay, and that the company needed to give individual stores more control over their scheduling systems, rather than having a corporate office control most of it.
“I always had the intuition that I was giving away more value than I am being compensated for, and that’s what covid helped me unpack: how much anxiety I had about that,” Apple employee and union organizer Billy Jarboe told The Post at the time.
