“Towson took tons of planning and education. “This isn’t Starbucks, where you have 10 employees and can make the decision to organize quickly,” says Dave DiMaria, a representative for IAMAW. As a point of comparison, the first Starbucks store that unionized had 19 yes votes and 8 no’s. The vote was 65-33 in favor of the union. The dynamic is particularly important at Apple, where the company has near limitless sums to spend on union busting and the culture of secrecy filters down to the frontlines, making workers less likely to share their support for a union on social media.Īpple employees in Towson, Maryland, who unionized in June, were organizing for more than a year before they announced. “If you talk to people at Starbucks, Trader Joe’s, Apple, or REI, not only will they say that they’ve heard of Starbucks and Amazon union campaigns, but they’ll often say that they’ve been inspired by them.” “Media attention is critically important - it’s part of the dynamic through which these campaigns spread,” says John Logan, director of labor and employment studies at San Francisco State University. But most retail employees can only access Slack from devices inside the stores, making press about organizing crucial for surfacing shared concerns and inspiring workers to take action. During the pandemic, Apple’s corporate employees were able to organize on Slack, finding like-minded people who didn’t want to return to the office and circulating open letters about their concerns. That some Apple workers fear the movement is already dead hints at the importance of media attention and the perception of momentum for nascent organizing campaigns. Organizers at the Communications Workers of America and the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers - two unions helping to organize Apple employees - say more stores are expected to announce unions as soon as next month. “Don’t measure it against the Starbucks Corporation - the Starbucks campaign is the exception.” “That’s actually a lot of organizing activity for six months - most campaigns take several years,” says Kate Bronfenbrenner, director of labor education research at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations. “From my perspective, Apple has appeased people here, but the underlying issues persist.”īut experts say it’s far too early to write off the union campaign. “The temperature for considering a union has gone cold, much to my disappointment,” says a worker in Texas, who asked to be anonymous for fear of retaliation. Finally, it announced a retail pay bump of roughly 10 percent, hoping to satiate workers. Then it released a video from vice president of people and retail Deirdre O’Brien discouraging employees from unionizing. In June, the first Apple Store in the country, in Towson, Maryland, voted to unionize.Īpple’s response was unequivocal: the tech firm hired anti-union lawyers at Littler Mendelson. Two stores filed paperwork with the National Labor Relations Board while dozens more began to organize. Earlier this year, Apple seemed poised to join Starbucks in a nationwide unionizing blitz.

Apple store