I apologize in advance for this long winded story, TLDR at the bottom
I work for a small organic chocolate company operating the main production machine. There are around 50 people working for the entire company in total. With that said, the company distributes a lot of chocolate every month to big stores such as Walmart, Stop & Shop, and Whole Foods, as well as many smaller grocery stores around the US.
The company recently hired a new production manager since the old one left, and he is exactly the kind of manager that only cares about what's good for the business and not the workers. Production goals have been significantly higher since he started here, he loads side tasks onto us in the middle of the day and makes changes to things that throw the whole production line out of sync for hours, he expects everyone to stay as long past the end of their shift as needed to hit the goals and clean everything up (which often can take hours), and he is barely ever around (usually off at hour long “meetings” with the other managers) to do his job. Me and the other 2 guys who operate the same machine as me basically manage ourselves and he just comes by occasionally to bark orders at us.
Yesterday I sat down with him to ask for a raise for myself and on behalf of my 2 teammates on the grounds that we've taken on a massive workload increase since he started as manager, and he basically told me that he'd only be willing to give us raises if we “did a better job” at meeting his demands (apparently we never do a good enough job cleaning the area at the end of the day even though we spend at least an hour cleaning all the machines and scrubbing the floor every single day), and to get ready because the production goals and his expectations of us were about to get even higher.
So basically, he is saying that our workload is going to keep getting bigger and bigger and he's never going to give any of us more money to complete it, and the forced overtime is just going to keep getting longer and longer since the company seems entirely uninterested in hiring more people other than to replace people who quit.
I feel like this is the perfect situation where unionizing would really correct a lot of these issues in favor of the workers, but I don't really know to go about establishing something like that or any of the potential risks involved. Has anyone here ever been involved in unionizing their workplace? If you have any advice or suggestions on this topic I would love any information you have to share.
TDLR: My boss keeps increasing our workload, forcing overtime, and not giving anyone a raise and I want to unionize but don't know how, advice pls