Wow, okay. Didn’t think this was going to happen to me but it just did. I work at a grocery store where most locations are unionized in our company except a handful.
We are ones of those handful.
Part of the reason is we live in a college town and have a rotating staff. Turnover is so high because everyone’s leaving to go home and for school or internships pop up that the staff changed practically every few months. I’ve worked at this store since January and there are a TON of new people.
Okay, now onto the actual story. Today our district HR manager came in and were pulling groups of 3 into the conference room to talk to us. No one knew what it was about. I was the second group pulled in.
They had this whole presentation about how unions can do good work and have in the past but aren’t needed in retail. They say that the company already has everything we need and the union wouldn’t do much. They said that we would be giving up a lot of money to the union that we wouldn’t see back. We’re all broke college students and they played on that VERY well.
They kept reiterating how they weren’t “anti-union”. Like “my brothers in a union! I’m not anti-union! I think they do good for his profession [as a teacher] but not for retail!”
They then said that this presentation was voluntary, but all our managers made us go (so how voluntary was it). The entire thing felt very off.
I want to join a union. I want our store to be unionized, but after this presentation I think quite a bit of my co workers are going to change their minds. And that’s the part that scares me.
In one 30 minute non voluntary presentation, I’m expecting so many people to change their minds about unionizing. They hit us where they knew it’d hurt. Talking about money, staffing issues, relationships to different departments. And that’s what scares me.