Yahoo Finance’s Dan Howley details how the recent success of the Amazon union vote in New York may influence workers in other tech companies and known managerial pushbacks of wanting to unionize.
Video Transcript
– Well, as we heard that the Amazon obviously the top place that teens like to shop. But we did see President Biden issuing his support for the Union effort at Amazon. Speaking earlier today at a trade union event, he said the choice to unionize lies with the workers alone, warning Amazon, here we come. Well, Yahoo Finance’s own Dan Howley is here with a look at what this worker activism could mean for Silicon Valley. So what are your thoughts here?
DAN HOWLEY: Yeah, so essentially what’s going on here is we saw this kind of movement at the Staten Island Amazon plant, and while it is one plant so far, there are still other plants that are attempting to unionize. We have one in Bessemer, Alabama that had its second union vote, and though it looks like the vote is in favor of not joining the union, there are still 400 votes that need to be kind of worked out, as far as whether or not they’ll be counted. And those could swing things in favor of people who want to join the union.
But it’s not just Amazon here. We’re seeing other companies in Silicon Valley have kind of a reckoning with these kinds of worker organization movements. And so Google has its own union, though it’s not recognized by the National Labor Relations Board, that’s called Alphabet Worker– Alphabet Labor Workers Union– excuse me– and they are basically unlike the Amazon union working towards things like the ability for employees to disagree and refuse to work on specific projects at Alphabet. We’ve seen that kind of activism before, when it came to Google’s work with the US military.
We’ve also seen some workers, retail workers at Apple, attempting to unionize. In fact two stores have already filed the paperwork with the NLRB to become recognized by the union. And it looks like we’re seeing more stores going forward. And while we haven’t heard a word specifically of workers on Apple’s campus discussing things like unionization, there have been some reports that they aren’t particularly happy with things along the lines of pay discrepancies among different groups, as well as harassment and the hiring of certain managers at the company.
So all is not well across Silicon Valley, as it may have once been because of talk of things like built in barbers, and dry cleaners on campus at some of these companies. So they could start to see a lot more worker activism, and that could lead to unionization down the line.
– You know, it’s interesting. We hear so much about the spread of labor unions around the country. But the truth is they have been shrinking over the last decade, even the last 20 years. But in terms of those companies that we hear so much about, what’s been the pushback?
DAN HOWLEY: Yeah, so there’s been obviously some union busting going on. That happened at Amazon, and continues to happen at Amazon. We’ve heard of it as well at Alphabet where– Google parent Alphabet– where people who were trying to organize or were seeking to organize or even talking about walkouts were kind of kicked off of different systems that they may have been trying to use to organize internally. We’ve heard reports of the workers at Apple’s retail stores, their managers kind of talking negatively about unions as well.
And we’ve seen at Activision Blizzard, where some of the QA testers for a subsidiary were broken up into different individual teams so they wouldn’t be able to form a union after there was some discussion of that. So we’re really starting to see this kind of momentum build. It’s not exactly a sea change yet in Silicon Valley. It’s not as though we’re going to see this massive wave of unionization. But it could really put some fire underneath employees who want this kind of representation, and want their voice to be heard at these massive companies. So that, obviously stands to reason then that those companies will attempt to push back.
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