Apple Store Employee Attempts To Form Union

An anonymous reader writes "Cory Moll, a part-time employee at an Apple store in San Francisco, is attempting unionize Apple store employees. The Apple Retail Workers Union is an attempt to fight for better wages and benefits and to address what he says are unfair practices in the company's glass-and-steel retail showrooms. 'The core issues are definitely involve compensation, pay, benefits,' said Mr. Moll, who has received little public support from employees so far, though he said he has emails expressing support. An Apple representative confirmed Mr. Moll is an employee, but declined to comment on the union effort."

Re:Part timers?

[telekon]

Actually, under Federal labor law, you can't be fired for advocating unionization. If you live in an at-will state, you can be terminated arbitrarily, but then a) you're eligible for unemployment, and b) if you WERE agitating for a union, and fired "without cause", you can drag your former employer in front of the NLRB for a lengthy and costly arbitration process.

Re:Wow.

[DurendalMac]

Ah, gotta love the massive leap to conclusions and people kneejerking this shit. Retail employees are not highly skilled labor. They are not worth tons of money. There is a large pool of potential employees. You cannot expect awesome wages and awesome benefits in that situation, period. You can call it disdain. I call it fucking reality. You want to get paid a lot? Work a job where you're worth a lot to the employer. You can cry all you want about the big bad men at the top, but that's how it is. Supply and demand applies to labor. That's how it is. Furthermore, when these people are making better wages and getting better benefits than most in similar jobs, you can hardly say that they're getting pissed on. But go ahead, keep assigning your own meaning to what I write if that helps you continue your idiotic ranting.

Re:Unionize this

[tomhudson]

When that happens, you download an .stl file and print whatever object it is you wanted.

And if they put DRM into it so you can't just "print up whatever you want"?

We should all start our own lists of companies to boycott, giving the reasons why [trolltalk.com], rather than being afraid that they might sue us if we dare to name and shame them.

Sunlight - it works on vampires, you know. Shine a bit on the businesses that are screwing us, and maybe they'll shrivel up and die because nobody wants to be seen near them. What have you got to lose except your chains?

Re:Is this worthy of Slashdot?

[jejones]

Employer-subsidized health insurance is a result of having to get arond WWII wage controls (see http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/22/is-employer-based-health-insurance-worth-saving/ [nytimes.com] for info). Unfortunately, it continued after the war, and the result is that people who lose their jobs lose their insurance (that being the majority of the "N milliion uninsured" figure that is bandied about).

Citation needed

[PotatoHead]

Sorry man. You've been swallowing a lot of dogma whole, for a considerable length of time it seems.

Over the last 30 years, the average American has been exposed to more cost and risk than they have increases in buying power per hour worked, and it's escalating.

Health care, in particular, is a huge risk point, with a large cost. Did you know we pay more than any other nation for that? Did you know we pay twice as much per capita as the next most expensive nation, which is France? Our access / per out of pocket dollar, and outcomes are far worse than theirs are.

I lost my home and all I worked for because of our health care policy. Had I lived in a nation that actually does value it's people properly, that would not have happened. And no, I was not the sick one, sadly.

Risk and cost are on the rise, with multi-national companies doing what they do best, which is push cost and risk away from the enterprise. Where does it go? On the US citizen, that's where it goes.

Clearly, you've had little real union involvement. I've worked for myself, in small business with a union, and without, and everything in between.

Secondly, average wages are far down now, if you exclude the very high percentages. For average people, the waves of outsourcing have forced them into jobs that pay far less than their old one did. Happening all over the place, and that too is escalating. New job creation is not generally family wage jobs, meaning we are moving more of our work force to poverty wages, than we are employing them at family wages.

You go ahead though. Ignore the contributions of labor to our past, and also ignore the lessons of other nations like Germany, who actually do target the welfare of Germans with their trade policy, instead of here, where we make sure our big corporations get all they want, leaving scraps for the average laborer to fight over.

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[account_deleted]

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Re:Unionize this

[EdZ]

Heh, no, build it with a couple of paint buckets and some concrete, with a propane burner to heat it. Use that to cast components from moulds created by printing plastic, coating it in ceramic, packing around with sand, then melting out the plastic (you could also print in wax directly, easier to melt out). You now have solid cast parts you can clean up by hand to make your first heavy mill (&lathe, etc). Use your heavy mill to create parts for a stronger and more accurate heavy mill. And so on ad nauseum.
Current limitations on this are the electronics (only a few people have made silicon chips at home), and the accuracy of your groundbar and screw drives are mostly dependant on the accuracy of the bar and screws already in your mill.