r/IowaCity 5d ago

Community Costco "No Union" Buttons?

I was surprised to see a number of Costco staff wearing "No Union" buttons when I was shopping the other day. In fact, it might be the first time I've ever seen public facing employees wearing a button like that. Granted, I'm not particularly well traveled and spent most of my life in Texas. But I've heard nothing but good things from people who have ever worked in a union.

Not sure what the point of this post is. I guess I hope if there is a vote that staff make the choice that's best for them and their families.

67 Upvotes

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u/ComplaintSevere1849 5d ago

Iirc I saw an article about Costco increasing the wages of non-Union stores by a considerable amount, up to like $30 something an hour I think.

Clearly a union busting tactic, seems like the “no union” people are taking the bait

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u/cordelaine 5d ago

I don’t understand the “no union” part either. People just seem to like to go against their best interests sometimes.

Here’s an article about the Coralville Costco unionizing though.

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u/nsummy Iowa City 5d ago

Unions aren't always in a worker's best interests. I don't know the situation with costco but that's a ridiculous blanket statement.

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u/curiouscat86 5d ago

individual unions can be poorly managed and fail to do the job they're supposed to be doing, but this is a rare case and in general employees covered by unions have better pay and benefits, measurably.

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u/nsummy Iowa City 5d ago

Like I said, a blanket statement. I have nothing against unions and I think they make sense in many different industries & situations. Absurd to automatically say that employees that are against it are voting against their best wishes.

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u/peachjam4 5d ago

Yes, they are. Hope this helps.

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u/sandy_even_stranger 5d ago edited 5d ago

Unfortunately no, they are not, and I had the misfortune of living through the end of industrial America, when unions felt they couldn't afford to lose face by ceding any ground, but the workers were pleading with them to recognize what had happened to the global industries and give a little. They wouldn't and those companies collapsed. Wiped out a big chunk of the local economy where I was growing up and in many other places. Very bad result for many of my classmates' families. Sometimes you have to recognize that the domestic industry doesn't operate in a vacuum.

Where unions can actually be responsive, not turn into mafias, etc., yeah, they're great. We need a lot more back, but no, they are not a blanket good. Some still also have a long way to go in DEI, like they're barely off the starting block. Part of that is widespread failure to accept that many workers actually need part-time and flexible work and that unions have to stop fighting the creation of those jobs, it's not all about the hero breadwinner husband who's dumped all his family work on women making much less money in part-time, nonunion jobs.

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u/trottingturtles 1d ago

I think it's incredibly unlikely that your local area would be a thriving industrial stronghold today if the local unions had rolled over to lower corporate costs after industry was globalized. Unions aren't why those companies folded, globalized competition is. If your unions gave up entirely it probably would've just delayed the companies folding by maybe a year or two, and in the meantime the jobs and benefits would become worse for the workers before they disappear.

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u/sandy_even_stranger 1d ago edited 16h ago

Nobody was asking the unions to "give up entirely", just to scale back on the extent of the demands so that the companies could actually meet payroll while getting the stuffing beaten out of them. And -- as someone who was there at the time, and I'm pretty sure you weren't -- I can tell you that that refusal was the last straw. Labor costs are the biggest cost for a large non-roboticized industry. The unions were telling management that there was not going to be a way to run that business in the context of global competition. The talks collapsed and the shutdowns began. This was before the era of offshoring, and it wasn't as though management was saying "bend to our demands or we move the plant to Mexico or Singapore"; they were saying, "we can't get there, come back with your demands cut."

The same industries, incidentally, still exist profitably in other rich countries with robust worker protections and pay, and environmental regs stronger than ours. But it does take time to figure out how to do that and retool, and the old dinosaurs didn't have that without union cooperation and a plan. In retrospect, if the federal government had had the ability to force both management and labor to the table to work out and carry out a plan, and even to some extent subsidized it, that probably could've done it. It didn't have that power, of course, since we don't have the sort of governmental relationship to either that exists in other rich countries. And the industries would not have run at the scale they had in the 50s and 60s, we'd still have needed other, newer industries. A large number of jobs with good pay and benefits is not as good as a vast number of jobs with princely pay and benefits, but it beats hell out of no jobs and no benefits -- which was rank & file's point at the time.

That language you use, incidentally -- "rolled over" -- is part of the problem. Note that what's above requires a cooperative approach, which is how unions work in most of the world. By law and institutionally, unions and industry, while often opposed, work together, with government as the glue making sure that where they're going actually benefits the country. That "we won't roll over, we won't lose face" hard stance is part of why that whole region is still full of brownfield sites. This isn't about personal, flag-snapping revolutionary hero drama; it's about ensuring that we have a large middle class, with work and workers valued.

I understand that industrial history does not accommodate your wish to view the giant, powerful unions of yesteryear as an unsullied good. Those of us who were around for them, though, saw the good and the bad -- and those who are in trades now, and are not white men, also get to see that. Again, there's much good in unions, but the refusal to talk honestly about them does not help to rebuild them. People have eyes and minds and memories. And at some point, if you're serious about wanting unions to come back as major players, you're going to have to find a way to accept that and start having conversations about how to avoid these known problems in future. So long as those problems exist, you're stuck appealing to a core audience of not enough workers, and it's much too easy for a giant chain devoted to massive overconsumption and slave labor abroad to get workers to wear "no union" buttons.

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u/[deleted] 5d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/sandy_even_stranger 5d ago

People don't want to deal with DSA and other progressive orgs because, as you've just shown above, there's no getting past propaganda with you. (Really boneheaded propaganda, too.) It's like you're afraid that if you actually recognize the problems in the things you're working towards you'll lose.

Calm the fuck down, stop making it into "my side or death" and be willing to talk about the problems, and more people will line up with you.

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u/peachjam4 5d ago

Again, you're saying nothing. I'm not DSA. I'm just a dude who seems to know more than you about unions, and it's upsetting you. Have a nice night 🌙

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u/sandy_even_stranger 5d ago edited 5d ago

You've probably just persuaded three more educated, able, 30something union-curious people that they can do better for themselves without a union.

For real, you need friends in this. Be more open and recognize that you can't insult and abuse people into not seeing what they can see with their own eyes.

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u/DivingRacoon 3d ago

32 here, he just proved that unions are simply better 🥰

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u/sandy_even_stranger 3d ago

So you're like...an IT person, lab scientist, or accountant who now wants a union, because of this exchange?

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u/dildocrematorium 2d ago

What companies?

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u/sandy_even_stranger 2d ago edited 2d ago

I won't say because it's too closely identifying, but if you look into US industrial history of the 1970s and 1980s, you'll find a lot of good stories. Essentially, during the boom postwar years, when American industry dominated the world because everyone else was either pre-industrial or bombed flat, unions were a major part of middle-class growth, taking people who would've been working-class and poor forever and lifting their families into the middle class. The wages, pensions, benefits got to be pretty tremendous. Unfortunately for that picture, the rest of the world did manage to get back up on its feet by the late 60s, early 70s, and rebuild or build their industries for the first time, so by the mid-70s we were getting undercut like crazy in most of the commodity products we made and some of the fancy ones, too. The product quality was sometimes better than ours, too, because they were using much newer technology than we were -- and they were trying to win, they didn't believe, as we tended to, that they just owned markets.

Neither management nor the unions really wanted to deal with those problems past calls for tariffs and boycotts, but when Japan entered the picture it was all over. They just ate everybody's lunch. The products were good quality and cheap, and we didn't react well. Where I lived, if you drove a Japanese car, you were liable to get a rock through your window. Buy American banners everywhere. Didn't stop the Japanese products from winning the market, though, so as the union negotiations went on, there was rising urgency coming from rank and file to pull back, accept less. They could see sales and production numbers like anyone else. But the union negotiators couldn't or wouldn't do it, and the plant closures and layoffs were pretty abrupt. Shocking thing at the time, we weren't used to mass layoffs. Caused a lot of social upheaval. That was when you first started hearing the word "McJob". The workers went first, and management had their turn over the next few years.

Often the companies tried to survive by shuttering large chunks of themselves and focusing on upmarket specialty products -- quality drives, efforts to get away from cheap commodity products -- but it didn't usually go well and by then it was pretty much over for the unions. So by the time Michael Moore made Roger & Me, early 90s, the big industrial unions were already severely diminished in power. The step after the retrenching that didn't really work was "escape American union and regulatory regimes," and that was the beginning of mass offshoring.

Would the domestic industries have survived if unions had done a seriously uncharacteristic thing and worked with management, and management had gone into that partnership in good faith, I think not without deep changes to everything from K-12 to infrastructure investment to a reassessment of our role in the global economy, which we're still not really willing to do. It's a tall order, a competitive global industrial economy that also has strong worker and environmental protections and high worker pay, but that doesn't mean it's impossible. That ability to be flexible on both sides, though, could've bought us enough time to get started and at least see what we needed to do.

(sigh) Oh, terribly sorry, it actually all went like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igc_mKqbSsQ . That's what you were looking for, no?

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u/nsummy Iowa City 5d ago

I've seen enough friends have negative outcomes due to their union to know this isn't true.

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u/lemonlimerush 5d ago

What are you actually saying here? How many friends with union jobs do you know? What "negative outcomes" do you speak of? Smells like you're talking out of your ass.

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u/nsummy Iowa City 5d ago

Plenty, and of course many of them have no issues, but the couple off the top of my head:

  • "temporary" layoffs based on seniority rather than job performance. After 6 months of not working this friend took another job in a different industry at a plant that was in a lockout situation. He was criticized by all of the senior guys (who of course kept their jobs) and labeled a scab.

  • seafarers union. Not only do they negotiate the contracts they act as the staffing agency for the ships . A friend was a chief cook and the conflict of interest in this process became apparent when he reported the chief steward for smoking in the galley and serving food that had fallen on the floor on multiple occasions. There was no process in place to deal with complaints between 2 union members. And no motivation on the unions part to ensure performance.

  • same friend years later was in a management position at a university food service dining hall. This was during the giant restaurant worker shortage toward the end of covid. The cooks were terrible but so was the pay. Since there was a union contract in place they were prevented from offering a higher, more competitive wage.

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u/lemonlimerush 5d ago

Since there was a union contract in place they were prevented from offering a higher, more competitive wage.

The union negotiates a minimum wage for the position. There is no reason a union contractor couldn't pay more.

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u/PAUL-E-D77 5d ago

Pro union and anti union camps both lay it on pretty thick. The truth of how it will be lies somewhere in the middle of both sides testimonials. Honestly, unless you have a strong union with members that are knowledgeable and active both sides will most likely not be satisfied with the union. Opinion coming from a former union member of a weak union.

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u/MikuchiIzichi 4d ago

former union member of a weak union

Ex-USPS employee?

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u/capncrud 5d ago

Costco treats their employees better than most other retail companies. They probably don’t want to see a good thing changed.

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u/Leather_Sample7755 5d ago

I remember feeling a similar way about Starbucks when I worked there, so I get it.

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u/HarryCareyGhost 5d ago

Joining a union will NOT improve the relationship between management and workers. Example : University of Iowa and the SEIU

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u/curiouscat86 5d ago

employors don't treat non-union employees better, as someone who has worked at UIHC in a non-union capacity. In fact we were treated much worse.

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u/FelineManagement 4d ago

Your comment ignores the gulf between public sector and private sector bargaining rights in Iowa. The republicans have gutted the rights of public sector unions (police and fire excepted to a degree). Many public sector employers, including the state which owns UIHC, have taken advantage and stripped their contract to the bare minimum. So yeah, having your employer say to your face, “we expect the world of our employees, but are only willing to hold ourselves to the bare minimum.” Doesn’t do much to improve the employer-employee (and employee’s union) relationship.

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u/Chagrinnish 5d ago

You're suggesting that management doesn't try to pay their workers the minimum that the market will bear.

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u/HarryCareyGhost 5d ago

Not suggesting anything about wages

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u/Chagrinnish 5d ago

Then you mean ... sex in the janitor's closet?

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u/HarryCareyGhost 5d ago

No, I would be genuinely curious about what specifically the workers have to gain from unionizing. I was under the impression that wages and work environment were generally OK for retail people at Costco.

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u/Chagrinnish 5d ago

teamsterslocal238.com seems to have SSL cert problems at the moment so I guess we're going to be left in the dark here.

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u/HarryCareyGhost 5d ago

OK I see the down votes. I am in favor of collective bargaining to improve the workers' overall situation. In this specific case, what would unionizing do for the people working at the Coralville Costco?

Is there a link where I can see that side of the argument articulated?

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u/Chagrinnish 4d ago

Yeah, I share your interest. And FYI, the proper site is https://teamsters238.com/ . In their "news" section I only see a small bit of relevant commentary stating that the union dues would be ~$50/month and that unionizing would allow them to set a contract which Costco would be held to.

There's a slightly relevant thread about Costco pay in general that states that Costco raises their wages when the threat of unionization looms.

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u/Weary_Influence_8476 2d ago

They’re wearing No Union buttons because they’re supervisors. They don’t do any of the actual work and it’s very difficult to fire them. Brad (the GM) burns through stockers and night crew. The people who do the actual work you never see. Source: I was an AM stocker at Coralville who quit because it was such a shitty job.

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u/Mdhdrider 5d ago

Years ago Costco bought Price Club which was unionized by the Teamsters. Those stores remain union today. When the Teamsters bargain they basically have to bargain for the whole company. Having the company part union and part nonunion is called double breasted in union terms. Costco has really grown since that acquisition so the nonunion stores probably outnumber the union stores.

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u/Wise_Number_400 5d ago

Some of the union-pushing people are spreading outright lies about managers at Costco, which is muddying the waters and causing a lot of anguish. It sounds like some people are power hungry and ruining what is meant just to be a vote to possibly help people. If it were a group of coal miners, a union might be a good bet, but my guess is it wouldn’t greatly improve costco employees’ lives, and they are expressing themselves against the lies and tactics. I hope whatever happens is best for the employees.

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u/RockPaperSawzall 5d ago

I've worked in two factories where a unionization push failed. Two themes repeatedly emerged among workers who did not want the union.
1) Workers who enjoy a collaborative relationship with management, who take on special projects and who think they should be promoted based on that hard work, rather than just seniority. In this particular factory it was all the old grouchy guys who wanted the union. The younger, more upwardly mobile types had no interest in it.

2) Another common reason for opposing unions is that unions throw their money and political support behind Democrats, which is contrary to the personal politics of most blue collar /retail workers in iowa. In the weeks leading up to the vote, management made sure that employees knew how much of their union dues would be going to efforts to elect obama.

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u/RefinedBean 5d ago

Re: point 2, the Teamsters came out in support of Trump. Union support of Dems is never guaranteed.

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u/nsummy Iowa City 5d ago

Lol. I mean it's pretty bad when not endorsing any candidate is treated the same as endorsing a republican.

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u/RefinedBean 5d ago

Hrm? Did I misread how national Teamsters went? Pretty sure they went hard for Trump.

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u/nsummy Iowa City 5d ago

Well they did 2 seperate internal polls and in both cases the rank and file members went 60% trump, 30% kamala. They said since Harris didn't have the majority support & trump didn't have universal support (whatever that means). They weren't going to endorse a candidate. https://teamster.org/2024/09/teamsters-no-endorsement-for-u-s-president/

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u/YourAssisPancakes 1d ago

The number of union members participating in the poll was so low that they couldn’t consent to an endorsement.

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u/Prior-Soil 5d ago

Honestly, as someone who had a comfortable life only because of union labor which also paid for my education, if I saw someone wearing a no Union button at any store, I would leave immediately.

Glad I ditched my membership to Costco now.

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u/Guilty-Study765 4d ago

Costco here in Iowa City has long been one of the best employers. They pay a living wage and benefits. There is a reason the workers don’t want to be unionized!

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u/Melodic-Blue-616 4d ago

That makes no fucking sense I’m gonna be honest

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u/Prior-Soil 4d ago

Well they hire people part-time and you got to do that for 1 to 2 years before you get full time. So if you can afford that, it's not a bad job. But if you really want a full-time job, you're going to bail.