If not interested in coffee and coffee shops, you picked the wrong topic to post. Really a shame about your reaction to coffee. I'm kind of a coffee whore, myself and will actually drink just about any if it's hot, black and extra sweet. Mess Sergeant ruin me, making it in a 5 gallon stewing pot, stirring it with a canoe paddle and sweetening with brown sugar, litterally whole cans of coffee and multiple bags of brown sugar. Served out of mermite into my canteen cup, I swear when you've been up 18 plus hours and the temp in the field never got above 18 degrees, that sh#t will raise the dead, before you head down the trail, to see what somebody has gotten themself into or what crazy crap they have done with your equipment and how long it's going to take to unfk the situation.
To the best of my knowledge, Starbuck baristas make decent for part time, minimal skill required work and Starbucks has some benefits even for part timers. The article said there were votes at 3 locations and only had one location approve it. My business experience with unions, leans toward that being a local management problem not a systemic systematic abuse of employees across a company. I've seen this before. Unions can start good or bad, for reasons real or trumped up, but tend to get worse over the years. At coffee shop barista level, it's not worth the dues.
I have never liked coffee. The smell of it turned my stomach.
Chemo turned that into coffee makes me vomit.
While I could care less about coffee, I do care about the workers and unions.
Which this thread is about the coffee shop voting to start a union.
As for unions, yes, there are some that are useless.
There are many more that aren't useless.
Such as the one my ex was in from 1988 until he was promoted out of it in 2014.
That company has both union and non union contract employees.
The union employees got a much better deal from the company.
When I needed help for insurance problems, I went to the union. They resolved it in my favor every time and they did it quickly. I would have had to get lawyers without a union and ended up in legal hell for years.
The union made sure that we had what's now called "Cadillac" insurance though it used standard insurance for most everyone who worked.
The union had an agreement in the contract with the engineers that any patents for inventions by the employee that are licensed with product sold, the engineer gets half the profits. The company tried to screw my ex out of that. The union quickly put a stop to it. Without the union, we would have had to hire a lawyer and been stuck in legal hell for years.
On top of that, the unions at the company my ex works always works to prevent jobs from being outsourced. The machinist union went on strike a couple times over that. My ex was in the engineer's union, SPEEA.
I can go on and on with the benefits of unions.
We got much more out of the union than the measly dues we paid. I think the dues were like 20 bucks per pay period. Or somewhere around that. I don't remember the exact number.
buffalonews.com
