You can drop us a line here. The most secure options for contact if you’re worried are our riseup email [email protected] or our PO Box (PO Box 77 Altamont NY)
Their unionization push comes amid a wave of unionizing at other retail companies. Last month, the independent Amazon Labor Union won its union election at a warehouse in Staten Island, New York (although a subsequent vote at another nearby warehouse failed). Workers at an REI in Manhattan voted to unionize in March. Union elections have been called at Apple stores in Atlanta and Baltimore. And about 60 Starbucks stores have voted to unionize since December, with dozens more elections filed.
Many of these campaigns have important things in common. These are the kind of low-wage, service-sector workers who seemed so impossible to unionize for so long. Amazon and Starbucks workers aren’t bringing in organizers from big, established unions, but instead workers are leading the way themselves. And they’re going store by store, location by location. It was long thought that such a campaign couldn’t work. “What people didn’t recognize is the contagion factor,” said Kate Bronfenbrenner, director of labor education research at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations.
Target Workers Unite is hoping to instigate exactly that kind of national spread.
“Customers need to know that just ‘cause you hit one-click buy, it’s not magic. These are real people being affected. We want you all to stand in solidarity with these workers. They come from y'all community, they’re your neighbors.
The first thing we’re fighting for is job security. They hire and fire people all the time. There’s people that are homeless and people in shelters working there that we help.
We’re fighting to make everybody a shareholder again, which they stopped in 2018, and bringing back the monthly bonuses for productivity and attendance. They stopped that in 2018, as well. Bring back hazard pay.
They think the pandemic is over. People are still working, catching covid, still being sick. And, also, providing a better quality of life: a pension, free college…everything a union can provide, we want to provide.”
An incomplete list of things that employers commonly threaten that are 100% illegal in the United States
“We’ll fire you if you tell others how much you’re making” The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 specifically protects employees who discuss their own wages with each other (you can’t reveal someone else’s wages if you were given that information in the course of work, but you can always discuss your own or any that were revealed to you outside of work duties)
“If we can’t fire you for [discussing wages/seeking reasonable accommodation/filing a discrimination complaint/etc], we’ll just fire you for something else the next day.” This is called pretextual termination, and it offers your employer almost no protection; if you are terminated shortly after taking a protected action such as wage discussion, complaints to regulatory agencies, or seeking a reasonable accommodation, you can force the burden onto your employer to prove that the termination wasn’t retaliatory.
“Disparaging the company on social media is grounds for termination” Your right to discuss workplace conditions, compensation, and collective action carries over to online spaces, even public ones. If your employer says you aren’t allowed to disparage the company online or discuss it at all, their social media policy is illegal. However, they can forbid releasing information that they’re obligated to keep confidential such as personnel records, business plans, and customer information, so exercise care.
“If you unionize, we’ll just shut this branch down and lay everyone off” Threatening to take action against a group that unionizes is illegal, full stop. If a company were to actually shut down a branch for unionizing, they would be fined very heavily by the NLRB and be opening themselves up to a class-action lawsuit by the former employees.
“We can have any rule we want, it’s only illegal if we actually enforce it” Any workplace policy or rule that has a “chilling effect” on employees’ willingness to exercise their rights is illegal, even if the employer never follows through on any of their threats.
“If you [protected action], we’ll make sure you never work in this industry/city/etc again.” Blacklisting of any kind is illegal in half the states in the US, and deliberately sabotaging someone’s job search in retaliation for a protected action is illegal everywhere in the US.
“Step out of line and you can kiss your retirement fund/last paycheck goodbye.” Your employer can never refuse to give you your paycheck, even if you’ve been fired. Nor can they keep money that you invested in a retirement savings account, and they can only claw back the money they invested in the retirement account under very specific circumstances.
“We’ll deny that you ever worked here” not actually possible unless they haven’t been paying their share of employment taxes or forwarding your withheld tax to the government (in which case they’re guilty of far more serious crimes, and you might stand to gain something by turning them in to the IRS.) The records of your employment exist in state and federal tax data, and short of a heist that would put Oceans 11 to shame, there’s nothing they can do about that.
PSA.
ALSO GET EVERYTHING IN WRITING! A verbal contact is nice but for the love of Jesus make sure there’s a written record of everything your employer tells you regarding this shit.
Also, while we’re on the subject, if they say something like this in a verbal conversation but refuse to put it in writing, document it yourself. Sit down that day after work, and draft a dated contemporaneous memo stating what happened and what they said. Save it so that if they claim that your story has changed and you’re making up new things about them, you can prove that it hasn’t, and that you aren’t. Possibly even email it to yourself or a non-work friend so that it is clearly and unambiguously time-stamped. Even if it’s your word against theirs that it happened, being able to prove that your side of the story has stayed consistent can go a long way.
Mail a hard copy to yourself by registered mail and don’t open it when it arrives. It’s sealed and from a legal source.
As a matter of fact, if your employer fires you for anything relating to forming a union, that’s retalition, and it’s illegal under federal law. If this happens to you, vontact the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
