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Comment by kibwen | Hacker News Reader

> The practices that companies are willing to engage in to prevent unionization are cartoonishly evil.

Yesterday, after a Chipotle in Maine became the first location to vote to unionize, corporate decided it would rather shutter the store than risk giving anyone else any bright ideas. The beatings will continue until morale improves.

Honestly, I don't even particularly like the idea in principle of adding another layer of bureaucracy to any organization. I would rather have a country where strong labor laws made unions unnecessary. But it's plain to see that these companies need internal opposition in order to stay honest.

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Countries with strong labour laws also have strong unions. Their existence is precisely the reason why such labour laws exist. It's a matter of power balance, and laws swing the way power is.

Spoiler: the labor laws create their own layer of bureucracy. Companies have to hire extra people to observe these laws. There have to be lawyers and courts which specialize in those laws. These laws are inefficient and get in the way on many occassions (i.e. both employer and employee would rather not have them), but you're still required to observe them. You can't make things more regulated without making it more rigid and inefficient at the same time.

That's.... All in order, no? If workers want to be able to not be abused, they need to collectively bargain. Which, adds extra steps. But necessary ones? What am I missing?

Negotiating your salary on an individual basis is common sense yet when put in the context of collective bargaining suddenly it's "extra steps" and "bureaucracy". Despite the fact that once you're in the job your employer rarely even gives you an opportunity to renegotiate the terms of your employment.

Negotiating your own salary is negotiating from a point of weakness though?

The company decides whether you eat or not, and you can't live long without eating

You know, laws in general get in the way. You need to understand them, hire extra people to observe them. We need lawyers and courts. The laws are inefficient if not just straight up outdated, but you're still required to observe them.

Well, tell employers not to screw people over and we wouldn't have to have the laws.

We hear the same line of BS about environmental laws, that they make things less efficient, yet the places that have them are objectively better.

Flexibility and efficiency are not the only goals worth pursuing.

Not quite a balanced representation of what happened. The store had been closed for a month due to an inability to hire people. Washington Post article has fuller explanation of both sides - https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/07/20/chipotle-...

That link is paywalled for me, here's one that's not, which claims that the location had "about 20" employees: https://www.boston.com/news/business/2022/07/19/chipotle-clo...

To see whether 20 is a low number, I searched for how many employees an average Chipotle branch has, which brings up this page (from 2018), where multiple commenters leave estimates that all hover around 20: https://www.indeed.com/cmp/Chipotle-Mexican-Grill/faq/how-ma...

Regardless of how close it is to the target staffing: was it open (and presumably operational at some level of customer satisfaction) or closed at the time it was shut down? What does it mean to have 20 employees but closed for a month? Wouldn't those employees be seeking other employment already?

We can also ask, was the store closed for a month in an attempt to force out the union-sympathizing employees? Does the fact that it still has 20 employees after a month of closure suggest there were even more employees a month ago? The last time the store opened was on June 17th, and the vote to unionize was held June 23rd. All that upstairs needs to do is not send a manager with the keys.

The gist of the Washington Post article is they could not hire sufficient staff for the store. They dedicated two recruiters to the task and were still unsuccessful. For the staff they did have, there was "excessive call outs and lack of availability..." I do not have any facts beyond the article, but would not surprise me that an understaffed store (described as in a remote location) would enter a downward spiral that leads to a shut down.

The company representative described it as remote. The journalist described it as in a strip mall just off the highway in Augusta. Augusta is the capital.

It would not surprise me if the store couldn't hire workers because of a reputation for poor working conditions. It would not surprise me if call outs and lack of availability were proportional to excessive call ins from an under staffed store.

Isn't it kind of weird that a Bezos owned media outlet is publishing an anti-union argument? "There's two sides to the story" falls apart when your siding with Corporate over Fast Food workers.

I did not get the impression that the article was "siding with Corporate over Fast Food workers". Can you quote the sections of the article that made you think differently?

Are you familiar with the economics of the store? Maybe they were having a hard time staying afloat anyway. Augusta, ME has a population of like 15k - my city of 100k(with 20k college students) only has 1 Chipotle.

I'd imagine that locations which are struggling to hire would be correlated with disaffected employees looking to unionize.

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