I can understand why the production staff would want to unionize because they dont make any money as the industry underpays but why would the front of house want to unionize?
Union drives are not always about higher wages. In this case, Fair State's front of house staff simply wanted to ensure that collectively, they will from now on have significant input on the decisions that affect them in the workplace.
The trepidation I have here is that the staff already says Fair State is a great place to work and that they are treated well in wages, benefits, and working conditions. Why the trepidation? Because union-management is, by its nature, an adversarial relationship. It is not, but its nature, a cooperative relationship. Everything seems kumbayah now. How about in 5 or 10 years when most of the staff only knows the union and not what it was like before? Eventually, someone files the first grievance. It WILL happen. The question is, what happens then? IOW, I wonder, will this end up being more destructive of the current situation than preservative of it? Years ago I worked at a family-owned business (much larger than Fair State, and a manufacturing business) where the workers voted to unionize for much the same reasons in the beginning. By the time I left the company, there were anti-management newsletters, union hall rallies, and strikes. The existence of the bargaining unit affected the attitudes of both sides toward each other. Of course, my story is not by any means a prediction. There was a lot different between where I worked and Fair State (size of the company, nature of the business, ownership opposing the union organizing from the beginning, the union being the aggressive UAW, etc.) However, it doesn't take very long for the "us" and "them" attitude to set it.
Interesting points above, MNAle. If union-management is by nature adversarial, why is that not true for individual worker-management? In both relationships, the parties have ultimately conflicting interests, right? Management wants to keep as much of the revenue as they can; labor wants to get the biggest share they can. The parties share an interest in maximizing revenue for the firm, but their interests diverge regarding how that revenue is allocated. This is true regardless of unionization. When workers are not bargaining collectively, each one's power is limited, because management can tell a worker who isn't satisfied with her/his share of revenue to go find work elsewhere. When the workers act collectively, management must work with them to find a solution that is agreeable to all parties. As I see it, this means the union-management relationship is no more adversarial than the individual worker-management one. It only has a more equal distribution of power within that relationship. Certainly, some unions become more adversarial than would serve their interests best. But this is not a problem with unionization in general so much as a question of whether any particular union is good or bad at representing its members. There are good unions and bad ones, just like there are good bosses and bad ones. Most people don't see one bad boss and say that wage-labor should be abolished, but many people see one bad union and use that example to argue that unionization should be avoided in general.
A lot depends on the leadership and the culture of the company. If the leadership builds a team culture (which I sounds like Fair State has done), then the worker-manager relationship is more like player-coach. That will disappear over time (I fear) with union representation, since it is no longer player-coach but players (as a unit)-owner. Again, none of this is a prediction. It does not have to happen this way, but it will take effort on both sides (see, we already have sides) to keep the current culture.
As a shop steward, that has helped unionize other job sites in power generation, I can tell you shops wont vote to go union if everything is a peachy as you say.
I'm not disagreeing with you, but I would point out that I'm not the one saying that. It came from workers quoted in the article. Read the article.
