Gawker, of all sites, has been following efforts to unionize workers at Target stores. First, they collected stories from Target employees. More here. A brief excerpt:
Now the slogan is “Expect More. Pay Less.” It’s supposed to be a slogan for customers, but I encountered many employees who felt it applied better to how the company treated them…
I also remember one of my managers mentioning to me that Target Corporate has an “anti-union team” with its own jet, whose sole purpose it is to go into markets where union activity is rumoured, and work against it. Apparently working at a store where this is going on is a particular hell.
In particular, an effort by employees to take advantage of their fundamental right to organize for collective bargaining purposes, may be close to fruition in Valley Stream, NY.
But Target has long been virulently anti-union. Like all good, shameless greedhead, free-market-fundamentalist true believers, the fatcats there hate unions like they hate sin and hippies, and they know what to do in the face of such threats: make employees watch a video! I don’t have access to an embed code, but the production is only a click away.
The 13-minute video, “Think Hard Before You Sign,” has the production values and cheesy dialogue of an eight-grade educational film. It begins with an earnest discussion of Target’s business agility, and, at about the 1:50 mark, the anti-union push begins in earnest.
The larger-scale realities of this are, in fact, not amusing. A number of state governors and legislators are pushing bills to attack private sector unions, just as they are using every means they can to try to destroy those for public sector workers. And, frankly, many activists might argue that there’s been far too little leadership from far too many Democratic political leaders on this, all the way up to the very top, if you catch my drift.
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