Young retail workers are giving union popularity a boost

By Tony Poland, LegalMatters Staff • Young workers could be leading the charge in a resurgence of union popularity, says Toronto employment lawyer Jeffrey M. Andrew.

Some are predicting 2023 could be the year of the union comeback with employees in low-paying service sector jobs seeking the bargaining power and protection that comes in numbers.

“It seems to be the younger generation pointing the way with gig employees and people who work at places such as Starbucks turning to unions,” says Andrew, a partner with Cavalluzzo LLP. “It is these workers who recognize that they are expected to do a lot for not a lot of pay. This generation is much more interested in being treated fairly and I believe that they are starting to wake up to the fact that unionizing can help.”  

He tells LegalMattersCanada.ca that union membership in Canada and the United States has dropped since the 1970s.

Only 13.8 per cent of private sector workers are unionized

In Canada, about 29 per cent of the workforce belongs to a union as of 2021, according to Statistics Canada.  However, in the private sector only about 13.8 per cent of employees are unionized (down from 19 per cent in 1997) compared to over 74 per cent in the government sector.

CNBC reports that unionized employees made up about 10.3 per cent of the U.S. workforce in 2021, down from 20 per cent in 1983. At its peak, union membership was close to 35 per cent in 1954, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. 

However, in the first three quarters of 2022, there was a 58 per cent increase in official attempts to unionize, CNBC reported.

Riding that wave were workers at Starbucks locations, where employees at more than 200 outlets officially voted to unionize, according to the media outlet. 

“A lot of it is concentrated amongst young workers, sometimes college-educated young workers, often working in sort of low-paying service sector jobs: overworked, underpaid, overeducated workers,” John Logan, a professor at San Francisco State University, told CNBC.

Andrew says although people recognize unions give them more leverage with employers, “it has always been a challenge to organize smaller, more transient workplaces such as the service sector.”

‘People are not necessarily committed to the jobs long term’

“People are not necessarily committed to the jobs long term. They move frequently,” he says. “Maintaining a presence during an organizing drive and after is a challenge. If you have a small workplace with 20 or fewer people, a few personnel changes just makes it more difficult to establish a commitment to the union because you get new people coming in who may not be as supportive.”

Andrew says many young workers are employed in the customer service industry and “dealing with the public which can be very demanding.”

“They are facing the pressures that come from meeting the employers’ demands,” he says.

If the employer is part of a franchise, the head office will typically set targets for global sales and standards of performance, says Andrew.

“It can cover what is on sale and how to sell it,” he explains. “There will be all sorts of procedures to try to create a system that operates without much variation from location to location. But what that means for people who are actually doing the work is they almost become drones.”

If the system works and the store is successful, workers will be busy, Andrew says.

Workers don’t have control

“If they are really busy, the people behind the cash registers and in the back of the business are moving pretty quickly,” he says. “They don’t make a lot of money and they don’t have much control over what happens. I believe that breeds frustration, particularly among young people.”

He says it is not surprising unions are popping up in places like Starbucks, movie theatres and cannabis stores.

• Human rights ruling is unlikely to change how claims are adjudicated
• Unionized workers’ right to strike can be misunderstood
• Inappropriate workplace behaviour ‘dangerous to your career’

“The thing about younger people is they have options. Often, they do not have children to support or mortgages and they are a little more idealistic,” Andrew says. “Gen Z workers are more committed to things such fairness and that includes fairness to themselves.”

However, he says unionizing a workplace is rarely a simple task.

“Employers don’t want to be unionized and they trot out the same old arguments to discourage employers from organizing,” Andrew says.

He says employers will often claim they don’t want a third party interfering or coming 

between themselves and the worker.

‘That is just a myth employers propagate’

“They see a union as being a threat that can organize people around certain ideas. When you are dealing with individual workers, they may not have the knowledge or experience to be able to react or challenge employer initiative,” says Andrew. “But it is certainly not the case that unions come in and dictate what is going to happen. That is just a myth employers propagate to make employees suspicious. 

“The reality is the employer is still the employer,” he adds. “The business is still their business but the union, through the collective group of employees that it represents, can have much more influence on working conditions.”

Unions often face an uphill battle to organize, he adds.

“The cost can be quite high for a union. You need organizers and there are legal proceedings,” says Andrew. “When there is a transient workforce that is difficult to hang on to it presents even more challenges.

New workers may not be sympathetic

“It is not just having organizers hired by the union. It is also about the people who were being organized,” he adds.  “You need leaders to keep it going. If you have a transient workforce and you lose supporters, you have to engage new people who may not know anything about what a union can do, so they may not be sympathetic to it.”

To be successful, employees must be “prepared to stick their face into it and a certain vulnerability comes with that because sometimes employers find ways to exit you from the workforce,” Andrew says.

And while it may not be easy, organizing a workplace can certainly have advantages, he says.

“There are more and more people in service jobs who recognize that it is their only avenue to gaining more leverage,” says Andrew. “What unionizing does is it creates a collective. It is called collective bargaining for a reason. As a group through the union, you bargain wages and terms and conditions of your employment. It offers the protection you might not otherwise have.” 

“Certainly, the enthusiasm to organize smaller workplaces seems to be there and there seems to be some growth on the large scale,” he adds. “Hopefully, we will start to see a positive change in worker rights.”

More from Cavalluzzo LLP:

The challenges and complexity of constructive dismissal law