Costco workers in Norfolk have unionised and Costco are seething.
It’s better, but still childish. “We’re not angry, we’re disappointed”.
If you are really taking care of your employees, you don’t have to worry about a union, and would support your employees to form one.
To be fair, the disappointment is directed at themselves, not the employees. If they’d said they were disappointed in the employees for unionising then I would agree with you, but this to me at least reads like “we haven’t been doing enough and need to do better”.
I don’t know, man. The wording of that still paints the act of having a union as a bad thing.
You wouldn’t say, “I’m disappointed that my son only has a 3.9 GPA, but actually I’m disappointed in myself for letting that happen” If it’s not truly a bad thing, no one needs to be disappointed at all. Unions are good for everyone, except literally the people at the very top who might only make 7 digits instead of 8.
The framing matters, and this is still worded like a backhanded framing of “unions bad” from corporate like they’re saying “Yeah, the dog shit in the bed but we should be responsible as owners”
That coupled with the cookie cutter anti-union advice to just talk to your manager if you’re unhappy (so they can unfailingly steer you away from a union) makes this whole thing just sound like an HR guy framed it to be as inoffensive as possible while still painting the union itself as bad.
I’d say that it paints requiring a union as a bad thing. In a perfect world, with both workers and management valuing each other appropriately, a union shouldn’t be necessary because there is established trust and respect. I think a completely appropriate response is “We thought we had that trust, but if we created a situation where our employees felt they needed a union, then obviously we didn’t earn that trust. We should have done better.”
Not necessarily, I would agree with you in a lot of cases but there is such a thing as a bad union org.