Unionbusting at “The Office” |
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Every week “The Office” offers up plenty of hilariously outrageous situations that you’d never imagine happening at your own office. But this time the show served up the hard truth about how far employers will go to stop their employees from forming a union. It’s unfair and illegal for Dunder-Mifflin to threaten workers in this manner. But can we chalk it up to another Hollywood dramatization? How many companies actually go as far as Dunder-Mifflin did to threaten to close up shop to keep workers from forming a union? 49% of employers openly threaten to close a worksite when workers try to form a union.*That’s right—half of employers faced with a union organizing drive threaten workers that they won’t have a job if they vote for a union. What’s even more outrageous is that it’s illegal for employers to do so. Yet half do! And many are never held accountable. And while it’s usually Michael who’s not operating by the book, in this episode Jan, from Dunder-Mifflin’s corporate office, made the ‘mistake.’ If she had hired one of the thousands of highly-paid "anti-union consultants " out there, she could have avoided this misstep by being coached to give practically the same speech with a few subtle differences to ‘technically’ not violate the law. But would these few words really lessen the impact of the threat to the workers?
Regardless of how she chose her words—in either scenario—a threat is a threat and it’s coercive to workers. Yet that’s the unfortunate situation for workers who feel the effect of our weak labor law system. Thankfully, a show we can count on to help us laugh at the ridiculousness of our worklives, brought attention to the absurd reality faced by workers simply trying to form a union. ——————————————————————— Source: Theodore, Nik and Chirag Mehta, Undermining the Right to Organize: Employer Behavior During Union Representation Campaigns , Center for Urban Economic Development, University of Illinois at Chicago, Dec. 2005 |
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