Towson, Maryland, is a Baltimore suburb that Apple executives have marked with a red dot. In June 2022, employees at the local store voted to form a union, an unwelcome first for an American store owned by the manufacturer of the iPhone. Where there's a union, there's negotiation and potential strike action. It was once again in Towson on Saturday, May 11, that the hundred or so unionized employees authorized a work stoppage, another first for the US tech giant.
The employees unionized over a year ago with the local branch of the IAM CORE union, which stated that negotiations have stalled over "work-life balance, unpredictable scheduling practices disrupting personal lives, and wages failing to align with the area's cost of living." It is now up to the union to decide on a strike day, which could occur before the next negotiating session on May 21.
Traditional large industries, like the automobile industry, still have powerful unions. However, Big Tech, having earned a solid reputation for anti-union practices in a legal environment that curbs unionization, is now in the crosshairs. In 2018, 20,000 Google employees protested sexual harassment. Three years later, 226 employees set up a union, prompting an executive to respond that the company would "continue engaging directly with all our employees." The New York Times nonetheless called it "the clearest sign of how thoroughly employee activism has swept through Silicon Valley over the past few years."
In these high-paying companies, this activism focuses mainly on the fight against racial segregation, gender discrimination and harassment, or even their strategic choices, such as artificial intelligence and contracts with the Pentagon. But the unionization movement has also affected low-skilled sectors, where workers have won wage victories, like Amazon warehouse workers and Starbucks baristas.
The movement is still embryonic: The Oklahoma City Apple Store is the only one, aside from Towson, to have taken the plunge. Employees at a store in New Jersey rejected it on the same day that their colleagues in Maryland voted to strike. US President Joe Biden has not won his bet to increase unions' influence. Since his election, the number of union members has risen slightly to 14.4 million employees and civil servants, with the new members being African American and Hispanic. But the increase in the number of employees pushed the unionization rate down to 10% in 2023, far from the historic peak of 30% in the 1950s.