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What I’ve Been Reading This Week


Minimum wage hikes, updates (and reflections) on recent unionization votes, and a look at an oddly delayed/stalled right to work bill in North Carolina, should provide readers with a nice smattering of topics to page through heading into the long weekend.  Of note, I point readers to the Atlantic article on the recent successful unionization of the Amazon warehouse in Staten Island.  That article provides a bit of color as to the background (and perhaps motivation) for why these warehouse workers voted to unionize.

As always, below are a couple articles that caught my eye this week.



On Tuesday, the El Paso City Council approved a minimum wage hike for city workers.  The 7.2% wage hike will see hourly pay rates rise to $11.11 beginning May 22nd.  The Sun City will also provide all non-uniform city workers provided with a $500 bonus at the start of their employment along with an additional $500 bonus after a six month probation period.  (Uniformed city workers, such as police and fire, will see a $1,000 bonus).  To call this 7.2% wage hike (and bonus payout) sizable, is an understatement.



Readers will likely recall that the recent unionization of an Amazon warehouse in Staten Island was met largely with surprise, if not shock, when the results were announced.  The successful unionization marked a turning point at the company, given Amazon’s history of successfully having beaten back prior unionization efforts.  As Adam Serwer at The Atlantic notes, Amazon warehouse workers have notoriously been subjected to less than ideal working conditions:  low pay, long hours, grueling shifts walking around often hot warehouses, etc.  As a result, this unionization has been heralded as a potential turning point for workers at the company.  Will it lead to unionization of other Amazon warehouses?  Time will tell.



To call the successful unionization efforts at Starbucks one of the marque developments as of late is an understatement.  Actually, that would be quite an understatement.  With 16 Starbucks locations around the country voting to unionize (and only one voting against unionization), the efforts of Starbucks to defeat the unionization efforts is in essence an unmitigated failure.  Starbucks had recently announced that it would bring back former CEO Howard Schultz on an interim basis to replace its retiring CEO.  Amy McCarthy over at Eater recently reported on Schultz confronting workers in Long Beach recently in which he apparently told workers that wanted to unionize that if they hated the company so much, they should leave.  It is understandable that Schultz, who previously built Starbucks into the juggernaut that it is (and defeated unionization efforts before) is frustrated with the spread of successful unionization votes.  Is there a way to turn the tide?  Maybe.  However, with approximately an additional 150 locations seeking to hold a vote on whether to unionize, this is approaching a situation where it is going to become (more) difficult to defeat the unionization efforts.



Last year, Senate Bill 624 was introduced in the North Carolina Legislature in which the bill sought to enshrine the state’s right to work law into the state’s constitution.  While North Carolina’s right to work law has been in place for nearly 75 years, advocates of the law what to enshrine it in the state’s constitution to make it less susceptible to being undone.  However, as Dallas Woodhouse writes in the Carolina Journal, Senate Bill 624 has been stuck in committee with no apparent appetite among Republicans (that have a strong majority control in the Legislature) to move it along to a vote.  This is a curious development and one that I would encourage readers to review further.

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