Retail Watchers

Changing corporate culture is difficult to do, unionized or not. Acme has clearly been failing in this regard.

Blaming it on unions is a red-herring. As an example in the airline industry Southwest Airlines, which is unionized, as a much better customer service image than Delta Airlines, which is non-union for all it's customer-facing employees. In the Warehouse Club industry Costco, which is unionized, has a much better reputation than Sam's Club, which is non-union.

It really comes down to management's ability to motivate employees.

klkla wrote:Changing corporate culture is difficult to do, unionized or not. Acme has clearly been failing in this regard.

Blaming it on unions is a red-herring. As an example in the airline industry Southwest Airlines, which is unionized, as a much better customer service image than Delta Airlines, which is non-union for all it's customer-facing employees. In the Warehouse Club industry Costco, which is unionized, has a much better reputation than Sam's Club, which is non-union.

It really comes down to management's ability to motivate employees.

I agree 100%. Taking the airline comparison one step further, a friend has been an American Airlines flight attendant for more than 30 years. Several of her colleagues have retired from AA and gone to work at Southwest and love it. Why? Because Southwest treats their employees well.

klkla wrote:
It really comes down to management's ability to motivate employees.

Probably, but in that case having unions or not is irrelevant, isn't it?

pseudo3d wrote:Probably, but in that case having unions or not is irrelevant, isn't it?

I've managed retail employees in unionized and non-unionized environments. The only difference is with unionized employees you need to cross your t's and dot your i's - in other words you have to be a little more diligent and make sure you document everything where there might be an arbitration issue.

I lost more arbitrations with unemployment department than the UFCW.

Albertsons' bid for Strack & Van Til fell prey to antitrust issues surrounding three stores
http://www.supermarketnews.com/retail-f ... strack-bid