Borders Books employees vote union in

Retail Worker retail_worker at yahoo.com
Sun Oct 20 15:54:42 PDT 2002


On October 18th, in a strong show of support for union representation, workers at a Borders Book Store in Minneapolis, MN voted 15 to 6 in favor of being represented by UFCW Local 789.

A number of things about this organizing drive make it especially noteworthy.The campaign featured extensive use of the Internet during organizing and in the run up to the vote. Communication with and among workers was enhanced by the worker-owned Web sites BordersUnion.com and RetailWorker.com, the union reform site ufcw.net (a.k.a. Members for Democracy), and, more recently, Local 789's YouAreWorthMore.org Web site. Each of these played a role in building support, providing information and, most importantly, encouraging working people to communicate with each other about what was going on and what they wanted.

In the final month of the campaign, the small group of workers were able to maintain a high level of support for their union despite ongoing pressure from their managers to do otherwise. The anti-union campaign is documented in an Organizers' Journal on the BordersUnion.com site, a strategy which prevented store managers from engaging in the egregious anti-union tactics used in past campaigns at Borders.

The organizers in Minneapolis were also in contact with organizing committees that have formed in Chicago and at Borders original flagship store in Ann Arbor. The Ann Arbor organizers are confident that they will file for a NLRB-supervised election soon.

The Borders campaign has unfolded over a period of several years and has been largely worker-driven. Eleven Borders stores and one warehouse have had votes in the last six years, seeking representation by the IWW, the Teamsters, or the UFCW. Four stores did approve the UFCW as their bargaining agent in 1997, but none are under contract now.

Now that it's time to negotiate a first contract, Local 789's President, Bill Pearson, has no illusions about the company's intentions. Can the on-line community of workers that is evolving help the newest members of Local 789 develop a strategy that will get them a good first agreement? Pearson had this to say:

"I always expected to win the election, and the thing that gave me the most hope was the group isn't acting and thinking like your traditional union members/leadership. They've taken the ball and run, and in some ways more creatively than we would have. We are going to capitalize on that, and lots more. The last thing this will be is the type of negotiations that Jackson Lewis [Borders union-busting law firm] is comfortable with. I know they are looking at these negotiations as critical to whether this thing catches on. So are we."

Local 789 is exploring a number of novel negotiation strategies, including the videotaping and web-casting of negotiation sessions, in the hope that a transparent process will give the union leverage and publicity to win the contract gains that Borders management has sworn no union will get. In the past, Borders has said that no unionized store will gain any wage or benefit improvements over non-union stores, a position that seems to violate the legal obligation to bargain fairly.

Borders hardball anti-union stance is at odds with its image as socially-responsible corporation, an inconsistency the union intends to exploit. "There are lots of ways to influence how investors feel about an investment, says Pearson, "most of which we haven't even begun to explore using the 'net. The interesting aspect of Borders is they want to come off as a socially-conscious company, appealing to the people who frequent bookstores. Workers always pay the price in the course of an ugly fight, it doesn't have to be that way: the stakes of the game have to be played at levels where the employer has as much -- no, more -- to lose than the worker."

Community supporters included Professor Peter Rachleff of Macalester College, State Representative D.Scott Dibble, Mark Nowak from the National Writers Union, Laura Billings from the Pioneer Press, Michael Kutcha from Workday Minnesota (a project of the University of Minnesota), reformed union-buster Marty Levitt, and others, including many retail workers who learned of the campaign through retailworker.com (which has become the informal base for a national union campaign at Sears).

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Zizek-reading commie bookworms strike again!

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