Fighting for a Union at Barnes & Noble

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The following is an interview with Craig Carpenter, who started a union drive at the Barnes & Noble where he worked in Newton, MA, and was fired during the process. Craig’s experience holds valuable lessons for all of us who want more democracy in the workplace. It shows that getting a union drive started is something that anybody can do. Justice’s Dennis Prater interviewed Craig.

So the Massachusetts Bar Association helped get you in touch with a union lawyer. What did they tell you about the unionization process?
It turns out that only 51% of the employees concerned have to sign union cards for negotiations to begin. Once negotiations begin, we, the workers, would form our own committee and the union would supply a lawyer who meets with us and management. And that sounded like a pretty good choice. We would be doing the negotiations ourselves.

What were some of the reasons why you wanted a union?
The sense that everybody seems to have in jobs is the employer’s doing you a favor by hiring you, and there’s all this sense of loyalty. It’s just a weird thing. At Barnes & Noble, we were “at will” employees so they could fire us at any time for any reason. If they fire you for union-type stuff, that’s against the law, but they can fire you for, like, wearing wrong-color shoes.

So there’s no job security?
Not at all. People get this idea that they have to do what their employer says all the time, that they never have a chance to assert themselves. That’s why we needed a union – to be able to find out what our rights are and then to exercise them. Being able to stand up to management requires everybody to have some sort of organization to collectively bargain and say, “We feel this is unacceptable,” and to be able to change it. If it’s just one person, they’ll get fired, but if it’s everybody, we can stand up.

In this case, management did find out. How did that happen?
They found out pretty fast because I let it slip. I was talking to the assistant manager. They get paid poorly too, and they get treated pretty badly because the corporate people in New York set these policies. So I was mentioning to him how a union would make sense, because he could probably empathize.

Well, it appeared he couldn’t because he told the district manager, who sat me down and said, “Oh, I didn’t know you were unhappy here.” I said, “No. Why would you think that?” She said, “Well, I heard talk that you think unions would be a good idea.” I said, “I do think they would be a good idea. The eight-hour workday, no child labor, weekends off, minimum wage – all those things are good.”

Her response was, “Well, there might have been a place for them in the past, but at Barnes & Noble we’re a family, and we don’t need a third party to arbitrate because we listen to you.” I said to myself, “Um, thanks for the paternalism. I’m an adult.” Asking me what I thought of unions was an unfair labor practice. I learned that people trying to organize in the workplace shouldn’t tell management what we’re up to.

So how many of your co-workers were interested?
Everybody was really supportive … I talked to people about how bad work was, and everybody agreed, “Yeah, we should unionize,” but nobody knew how to do it. There was a strong sense of solidarity, that all of us workers were doing a lot of work and being really underpaid for it, and we needed to stick together. This campaign shows the potential for union drives in the service sector, even when we’re faced with the power of big corporations. We didn’t win this time, but we can in the future.

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