After a series of COVID-related
delays, Apple Inc.
has set a Sept. 5 deadline for
corporate employees to be in the office
at least three days a week.
The tech giant is based in Cupertino, California.
According
to Bloomberg, the
company will require employees to work from the office on Tuesdays, Thursdays
and a regular third day that will be determined by individual teams. That is a
shift from Apple’s original plan, which called for in-person work on Mondays, Tuesdays
and Thursdays. The company notified employees of the new approach on Monday.
The new policy comes weeks after the company
dropped its mask mandate in common areas of offices. Apple had removed such a
requirement at individual desks several months ago.
Lowe’s to Give Workers Inflation Bonuses
Home
improvement retailer Lowe’s is offering hourly employees $55 million in bonuses
to help offset the sting of inflation, which has remained near 40-year highs
all summer, according to the Washington
Post. The company made the announcement on an earnings
call on Wednesday.
“In
recognition of some of the cost pressures they are facing due to high
inflation, we are providing an incremental $55 million in bonuses to our hourly
front-line associates this quarter,” Lowe’s chief executive Marvin R. Ellison
said on the call. “These associates have the most important jobs in our
company, and we deeply appreciate everything they do to serve our customers to
deliver a best-in-class experience.”
Steve
Salazar, a spokesperson for Lowe’s, confirmed that the bonus would be paid out
to hourly workers on Sept. 9 and taxed. Lowe’s did not respond to the Post about
how much each employee would receive.
Lowe’s
employs approximately 300,000 associates and operates or services more than
2,200 home improvement and hardware stores,
the Post reported.
Second Trader Joe’s Store Votes to Unionize
The New York Times has that workers
at a Trader Joe’s in Minneapolis voted on Aug. 12 to unionize, adding a second
unionized store to the more than 500 locations of the supermarket chain.
In July, Trader Joe’s workers at a store in Hadley, Massachusetts
voted 45-31 to unionize, becoming the first at that company to do so.
The Minneapolis vote was 55-5, according to the National Labor Relations
Board, which held the election.
The
Minneapolis workers voted to join Trader Joe’s United, the same independent
union that represents workers in Hadley. Workers at a third Trader Joe’s store in
Colorado have
also filed for a union election,
but the labor board has not yet authorized a vote or set an election date.
In
a statement referring to the election results in Minneapolis, a Trader Joe’s
spokeswoman, Nakia Rohde, said, “While we are concerned about how this new
rigid legal relationship will impact Trader Joe’s culture, we are prepared to
immediately begin discussions with their collective bargaining representative
to negotiate a contract.”
Sarah
Beth Ryther, a Trader Joe’s worker in Minneapolis who was
involved in the organizing campaign, said her co-workers had been motivated in
part by dissatisfaction with pay and benefits, issues that helped prompt the
union campaign in Massachusetts.
Starbucks Asks Labor Board to Halt Union Votes Temporarily
According
to the Associated Press, Starbucks asked the National Labor Relations Board on
Monday to temporarily suspend all union elections at its U.S. stores, citing
allegations from a board employee that regional NLRB officials improperly
coordinated with union organizers.
In a letter to the board chairman and other officials,
Starbucks said the unnamed career NLRB employee informed the company about the
activity, which happened in the board’s St. Louis office in the spring while it
was overseeing a union election at a Starbucks store in Overland Park, Kansas.
The store is one of 314 U.S. Starbucks locations where
workers have petitioned the NLRB to hold union elections since late last year.
More than 220 of those stores have voted to unionize. The company opposes the
unionization effort.
Starbuck
alleges that St. Louis labor board officials made special arrangements for
pro-union workers to vote in person at its office when they did not receive
mail-in ballots, even though Starbucks and the union had agreed that store elections
would be handled by mail-in ballot.
Starbucks Workers United, the group seeking to unionize
U.S. Starbucks stores, accused the company of trying to “distract attention
away from their unprecedented anti-union campaign, including firing over 75 union leaders
across the country, while simultaneously trying to halt all union elections.”
“Ultimately,
this is Starbucks’ latest attempt to manipulate the legal process for their own
means and prevent workers from exercising their fundamental right to organize,”
the group said in a statement.
Gallup: Job Unhappiness Is at a Staggering All-Time High
As
CNBC reported, Gallup, in
its recent “State of the Global Workplace: 2022 report,” found that,
along with dissatisfaction, workers are experiencing staggering rates of both
disengagement and unhappiness. Sixty percent of people reported being
emotionally detached at work and 19% as being miserable. Only 33% reported
feeling engaged — even
lower than 2020.
In the U.S.
specifically, 50% of workers reported feeling stressed at their jobs on a daily basis,
41% as being worried, 22% as sad and 18% angry.
“As Gallup finds, it’s not just the hours,
work-life balance, or workplace location that leave workers dissatisfied,” wrote CNBC’s Leah
Collins. “In fact, worker
disengagement rises with remote work and 4-day week workers, and stress levels
rise for in-person and 5-day week workers.”
Gallup also found
that the manager or team leader alone accounts for 70% of the variance in team
engagement.
“The role of the manager is really important in
well-being,” Jim Harter, chief scientist of
workplace management and well-being at Gallup, told CNBC. “Their first job
is to make sure the work-related things are right — people know what their role
is, they get recognized when they do good work, they feel cared about at work
and have a chance to develop in the future, they can see where they’re headed
in the organization. If you can get those sorts of things right, you start
building trust. And when you have trust, you can open the door for having
broader discussions around well-being.”
It pays to have
thriving workers, wrote Collins,
especially since Gallup found
that business units with engaged workers have 23% higher profit compared with
business units with miserable workers. Employees who are not engaged or who are
actively disengaged cost the world $7.8 trillion in lost productivity, equal to
11% of global GDP.
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