Apple's first retail store union will get an employee vote on June 2

sdw2001 said:

The starting pay is $20 an hour, far below the $31 needed for a single parent with one child would need to live. 

I call BS.  AI is just parroting pro-union talking points.  $20/hr is 40k a year with two weeks unpaid vacation. You can live on 40k in Atlanta, even with a child.  $31 is 60 grand a year.  That’s without any overtime or a side hustle.  It’s more than teachers in well-paid districts make to start, almost anywhere in the U.S.  40 hours a week and a little side business? You could easily make another 10-20k.  I’m so sick of this “living wage” crap. If these idiots want to unionize, let them. Apple is not going to sit back and suck up 50% hugger labor costs.  They’ll just cut hours.  

Apple has around 150,000 employees. If each employee made $200,000, that would cost them $30b. Their revenue was $365b last year, net income was $94b.

A 50% increase to 6-figure salaries would materially impact their net income. A $20,000 increase across 150,000 employees is $3b and it would probably only apply to half the employees.

Warren Buffett has made tens of billions from doing nothing but parking a big pile of money in Apple's driveway and it has grown significantly due to the work of these employees. Allocating $2b between tens of thousands of workers doesn't seem excessive when $50b+ goes to one shareholder.

It shouldn't take unions to make this happen, there needs to be legally enforced fair compensation that is relative to the value people create not just what the owners decide they are worth. Something like 10% of all yearly corporate profits should be distributed among employees and it can be capped at 100% of their salary. When there's a loss, employees eat the losses in the form of lower or no pay rises or job losses so they should get the reward when the company and shareholders do.

A company-wide yearly bonus structure would mean the base pay doesn't have to increase and it acts as an employee retention incentive. They can bring that to a vote with the shareholders. If there's fairness baked into the system, workers don't need a union, they only try to form unions when there isn't.