Return-to-office mandates drive unionizations
Contracts seen as useful as directives shift
When a group of workers at the National Women’s Law Center broke the news to their boss that they’d agreed to unionize in February 2020, they did it in the form of a greeting card: “Congratulations on your baby girl union!” After a tense few months of deliberation, management told the group they’d voluntarily recognize the 50-plus member bargaining unit, now one of nearly a dozen workplaces that have unionized with the Nonprofit Professional Employees Union this year.
While the two sides have yet to reach a first contract, the timing of the unionization drive — a month before the pandemic hit — was prescient. By April 2021, as vaccines became available and bosses started dreaming of fully inhabited offices, the NWLC union was able to negotiate the terms of a potential return to work. Together with management, the employees established a “memorandum of understanding” surrounding COVID-19 policies. This meant that no matter when the organization asked employees back to the office, they would be guaranteed eight weeks’ notice.
As companies hash out — and keep changing — whether and how their workforces will have to permanently return to the office, employees increasingly want a voice. Wall Street firms like Jpmorgan Chase & Co and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. have made it clear that most of its employees will need to show up in person, while companies like American Express Co. and Starbucks Corp are hedging with a hybrid setup.
So far, the most successful instances of corporate employees pushing back against new policies have been at major tech companies, including Amazon.com Inc.
But most of the mandates that have softened in recent weeks have less to do with the will of its workers than with the Delta variant.
Typically, return-to-office mandates are determined by a company’s executive team and its human resources department.
For corporate workers wondering if unionization might give them more leverage with those decision-makers, Harvard labour law professor Benjamin Sachs says a contract that protects them can be particularly useful when directives keep shifting.
Meanwhile, the laws that govern non-unionized work, Sachs says, are “a blunt instrument.” Parents worried about endangering unvaccinated children, for example, lack an obvious path to raise concerns, other than having one-off conversations with their managers.
U.S. workplaces, including offices, are mostly nonunion, which some business leaders say helps them stay nimble and efficient and avoid rigidity that can come with collective bargaining. With only 6.3 per cent of the private sector unionized, most examples of successful return-to-work union-led pushback remain in the public and non-profit spheres.
Nonprofit Professional Employees Union president Katie Barrows says several unionized non-profit are working on similar agreements to the NWLC’S. The Connecticut state employees’ union pushed Governor Ned Lamont to reverse a return-to-work order and
THERE HAD BEEN TALK ABOUT FORMING A UNION FOR YEARS . ... IT WAS A VERY PUBLIC EXAMPLE OF US FEELING LIKE WE NEEDED TO HAVE MORE OF A VOICE AT THE COMPANY WHERE WE WORK.
— JESSICA SIDMAN
THERE HAD BEEN TALK ABOUT FORMING A UNION FOR YEARS.
open up the possibility of long-term hybrid work. The trend has even impacted unions themselves: The AFL-CIO’S employees are accusing the union federation of failing to negotiate in good faith over a policy compelling them to work in-person.
While there has been a small movement of corporate workforce unionizations in recent years, the issue of RTO has not yet prompted a groundswell of new organizing.
The closest thing to it was a May strike at Washingtonian magazine, after CEO Cathy Merrill published an op-ed suggesting that staff who wanted to work remotely could be reclassified as contractors. By late last week, Washingtonian staff unionized.
“There had been talk about forming a union for years, but I’m not going to lie, it really gained steam after that op-ed,” said Washingtonian Guild member Jessica Sidman.
“It was a very public example of us feeling like we needed to have more of a voice at the company where we work.”