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JUNE 15, 2022

Meyerson on TAP

Man Bites Dog: Mega-Corporation Says It's OK With Its Workers
Unionizing

Parting company with almost every other U.S. big business, Microsoft
says it won't oppose employee unionization.

Amazon is calling the cops

to arrest union organizers. Starbucks is firing them. But the other
globally famous Washington state-based corporation, Microsoft, is
breaking ranks not just with Amazon and Starbucks, but with virtually
the entirety of American business, both big and small.

If its employees want to unionize, Microsoft says, that's fine.

In a June 2nd blog post
,
Microsoft President Brad Smith wrote that the company would not
discourage or delay its workers from forming or joining unions. Then, on
Monday of this week, the company made a joint announcement

with the Communications Workers of America (CWA) that if a majority of
employees at Activision Blizzard, which Microsoft is in the process of
purchasing for $70 billion, signed union affiliation cards, it would
recognize that union. It would not oppose that effort; it would not
subject workers to anti-union arguments; it would not insist on a
follow-up election (a redundancy that every other U.S. company in a
similar position would certainly insist upon).

The CWA has long been one of the nation's most militant and effective
unions. Unlike virtually every other union, it never abandoned the
strike, and in recent decades won quite a number of them, while other
unions shunned them for fear they'd lose. In that sense, the accord
between Microsoft and CWA might be viewed as the agreement of two
unicorns.

But there was more to Monday's declaration than simple harmonic
convergence. In March, the CWA sent a letter to federal regulators
saying that the proposed acquisition raised a host of antitrust
considerations. With this week's announcement, however, the union
withdrew its complaint.

This is exactly how unions should play the game.

As to Microsoft's motivations, the company surely must have concluded
that Biden administration regulators looking at the Activision purchase
were a good deal less likely to rule against that purchase if it meant
that Activision workers were to increase, not decrease, their income and
power.

But there appears to be more to Microsoft's calculations than
derailing obstacles to its current acquisition, important though that
may have been. Smith's statement of June 2nd made clear its stance on
unionization applied to all of Microsoft's 181,000 employees who were
eligible for union membership (as company executives, for instance, are
not). What else could Microsoft have been thinking?

My theory (and it's just a theory) is that Microsoft believes giving
its workforce the right to unionize actually gives the company a
competitive advantage over its peers-most immediately, its peers in
the tech sector, which have universally greeted the prospect of a
unionized workforce with horror and rage. Microsoft, by contrast, seems
to have realized that the young techies it wishes to hire (and, once
hired, keep) belong to the most pro-union generation in American
history. In the most recent Gallup poll on the matter, fully 77 percent
of Americans under 30 said they viewed unions favorably. One reason why
Starbucks's overwhelmingly youthful army of baristas is going union is
that the pro-union sentiment of the young is both a rational calculation
and a statement of values; it's almost a cultural norm.

In his June 2nd blog post
,
Smith said as much. "Recent unionization campaigns across the country,"
he wrote, "including in the tech sector have led us to conclude that
inevitably these issues will touch on more businesses, potentially
including our own." What Smith did not say-what he did not need to
say-was that those issues would also touch on Facebook, Apple, Amazon,
and Google, and when young techies compared those companies' hostility
to worker power to Microsoft's more welcoming perspective, they might
well opt for the House of Gates rather than the Fortresses of Zuckerberg
and Bezos.

Among its corporate peers, Microsoft is clearly a heretic. But if the
company's wager is right-if unionization is actually a competitive
advantage in attracting and keeping young, talented workers-this
heresy may yet spread.

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter

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