[ Parting company with almost every other U.S. big business,
Microsoft says it won’t oppose employee unionization.]
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MAN BITES DOG: MEGA-CORPORATION SAYS IT’S OK WITH ITS WORKERS
UNIONIZING  
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Harold Meyerson
June 15, 2022
The American Prospect
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_ Parting company with almost every other U.S. big business,
Microsoft says it won’t oppose employee unionization. _

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., seattletimes.com

 

Amazon is calling the cops
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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
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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
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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
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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.

Read the original article at Prospect.org.
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* union organizing
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* Microsoft
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* pro-union
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