During a roundtable that Bowles attended in May, a meeting leader said they would answer “questions from the team,” despite not knowing any questions had been asked. “If we unionize, can we lose our benefits?” read an anonymous question, to which the leader answered yes. Meeting leaders then listed individual benefits, such as a generous mental health leave policy, and asked employees to raise their hands if they took advantage of them. “Then they would look at people and say, ‘That mental health benefit you’re taking advantage of, that could be gone.'” Bowles points out that employees would never vote for a contract that robs them of cherished benefits. (Union contracts must be ratified by a majority of members.)
The CWA union filed a lawsuit for unfair labor practices in response to Atlanta’s mandatory public rallies, which the National Labor Relations Board’s general council has called illegal. In Towson, Apple continued the practice but changed the meetings from mandatory to optional, which would technically be in line with the law. Nevertheless, the employees still felt obliged to attend. The meetings were automatically added to people’s schedules and they had to opt out if they wanted to skip them.
At one point, Gallagher says, management seemed to shift its focus from unions in general to the IAM in particular. They tried to portray the union as racist and brought up its history of excluding minorities when it was founded, “without the actual historical context of 1880s Georgia,” Gallagher notes. “Someone pointed out that the union is run by rich white men,” said Graham DeYoung, a 15-year-old Apple employee and member of the organizing committee at the Towson store. “I said, ‘Hey, look at Apple’s board of directors.'”
In Atlanta, executives shared a letter from an employee of the Grand Central Station store in New York City about the union action there. At the time, Grand Central was affiliated with another union, Workers United. WIRED looked at the letter, in which the employee claimed to support unions, but wrote, “I don’t support THIS union…We are absolutely allowed to have disagreements, we don’t all have to want the same things, or even be friends – but the whispers, the pettiness, the DEATH THREATS and the downright ridiculous conspiracy theories and plots to take each other down must STOP!’
The idea of organizers issuing death threats “was absurd in the first place,” Bowles says. “But when it was placed in our store, it was very clear that the intention was to associate our organizing committee with that sort of thing.”
Employees at both stores say managers have boosted the voices of anti-union workers. Gallagher says that when he called employee relations to complain about a colleague spreading false rumors about organizing committee members, he was told the employee was entitled to their opinion. In Atlanta, Rhodes says, a store manager told union supporters they couldn’t talk about the union during working hours, but allowed anti-union workers to use their rhetoric freely.