Towson employees at an Apple store in a Baltimore suburb want to unionize. The employees in Towson in the US state of Maryland voted on Saturday by 65 to 33 votes to join the union of mechanical engineering and space industry, as the workers’ organization IAM announced. The result of the vote could not be immediately confirmed by the Federal Agency for Labor Relations, which must recognize the election.
The technology company Apple did not want to comment on the election at the request of the AP news agency. The IAM union and the Apple employees who wanted to join it said they had informed CEO Tim Cook about their plan last month. The statement said that their motivation was to seek rights that they currently did not have. In addition, the employees had recently founded the Core group (Coalition of Organized Retail Employees) to represent their interests.
The employees in Towson are the first employees in the retail sector of the group to organize themselves in a trade union. Apple employees in Atlanta, who were also planning to do the same, withdrew their application last month. They justified this with attempts at intimidation.
“I applaud the courage of the Core members at the Apple Store in Towson who have achieved this historic victory,” said Robert Martinez, President of IAM International. “They made a huge sacrifice for the thousands of Apple employees across the country who had all eyes on this election.“ He called on Apple to respect the election result and to give the unionized employees the opportunity to quickly conclude a contract for the Towson site.
It remained unclear what steps would follow the vote in Towson. Labor experts said it was not unusual for employers to drag out the negotiation process to take the wind out of the sails of union campaigns.
The IAM describes itself as one of the largest and most diverse industrial unions in North America. It represents around 600,000 active and former members from the aerospace, defence, airline, railway, transport, healthcare, automotive and other sectors.
In recent months, votes have been held across the country on similar efforts to organize workers, not all of which have been successful. Workers at an Amazon warehouse in New York City voted in April for a union organization, the first in the history of the online retailer in the United States.
However, workers at another Amazon warehouse on Staten Island overwhelmingly rejected such a plan last month. Employees at dozens of U.S. branches of the Starbucks coffee chain have also voted to unionize in recent months.
