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Just months after voting to form a union, workers at Apple Glasgow have signed a formal collective bargaining agreement with Apple management.
As reported by Herald Scotland, Apple has signed an agreement recognizing staff’s membership of the labor union GMB Scotland, making workers at the store the first to officially form a union.
GMB’s John Slaven said it was a “historic” agreement, and said that members of the store were “a beacon of hope across the world to show that you can organize to make work better.”
History makers
As noted, it means that workers at Apple Glasgow on Buchanan Street are the first in the UK to form a union agreement with Apple. Apple agreed to a ballot on unionizing last year, with the group winning that vote in November.
Worker demands include wanting to have a greater say over pay and shift patterns. According to the report, the tone of the negotiations was described as “consistently positive” by union representatives.
A spokesman for Apple told The Herald “We have long been committed to providing an excellent experience for our customers and teams. Apple is one of the highest paying retailers in Scotland and we’ve regularly made enhancements to our industry-leading benefits as a part of the overall support we provide to our valued team members.” iMore has reached out to Apple to confirm this.
While Apple Glasgow is the first UK store to sign such an agreement, multiple stores in the U.S. have already formed unions and struck similar bargains with the company. The back and forth between store employees and Apple has been fraught at times, with accusations of union-busting tactics thrown around. In the U.S., Apple has been accused of holding captive audience meetings and issuing anti-union talking points to managers in stores.
Apple renamed the store Apple Glasgow in 2020, it was formerly known as Apple Buchanan Street but was quietly changed to the former in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement that year. The street bears the name of Andrew Buchanan, a plantation owner.
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