Ikea's U.S. factory churns out unhappy workers

http://articles.latimes.com/2011/apr/10/business/la-fi-ikea-union-20110410

by GICodeWarrior • 15 years ago

40 22 15 years ago

articles.latimes.com

"The big difference is that the Europeans enjoy a minimum wage of about $19 an hour and a government-mandated five weeks of paid vacation. Full-time employees in Danville start at $8 an hour with 12 vacation days — eight of them on dates determined by the company."

"It's ironic that Ikea looks on the U.S. and Danville the way that most people in the U.S. look at Mexico,"

hollerith2• 15 years ago

Except that according to IMF 2010 figures, the average American makes about 124% as much as the average Swede:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28PPP...

0x12• 15 years ago

That's why you should not be using averages for comparisons like this.

The low end in Sweden is based on the local minimum wage and the vacation days are mandated by law. In the US IKEA uses the room afforded by the law there to pay their workers what they can get away with.

Clearly these are not 'average' Americans or Swedes we're talking about, we are looking at the low end of the curve.

Cost of living for those American workers is likely not all that much different from their Swedish counterparts.

asolove• 15 years ago

Presumably the median figures are different, and the standard deviation much different. Those numbers would be more telling when it comes to the pay of low-skilled industrial workers.

untog• 15 years ago

Looking at things that way is half the problem though. What about vacation days, healthcare provision etc.? They all have a big impact on quality of life.

RyanMcGreal2• 15 years ago

And if Bill Gates moved into your town, the average income there would skyrocket.

rickmb• 15 years ago

Just wait until European manufacturers discover the endless possibilities of the US prison system...

hugh33• 15 years ago

"It's ironic that Ikea looks on the U.S. and Danville the way that most people in the U.S. look at Mexico,"

Not really. With Ikea furniture being so cheap, so heavy, and so apparently labor non-intensive (only three hundred employees at the factory?) the main advantage to building furniture in the US rather than Sweden is saving on the cost of shipping US-bound furniture across the Atlantic rather than saving a few bucks an hour on wages.

SomeCallMeTim• 15 years ago

This is old news, by the way (April). Ikea followed up here in May:

http://www.ikea.com/us/en/about_ikea/newsitem/Swedwood_state...

In short, they plan to fix the mandatory overtime problem, and they claim not to be involved in union busting. The latter charge, even in the article, was weak -- mandatory meetings where management tries to talk people into not unionizing? Sounds pretty benign.

They also denied the charges of discrimination.

Sounds like they hired American management who weren't really on board with their philosophies, and that they're fixing the problem.

Natsu• 15 years ago

It's interesting because most of those conditions (except discrimination and union-busting) are completely normal, sadly. What happens, generally, is that a company will under-staff because they can't predict their workload and then try to make it up with temps when they get slammed. Except that the temps can't do any of the semi-skilled jobs that involve special machinery, so the people can use them end up with mandatory overtime and weekend shifts. They may also be forbidden from taking vacation days. I know a guy who just had to cancel his daughter's birthday party because the only other production worker who can operate that machine was injured.

I don't know anything about how unions fit into the equation having never dealt with that, but I know quite a bit about how production works at this point, and it's not pretty.

hvs• 15 years ago

Unfortunately, unions have a tendency to limit the number of skilled workers that a company can hire due to higher wages required for existing employees.

hugh33• 15 years ago

I'm rather skeptical of any "workers at factory are mistreated, unhappy, et cetera" story that just happens to coincide with an attempt by a big-labor union to unionize said factory.

Where did this story come from? Why are we reading about it right now? Of all the thousands of factories in America, why is the attention of the Los Angeles times focused on a single furniture factory in Virginia?

Some of the Virginia plant's 335 workers are trying to form a union. The International Assn. of Machinists and Aerospace Workers said a majority of eligible employees had signed cards expressing interest.

Which is it? Are they trying to form their own union? Or is an extremely large union trying to get them to join it?

Why is it that the only people they managed to interview for the story were one disgruntled former worker (where did they find him?) and a union representative?

What I'm trying to say is that I think the very existence of this story, and the spin which has been put on it, is a combination of deliberate feeding by the union combined with lazy journalists.

onemoreact• 15 years ago

It's is being covered in Sweden and they did get some response from the company.

"Plant officials didn't return calls and declined to meet with a Times reporter who visited the Virginia facility. Swedwood spokeswoman Ingrid Steen in Sweden called the situation in Danville "sad" but said she could not discuss the complaints of specific employees. She said she had heard "rumors" about anti-union meetings at the plant but added that "this wouldn't be anything that would be approved by the group management in Sweden."

What's interesting is not the conflict between workers and management at a camp, but how similar the coverage of the story is with bad press in the home country for outsourcing work to the US.

PS: Still, it's an old story and the company responded by reducing the need for overtime: http://www.ikea.com/us/en/about_ikea/newsitem/Swedwood_state... " The audit team identified one issue regarding excessive use of overtime. Although the use of overtime at Danville is within legal parameters, it does not live up to the high demands of IWAY. The remark has been taken seriously by the Danville management, which has designed a process to solve this issue and they are well on their way. IKEA will continue to monitor the situation to ensure an acceptable level of voluntary overtime in Danville. "

duncanj2• 15 years ago

Actually, 76% of workers ended up voting for union representation at the end of July. http://www.bwint.org/default.asp?index=3639

This story is kind of old. It will be interesting to see how things go in the future, but unless things change for the worse, it is unlikely to me that any newspaper will do any follow-up.

RyanMcGreal2• 15 years ago

> I'm rather skeptical of any "workers at factory are mistreated, unhappy, et cetera" story that just happens to coincide with an attempt by a big-labor union to unionize said factory.

Unions don't waste their time trying to organize happy, satisfied employees.

hugh33• 15 years ago

Unions are happy to take anyone's money. In fact they'd rather represent happy workers rather than unhappy workers -- happy workers pay their dues and don't cause any trouble.

I know from experience that unions are very good at forcing reluctant populations of workers to unionize. All they have to do is make you sign a little card, and they're not keen on taking "no" for an answer.

MartinCron• 15 years ago

Unions don't waste their time trying to organize happy, satisfied employees

Well, sometimes they do, but it generally doesn't work very well. I remember reading a story about how a labor organizer just totally failed to get anyone interested in signing up because their jobs were just fine, thank you.

DanielBMarkham• 15 years ago

As a former freelance writer, and somebody who lives just an hour north of Danville, it's a really weird feeling to see an LA Times article about something in our sleepy little neck of the woods. Woo hoo! We hit the big time.

So naturally, I'm doing quality control as I read. Where are interviews with management? Couldn't get them. Where are the interviews with the politicians who set this deal up? Couldn't do that either (but no explanation). Interviews with the people who like the work? Nope. Any attempt to try to see if there was another side to the story? Unknown, but unlikely.

But more importantly: where is the context to the story? You know, where you look at similar plants in the region, talk to somebody who has seen this story occur before, tell us how these things usually play out?

You see, there is a great regional story here. But you wouldn't know if from this article.

I'm not saying Ikea is running a great plant. If the trend holds, it's probably just like it was described -- at least for some. For others it's probably a life-saver. It follows in a long line of plants where politicians made tax concessions and begged overseas companies to come use the lower wages and higher work ethic found around here. There's a big ribbon-cutting ceremony where your local politician gets to smile and be on the news, there's a big construction effort, there's a big story about management abusing the workers, there's unionization threats, and then -- unionize or not -- both sides work it out. I could tell you 4 or 5 of these stories myself, and I haven't written any news copy in over 20 years.

But you wouldn't know any of that from this article. All we get is some hack playing dialing for assholes from a phone hundreds of miles away. I'd like to know where he got the list of people to talk with. I'd also like to know where he got the story idea in the first place.

I don't know enough about Ikea to say this story is mostly correct or mostly incorrect. But I know enough about writing and the local area to say this story is mostly incomplete. Not a good article.

duncanj2• 15 years ago

Welcome to the world of corporate-controlled speech. You don't hear from the managers because they aren't permitted to comment. You don't hear from existing workers for the same reason. Only the disgruntled ex-workers and the union rep don't have contractually-obligated silence. So the only opinions you get are the corporate flack, the union rep, and the disgruntled ex-worker.

Reporters often bend over backwards to present the other side of a story that has a left-wing bent. Typically they will find someone in that minority (24% in this case) of workers who would have voted against the union and present their opinions with equal weight to the disgruntled ex-worker, and the tone of the article shifts to "existing workers like the job, disgruntled ex-workers disgruntled because they're fired."

It's possible a better reporter could extend the same kind of protections and anonymity to the existing workers as their Washington counterparts routinely extend to political operatives, but would you then be complaining that none of the workers or managers had the guts to put their name behind their words?

We have no real idea what's going on, and I think it's more in Ikea's interest, than the union's, to keep it that way.

Ikea's U.S. factory churns out unhappy workers

Related Stories