Could SpongeBob Unionize the Krusty Crab?
Maybe. There's an issue of jurisdiction.
Ask and you shall receive!1
I was not allowed to watch SpongeBob as a kid (grating to listen to, my mom says, even from the other room). I only watched it at friends houses as a kid, and in friends’ dorm rooms as an inebriated or hungover adult. It’s a weird kid’s show. The main character is not in school, except for driving school,2 and instead he works a kitchen job in one of the strangest businesses on television.
The Krusty Krab is incredibly leanly staffed. In some ways this makes sense. There is a sole manager (Mr. Krabs, who presumably also handles all accounting, purchasing, shipment coordination, and outside contractors himself). Then, there are only two employees! Squidward, the entire front of house, and SpongeBob, the entire back of house, including the grill, fries, drinks, dishwa-
I read the title, I know where this is going. You do know there’s an episode of SpongeBob where they unionize the Krusty Krab and go on strike?
Really? There’s no way, they- Season 2, Episode 40a? It’s called “Squid on Strike”? Damn. Uh, give me a minute.
Yeah, shit, that’s an episode where they go on strike. Let’s see if we can make sense of this.3
The parties to the dispute are as follows:
Management of Mr. Krabs Enterprises LLC d/b/a the Krusty Krab, represented by owner/operator Mr. Eugene Harold Krabs
The entire staff of the Krusty Krab, namely:
Mr. SpongeBob SquarePants,4 Fry Cook (but as previously mentioned, de facto entire back of house)
Mr. Squidward Tentacles, Cashier and de facto leader of the coming labor action
The precipitating incident occurred when Mr. Krabs, who by multiple reports routinely engages in extreme miserly behavior, began instituting fees for several workplace infractions, including “breathing” and “existing”. These fees were instituted with no verbal or written notice and deducted directly from the workers’ pay. Additional fees were presented to the employees in writing, as a bill, in lieu of their paychecks. Depicted below is the bill presented to Mr. Tentacles.
The fines are clearly excessive. The workers make a very low wage; by some reports, Mr. SquarePants earns a dime an hour,5 meaning these fines could represent several weeks’ worth of pay. The fines are also clearly pretextual. Four out of the six depicted fines (breathing, talking, standing, existing) are necessary actions needed to carry out both the Fry Cook and Cashier roles.
As an aside, there’s no better way to get your employees talking about unionizing than making them pay into your enterprise. I once worked for a nonprofit where, for reasons of profound mismanagement, employees often had to make company purchases out of their own pockets. You had to do this even if the nonprofit had allocated money for it. Like, in addition the core mission, the nonprofit ran a small food pantry, and when the food pantry people wanted there to be food in the food pantry, they almost always had to buy the food themselves first and get it reimbursed from the food pantry reimbursement account.
Reimbursement then a) required a ton of paperwork, more than just submitting the receipt & an explanatory form, and b) usually took several months, and could take up to a full year for you to actually see any money back. This, despite there being the money for reimbursement! Beautiful American dollars, just sitting in one of several dozen bank accounts designated to hold money for these expenses!
Like Mr. Tentacles is about to do, we began a unionization campaign. The campaign, through which I happened to meet the girl I’d eventually marry, was a raging success because we started every conversation with “wouldn’t it be nice if you actually got reimbursed?” Kids, if you take away one thing from this article, let it be this: Don’t take money out of your employees’ pockets, or they will unionize.6
Upon receiving the bill, Mr. Tentacles immediately began fomenting dissent and organizing against management. Mr. SquarePants, initially skeptical, eventually joined Mr. Tentacles, thus uniting an astonishing 100% of staff against management. The employees instituted a full work stoppage and started a picket in front of the Krusty Krab’s sole entrance.
Mr. Krabs responded by terminating their employment and hiring local teenagers as scabs. It is noteworthy that Mr. Krabs hires three teenagers to replace his two employees, thus instantly increasing headcount by 50%.
What legal recourse do the Krusty Krab employees have?
A union of two workers is still a union, and has legal protections in the US. That said, if Mr. Tentacles had made contact with a larger national union, he could have gained access to critical legal and financial resources. Many American unions specialize in service workers - SEIU, UCFW, UNITE HERE…
Unfortunately, Bikini Bottom is not in the US. Bikini Bottom is located beneath Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands.
The working population of the Marshall Islands is so small (~60k workers total) that there are no labor unions in the entire country. That said, the Republic of the Marshall Islands is a constitutional democratic republic with a protected right to free assembly, and despite having literally zero labor unions in the entire country, its legislature passed a law in 2022 enshrining a right to bargain collectively.
The problem now is that they’re not in the Marshall Islands either.
King Neptune
Bikini Bottom is not under the sovereign authority of the Republic of the Marshall Islands. It is ultimately under the sovereign authority of King Neptune, ruler of the seas.
Living in a monarchy is not great news for Mr. Tentacles and Mr. SquarePants. Monarchies have not traditionally been kind to the labor movement.7 But, Neptune could be governing a constitutional monarchy, or at least have some labor protections promulgated in his codes of law. So, what are we working with here?
Based on “Neptune’s Spatula” (Season 1, Episode 19b) and The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie (2004), both of which I have now watched, it looks like this is how the Kingdom of Neptune operates:8
Neptune is the personal embodiment of the sovereign state.
Neptune is the sole final authority for all disputes and legal matters, which he wields without restraint or consistency. In The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie he:
Orders the summary imprisonment of his Crown Polisher for the crime of touching his crown
Attempts to summarily execute Mr. Krabs for the crime of stealing his crown. Subsequent events reveal that Mr. Krabs was framed as part of an ongoing business dispute with rival restaurateur Sheldon J. Plankton.
The bureaucracy under Neptune is incredibly thin, meaning there are not many government employees, with the exception of a seemingly robust regulatory regime for motor vehicles.
There is no legislature, democratic or otherwise, not even in an advisory capacity.
The citizenry’s fanaticism and loyalty to Neptune extends to literally treating him as a divine being, with “Oh, Neptune!” being a common exclamation.
This is highly unusual for the modern age. Even those autocratic states that do exist today tend to have substantial bureaucracies and present their leaders as mortals. I’d argue you have to go back to at least Roman emperor Diocletian to find many of these qualities in a Western leader, and even then, Diocletian’s bureaucracy was massive. How did this happen? What thought movement, beneath the oceans, could possibly have granted King Neptune this much power?
Oh no. It cannot be. It must not be. It could only be-
Curtis Yarvin, sick of America, has finally won out in Atlantis. The government employees have been retired. Democracy has ended. The CEO of the Seas has gained total power. Yarvinism-Neptunism is supreme.
This is a disaster for labor.
Is there any hope left?
Despite the odds stacked against them, and despite internal discord between union leadership (consisting only of Mr. Tentacles) and the rank & file (Mr. SquarePants), the strike works! Management caves within one day after the scabs fail to perform. Mr. Krabs needs these two specific workers to run his business. He approaches Mr. Tentacles in the middle of the night and they are able to hash out a deal.
Unfortunately, the rank & file has now been fully radicalized to the cause of labor, outstripping union leadership’s radicalism. Rather than wait for a deal, Mr. SquarePants, in the middle of the night, haphazardly demolishes the Krusty Krab.
Mr. Krabs sees the damage and subsequently orders that both Mr. Tentacles and Mr. SquarePants work to pay off the cost, “even if it takes forever.” In so doing, Mr. Krabs has imposed peonage, which you may also know as debt bondage. This is a form of slavery. Given that Mr. Krabs, the notorious cheapskate, determines both the terms of this debt and his worker’s wages, they are sure to be enslaved for a very long time.
Will Neptune’s regime intervene? The most likely outcome is no intervention. This is a dispute involving three marginal subjects over working conditions in a burger shack in an isolated corner of the ocean. The supreme ruler has better things to do. If he does intervene, Neptune is more likely to move against labor than for it, given Yarvin’s soft pro-slavery stances and apparent influence over Neptune. But, Neptune is a mercurial ruler, his word is law, and he has come to respect Mr. SquarePants in past interactions.
It may be fleeting, but there is still hope left.
Terms and conditions may apply.
As you may know, late SpongeBob creator Stephen Hillenburg added the boating school into the show as a compromise with Nickelodeon, who wanted SpongeBob to be a kid in school, to still have scenes with SpongeBob in class.
Yes, his legal first name is SpongeBob, not SpongeRobert, although the show sometimes addresses him as such.
Mr. SquarePants’ pay varies episode to episode for comedic effect, but it is always low.
If you take away a second thing, let it be that unionizing your workplace is a great way to meet women. Worked for me 100% of the time! (I only did it once)
Unless you count the medieval guild system. I wouldn’t.
I should mention here that I am only considering seasons 1-3 and the first movie, which is what popular consensus holds to be “the best” of SpongeBob.
literally wheezed when I scrolled to the Yarvin jumpscare.
krusty krab is a debtor's prison
Didn’t know what was gonna come next but yet another banger