The hack is knowing that this will lead many other Bandcamp staff who want a union to look for new jobs. Bandcamp bust their union and do a cheap layoff at the same time.
Seeing that half of the employees were already laid off, I assume most of the others will see the writing on the wall and start looking for new jobs no matter if they want a union or not...
I think the NLRB recently changed their rules and any interference or law breaking automatically confirms the union.
The problem then becomes bargaining—companies (see Starbucks) can drag out negotiations indefinitely. This part of labor law probably can’t be changed without congress unfortunately. The PRO Act included rules which forced companies to negotiate within a certain time window but it didn’t pass.
Not really - if you are salaried worker - you get paid even if the project that you are working on fails. You trade potential profit for stability.
But if you are a founder/investor who works on your own stuff then you will lose your own money if the project fails.
No, if you don’t generate surplus value. You get fired. One project sure, maybe your ROI window for your employer is higher than that. But it still holds true.
Having people produce something and not paying them what it is worth so someone else can profit - is exploitation.
Remove the prejudice from the word. Just like if you “exploit a coal seam” or “exploit sunlight to generate electricity”. You are deriving value from something where the benefit is more than the cost. When the exploitation crosses a human, it (rightly) takes on a negative connotation.
Exploiting the egg farmer, I suppose. Just seems nonsensical. Every trade benefits both parties more than the trade value. Otherwise the trade wouldn't happen.
Being sold a job working for a specific salary at 40 hours a week, and then being told to work 80+ hours a week without overtime in order to keep your job, and having all trace of your work removed from the credits if you leave. That's how the games industry works.
Except everyone who going for a job in games industry knows about it. It's not like people going for those 40 hours and unknowingly getting into modern slavery in a basement with their documents taken away.
There just too many people who want to make games and budgets are limited while competition is high. There is very few companies that are highly profitable, but majority of people wouldn't want to work for them.
Is it still shitty offer? Yes, but it's people's choice to work there.
Why can't they also want to make conditions better? Why do people have to accept that conditions are bad, tough tits, deal with it? We would probably have not half the safety regulations we have today and people would be dying a lot more on the job.
Because game development is what's called "successful product industry" which means sometimes you have to make 10 failed games to finally release 1 successful. Majority of game studios don't make it and competition is very high which means game budgets is race to the bottom.
Also platforms like consoles and Steam take their 30% cut, then publisher / investor take their 30-60% cut and you also have to pay taxes on every step. Usual game studio that working using publisher or investor money only get 20-30% of gross sales.
Large companies are able to make conditions better and they actually have higher salaries and better work life balance whithin the market, but since for everyone else it's run to the bottom they have countless number of potential new employees.
PS: I am CTO of small game development company and to make games I have to be okay that I'll earn 3x less than I would as middle software engineer in fintech. Game dev is tough industry to work in, but it's always by choice.
Literally everyone who works in game dev are able to find better paid job elsewhere: gambling, marketing, fintech, etc. People just love making games and dont want to move elsewhere.
If you don't like it, refuse to do it, and maybe they'll fire you. Or, if you're OK with it, then do it. I don't really see where the exploitation comes in.
Agree mostly with that, but the issue is that in certain occupations where you have a high transitivity of professionals, monopoly of work, high income, and some sort of power law in terms of outcomes, and asymmetric info that can be on the weak side of the negotiation that can generate high payouts an union does not help so much.
For instance, blue-collar professions do not have much of these, so being out of any agreement would be a huge disadvantage for the worker; for technology in general (talking here about software engineers specifically, I do not know other workers in tech) an union would be beneficial but not critical since this professional has some of the attributes described above.
> high transitivity of professionals, monopoly of work, high income, and some sort of power law in terms of outcomes, and asymmetric info that can be on the weak side of the negotiation that can generate high payouts
I don't know that I really understand what you mean. Not sure why those, even were they true, would mean people should get fired if they try to unionize. Maintaining high income and "monopoly of work" is one of the points of unions.
And Bandcamp CEO Ethan Diamond, who agreed to the original acquisition. Looking back 2 years ago he was making the usual promises that nothing would happen to it, after all his parachute depended on saying so.
If I understand the statement below right, 27 of the union members received offers
> “Of those laid off, 40 were in the union bargaining unit out of a total 67 members. None of the eight (8) democratically elected bargaining team members received a job offer.”
Seeing the headline, and remembering that 50% of employees were laid off, my first thought was: "what're the odds?"
I assume I'd have to use NCR or something to calculate that. I know the upper (rarest) bound is 1/2^40, but it's likely much more likely, and not random.
Given that 50% of all employees were laid off, what were the odds of at least 40 employees out of 67 randomly-selected employees getting laid off?
=B(67;0.5;40;67)
> 0.07103569
[This is the LibreOffice formula: "in 67 trials which each have a 0.5 chance of success, what is the probability of seeing between 40 and 67 successes?"]
One-tailed p-value of 0.07, two-tailed p-value of 0.14. So the odds are about 1 in 7, or 1 in 14.
You might want to ask yourself "Do I really believe that, if I thought I might be about to get fired, that would have no influence on whether I tried to join a union?" [Answering this question in the negative means you can justify using the one-tailed p-value, but it also means the odds of getting fired should be substantially above 50%.]
Note also that this number shifts substantially as you move the odds of getting laid off away from 50%. At 53%, you have a one-tailed value of 16.44%. At 47%, it's 2.5%.
There’s an implicit assumption that the layoffs were evenly distributed and that the union bargaining team was also evenly distributed within the organization. If those aren’t true, this analysis is going to give deceiving results (could be either direction).
And also that the union employees were identical to others -- which is kinda demonstrably false. People who self-select as union leaders are likely to be different from the other employees in various relevant ways.
Modelling any of these assumptions yields an arbitrary probability of your own choosing.
Isn't this a statistical catch-22? If being in a union increases the odds of getting fired… well, then there's nothing to discuss because that's illegal. And if it should decrease it because of fear of legal retaliation, wouldn't that make it less likely that this happened randomly.
This feels like the wrong conclusion to draw (especially the second part), but I suck at statistics so someone please explain where I'm off.
> Isn't this a statistical catch-22? If being in a union increases the odds of getting fired… well, then there's nothing to discuss because that's illegal.
Extreme example: suppose a company has 100 employees. Four of them are in the union bargaining team and they just happen to all work for the widgets department because of an accident of history or randomness etc. The widgets department has 10 people overall.
Now the company decides for business reasons entirely unrelated to unions, that thanks to GPT they don't need so many people in the widgets department. So they fire 8 people from widgets. Assume further that they went out of their way to protect the union bargainers: of those 8 people fired, only 2 are in the union bargaining team. (That means that the remaining 2 widgets people are both union bargainers.)
Even though the company went out of their way to protect the union bargainers, statistically they only laid off 8% of the company, but 50% of union bargainers. Would that be illegal or even unfair?
(In the real world, I am fairly sure that union bargainers are concentrated in some departments. Mostly because it attracts certain kinds of people, and different departments also attract certain kinds of people.
But, of course, I have no clue what the reality inside of Bandcamp was like. I'm just speculating about hypothetical examples.)
I'm not sure. Simpson's Paradox is even more confusing, if I remember right.
My example crucially hinges on the company being able to convincingly argue that they singled out that particular widget department for reasons unrelated to the union. If they can't make that argument, or someone even manages to proof that they fired from the widget department _because_ of the union people, then they would be in deep trouble.
-----widgets team-----
P(lose job | bargainer) 50%
P(lose job | not bargainer) 100%
-----everyone else----
P(lose job | bargainer) NaN
P(lose job | not bargainer) 0%
----------------------
Simpson's paradox in its prototypical form occurs when the comparison drawn in the top table (of just one cell) is reversed in every cell of the bottom table. (Which has two cells, here.)
This isn't the cleanest example, since the comparison at the bottom can't be drawn at all. But the way the problem is narrated, it would counterfactually have exhibited the paradox.
It would not be illegal if that was the genuine business reasoning. If they quickly rehired people to those roles it would likely not hold up as legal.
One thing you might not have considered is that some notion of "dissatisfaction w/ job" would increase both the likelihood of you wanting to join a union and your employer wanting to fire you or lay you off.
Edit: also, another confounding factor that hasn't been discussed is job role/department. Layoffs and union membership are definitely not evenly distributed across role/department, but there is not enough info in the article to know if the layoffs were targeting specific roles or uniform across the company.
Higher odds of getting fired increase the odds that you will seek to join a union. So you'd always expect layoffs to hit proto-unions especially hard regardless of whether proto-union membership is considered at all. It's not a catch-22.
Are you saying anything I didn't already point out in this paragraph?
>> You might want to ask yourself "Do I really believe that, if I thought I might be about to get fired, that would have no influence on whether I tried to join a union?"
Being a union bargainer is different from just being a member of a union? I would assume it takes more lead time than most people in the 'about to get fired' scenario have?
I think that's probably true in general, but if the whole union movement at the company is fairly new I don't think it necessarily applies (or is at least severely tempered).
You've computed the odds that at least 40 of the 67 union members get laid off, bargaining team member or not.
You actually want the odds of a specific set of 40 individuals getting laid off. It looks like Bandcamp had 118 employees and 60 layoffs per various news outlets (and on the wikipedia page [0]). Assuming each employee was equally likely to get laid off given the target retention [1], you could compute this from the binomial distribution using "number of ways to predetermine those 40 are getting laid off, plus 20 from the remainder, divided by number of ways to select 60 individuals out of 118".
Or, more concisely, (78 choose 20) / (118 choose 60), which is actually closer to 10^-16 (2 orders of magnitude more unlikely than the simple approximation of 2^-40, which assumes an infinitely large pool).
> You've computed the odds that at least 40 of the 67 union members get laid off, bargaining team member or not.
Well, close. I've computed the odds that at least 40 of a group of 67 special people get laid off.
There is another comment in this thread suggesting that 67 is the number of bargaining team members. I don't know, because I haven't read the article. So my calculation might or might not be right, depending on whether you interpreted the article correctly or the handful of people taking the other position did. My interpretation was that 40 out of 67 union members got fired, which appears to have been wrong.
However...
> You actually want the odds of a specific set of 40 individuals getting laid off.
I definitely don't want that. You never want to make a comparison against a specific outcome when you ask "what are the odds?" like this. All specific outcomes are rare, so that question will never tell you anything informative. (I almost wrote "will never tell you anything useful", but if what you're looking for is a scapegoat, you might find the calculation you propose useful for that. It's not useful for anything else, and frankly it's a disgrace that you suggested it.)
edit:
This is what the article says:
> “On Monday, October 16, 2023 over half of Bandcamp was laid off as a result of Epic Games’ divestiture to Songtradr,” Bandcamp United said in a statement. “Of those laid off, 40 were in the union bargaining unit out of a total 67 members. None of the eight (8) democratically elected bargaining team members received a job offer.”
So it looks like there are these groups:
- bandcamp employees (number unknown)
- union members (number unknown)
- union members on the bargaining team (67)
- union members on the bargaining team who got laid off (40)
- union members elected to the bargaining team (8)
- union members elected to the bargaining team, who got laid off (8)
This suggests that the calculation I gave was the same one that was sought, and also that the base rate, as far as we believe in it, was over 50%. Remember that shifting the odds of being fired from 50% to 53% more than doubled the odds of seeing the pattern we did see.
The calculation you provided is probably more closely represented as "what is the likelihood that the outcomes affecting the union were random happenstance, versus the union members being singled out".
I incorrectly conflated the number of laid off union members with the total number of "special" individuals, while only 8 of them were actually "special" (i.e. democratically elected bargaining team members). It'd be more accurate to describe that probability of the impact to the bargaining team as (110 choose 52) / (118 choose 60) which comes out to about 0.35%, not too far off from the 2^-8 estimate (0.4%) that your approach of using the binomial distribution on this same set would result in. Both approaches would yield similar results, and the result is still somewhat in the realm of plausible deniability.
> All specific outcomes are rare, so that question will never tell you anything informative.
I'm not describing any specific outcomes in this case, though. You could throw up your hands and say "oh, we laid off these specific 60 people, there's only a 10^-34 chance of picking exactly those 60 people out of 118". That would absolutely be useless.
I'm describing the event that "all of this one group got laid off" as a subset of the space of possible outcomes given what we observed, and ascribing a probability to that event.
I will admit I used the wrong inputs, but I stand by my approach.
still not legitimate, because then any laying of on union members/leaders could be legitimized that way
in any country which properly enforces labor protection law laying of any union leaders without the agreement of the union is extremely hard and requires missteps of the members like e.g. stealing. Or really unusual situations like you lay of half of the members and over half of the members have young children (or e.g. are disabled, project leaders etc.) but non of the union members have any of that. The likelihood of which is basically 0 in practice.
That sounds plausible as a rationale. In my experience "bad culture fit" has been used as a stand in for "I don't want this person working here and I don't want to explain why" about 80% of the time.
The reason is often racism. This time it could legitimately be illegal union busting.
If that went to an arbitration, the HR would have some difficulty unless they could show a paper trail (eg emails in which people expressed concern about the cultural fit of these individuals) ahead of time. They could of course have paved the way by preparing such a trail ahead of time…
But that would lead the way to the question of why this was a redundancy rather than dismissal for cause.
Im not any sort of lawyer let alone an employment lawyer, but I’m sure there are some employment lawyers getting in touch with these folks now to test their interest in pushing a case.
if these employees were focused on the organization efforts it seems reasonable that it would be pretty easy to show them as subpar performers against the corporate-oriented performance expectations, compared to others who were focused only on their work tasks. Stacked Ranking is reprehensible but not illegal.
There's probably a performance component as well. If you're high performing, can pick whatever job they want, and therefore get paid well above your peers, why would want to join a union?
No. Unions are for protecting employees against abusive employers.
Your highest performing state is temporary. There will be times where you’ll have off days. You will deal with death in the family. You will be eventually injured. If you aren’t already disabled, you will eventually be (this is just old age). You may become a parent. You might immigrate and come under restrictive visa. You’re a human being with fluctuating states, same as everyone else, and an abusive employer shouldn’t get to power trip over you just because they don’t think it’s legitimate enough for them or something.
So yes, there’s a lot of reasons why a “high performer” might want to be in a union. There’s a lot of life shit we all go through.
Edited to add: this is not the mention your employer might just pull some crap like nepotizing a promotion over you, where a union would come in handy handy!
Is it "abusive" for employers to fire/not pay you if you're away for weeks, or underperforming for months? The terms of the exchange is your time for money. The company isn't a charity.
Even if you think there should be a social safety net for these types of circumstances, it makes little sense for employers to provide it. For one, it has the usual problems of tying important services to employment, similar to how healthcare is in the US. It also puts an undue burden on small businesses. You run a 10 person startup and one of your employees got a long term disability? Congratulations, you have to now find a replacement AND continue paying them. Large companies have law of large numbers on their side, but as an unlucky small business that's 10% of your payroll.
>Edited to add: this is not the mention your employer might just pull some crap like nepotizing a promotion over you, where a union would come in handy handy!
1. has there been a good track record of unions being able to successfully prevent cases like these?
2. Given the level of corruption associated with unions, at least in the US, you're just replacing one problem with another.
> The terms of the exchange is your time for money.
So the contract only covers time? Not actual work, but only time? Do I get to spend the time how I want as long as there is a paper trail that it was your time I just wasted?
> The company isn't a charity.
Yet both are legal and social constructs and not something you can make up on the fly to fit your personal preferences.
> it makes little sense for employers to provide it.
I have been worked to exhaustion for one employer. You don't get to reap the profits and socialize the costs, that only incentivizes more abuse.
> You run a 10 person startup and one of your employees got a long term disability?
So if that person was you would you fire yourself and move onto the street in front of your former business?
This is why we need to both good private (insurance) and public (social benefit) safety net programs in place.
In the case of a small startup, long term disability insurance should cover the living costs of that disability. Yes, that person should be let go, even a founder, if they are unable to perform their duties. But they shouldn't be kicked the street, and the company also shouldn't be on the hook for their care. Either through premiums or taxes, this situation should be accounted for ahead of time. Employment shouldn't be a lifetime obligation of a company.
>So the contract only covers time? Not actual work, but only time? Do I get to spend the time how I want as long as there is a paper trail that it was your time I just wasted?
I'm not sure whether this is supposed to be gotcha at my wording, but it's pretty obvious that if you're paying for someone's time, there's an expectation that they're doing what you want them to do. Otherwise it's like ordering an airbnb but you don't get to use it.
>Yet both are legal and social constructs and not something you can make up on the fly to fit your personal preferences.
Let's go with the legal construct then. Most companies are not in fact "charities" as defined in Internal Revenue Code (26 U.S.C. § 501(c)).
>I have been worked to exhaustion for one employer.
No one is forcing you to work "to exhaustion".
>You don't get to reap the profits and socialize the costs, that only incentivizes more abuse.
If you read my previous comment carefully you'd note that I was only against leaving the responsibility of providing those services to companies. That does not preclude companies paying for those services in some way. Most developed countries don't leave the responsibility of providing healthcare to companies, and instead use a combination of public/private insurance schemes that companies and individuals pay into. Are you against that as well, because that would allow companies to "reap the profits and socialize the costs"?
>So if that person was you would you fire yourself and move onto the street in front of your former business?
In reality there are other considerations for key employees like the CEO which complicates this, but in principle? Yes. The CEO has a fiduciary duty to shareholders and if he's incapacitated and unable to fulfill his duties he should step down rather than using the company as a personal rainy day fund.
> I'm not sure whether this is supposed to be gotcha at my wording, but it's pretty obvious that if you're paying for someone's time, there's an expectation that they're doing what you want them to do.
It was indeed a good question, getting you closer to the truth: No, the employee isn't getting paid for time. No, the employee isn't getting paid for results. The employee is getting paid for fulfilling their terms of an employment contract which may include terms regarding time, results, and benefits that treat the employee as a human being, rather than a cog.
So the main reason to give such benefits to an employee of yours would be because the contract you signed says you have to.
My experience with underperforming workers is that often it is directly the result of poor management. I’ve seen entire teams underperform because of some arbitrary decision from a director. Changing priorities at times when it was guaranteed to remove momentum, or worse, destroy moral. I’ve seen individuals underperform as their manager interrupts them at a concentration destroying cadence. Hell, just 2 well placed meetings can completely ruin a developer’s productivity for an entire day. And then there’s environmental problems. I sat in a cube where the accoustics were such that one particular cube far away sounded like the person was in my cube. I tell you that was hard to ignore. I also once sat somewhere where sales constantly was walking past me. That led to many frustrated hours, and if they didn’t work 2 hours earlier than me, so I could start getting things done at 3pm I don’t know I could have done anything in that job.
So maybe firing someone for underperforming is abusive?
> Unions are for protecting employees against abusive employers.
That's one important role of unions, but it's not the only one. The primary purpose of unions is to allow employees to negotiate with employers on a more equal playing field. Without unions, the power imbalance generally ensures that employees are at a disadvantage when it comes to negotiating a fair deal.
Unions are a protection for both high performers and low performers.
I don't think they should offer protection for non-performers – outside of situations where a life event has mad a performer a non-performer for some reasonable amount of time.
Admission? Like the commenter is some kind of representative?
And while unions aren't homogenous, they generally don't protect incompetence. I've known people in unions that got fired for poor performance, generally. But if I was a cook and cut off a finger while making some company profitable, my performance would certainly suffer while it was healing, and lots of companies world very much rather stop paying me. So in that case yes, I very much hope that a union would protect people from that performance-related loss of employment.
> And while unions aren't homogenous, they generally don't protect incompetence
They tend to insist on due process for adverse actions, and management tend to hold out the idea that being able to dismiss arbitrarily without evidence or process is essential to efficiently dealing with incompetence.
Your assertion tends to rely on your anecdata which tends to not be any more useful than anybody else's. I've known a huge number of people in various unions and this simply does not reflect any reality I've experienced in 25 years of work experience.
I've known people who managed union employees. While being walked out (fired) for bad performance, they learned the magic words "I have a drug problem". Automatically reverses firing, employee goes to some (company paid rehab) for 1-3 months, gets their job back. They just use this as an option to keep their job, they dont even care. Every "compassionate" benefit you offer will be equally exploited by losers. It seems to me a zero-sum game.
The exceptional number of people I've known in Unions for decades are mostly career professionals with good professional ethics. Your anecdata vs mine. I hear garbage like that from anti-union people but have never seen that in reality. Is it a union for bank robbers?
Regardless of whether as a high performer, joining a union is actually better for you in the long term, the fact that there's a plausible case against it makes it more likely that pro union employees will be disproportionately affected. Not everyone is 100% bought into unions so I'd expect these factors to play a significant role
This was so much more than a job to many of them, just like Bandcamp is more than an e-commerce platform. Bandcamp employed a lot of people who had been there for 5+ years and contributed heavily to its role as cornerstone and defender of independent music. To them, it was as much an extension of their identities as it was a job, and they saw protecting Bandcamp as being equal to protecting independent music. The union came about after they were sold to Epic in an effort to protect not only themselves but also the company and everything it did and represented. Clearly, they were right to be distrustful.
>Not every talented person is motivated by greed for personal wealth and status.
What I said doesn't require everyone to be "motivated by greed for personal wealth and status". The effect will still be present even if only a fraction of people behave that way.
Of course? The most famously talented people their lives teaching, mentoring and otherwise trying to lift up those around them. Could any person be an effective leader if they didn't enjoy the challenge of working with people with different values and motivations to themselves? I've certainly never seen one.
Because unions protect everyone in ways that don't directly relate to pay scale. They help defend against abusive time-off, on-call, or surveillance practices, advocate for pro-worker policies like parental, bereavement, and sick leave, help prevent employees from being fired for using these benefits...
Why do some of the most highly-paid people (actors) join a union and join the picket line? Even if you are high performing, joining up with other workers increases your bargaining position. Why did Steve Jobs join up with Adobe to stop poaching when they were highly sought after work places? Because even if you're a behemoth, you can be stronger in a union.
>Why do some of the most highly-paid people (actors) join a union and join the picket line? Even if you are high performing, joining up with other workers increases your bargaining position.
Perhaps, but there's also a real chance that the union structure you end up with ends up being net negative for top earners. If you're in the top 10%, what makes you think the bottom 90% won't vote for policies that end up redistributing your wages to them?
Also as I said in my other comment[1], whether this is actually true is irrelevant. All that matters is that it sounds plausible and some fraction of people believe it. Perception is reality in this case.
> If you're in the top 10%, what makes you think the bottom 90% won't vote for policies that end up redistributing your wages to them?
We already have the bottom 10% (executives) doing that. We would need evidence to be convinced that your scenario would plausibly happen if workers had more power and executives less.
I will share an anecdote. A friend of mine, his dad owned a construction company. I was talking to him at a party and made a comment that was fairly anti union thinking he’d agree with the sentiment. His response was he loved unions because they gave him access to the best workers. He had 2 unions represented in his company, and his experience was that union workers were objectively better than non union workers. This surprised me because I couldn’t fathom a world where a capitalist would prefer to have unions in his company.
As to why a talented free agent would want to join a union. It seems to me that in an industry with strong union presence then union is obvious to join. It provides so many protections and adds leverage to intangibles that even high earning individuals can’t negotiate for.
Some of the most important things unions negotiate for aren't about pay and benefits. They negotiate things like working conditions, handle disputes, and the like.
Those things are usually much more important than pay and benefits, and when union negotiations stall, it's more usually about that sort of thing than about money.
I hate to bring up the old example, but it's used because it nicely illustrates the value of unions for everybody -- not just the union members. Things like having a 40 hour workweek and weekends only happened because of unions.
Bad culture fit is hard to argue when those 8 people were literally elected by their peers to represent them. One might say they're as perfect a representation of company culture as you could find.
Competent HR professionals would not do this to current employees because their documented performance record will render this "soft judgment" more than dubious in any litigation.
It clearly wasn't random, in fact, they said as much. It's a cost-cutting effort, and US salaries are generally much higher than non-US salaries.
If you want to know the odds, you'd have to know their criteria. You can't assume that it was random, because it definitely wasn't. (Though, I've seen the aftermath of a random layoff, I'd take criteria'd layoff every day, even if I'm the one with the pink slip.)
Once i worked for a company which had to lay off some people due to reorganisations. Management told and wrote to us that these people would be chosen based upon their performance only.
It was quite the weird coincedence that people who had an excellent performance, but refused to renegotiate their old contracts in an earlier stage, were all laid off.
I don't think anyone is too worried about the layoffs, but these look like targeted layoffs, reinforcing the notion that union members / representatives are troublesome.
At the very least, for the sake of optics, they shouldn't have fired the union reps. Not all of them anyway.
> At the very least, for the sake of optics, they shouldn't have fired the union reps. Not all of them anyway.
We're all making assumptions here, but let's assume they had legitimate business reasons for the layoffs. What you suggest is that they make less optimal decisions for the sake of optics.
In a free-market economy, the companies that make less optimal decisions will have their lunch eaten by those that don't.
I'd say an example of not showing concern for others is, for instance, using state power to bail out banks after the executives gambled with their customers savings and cashed out. Bad corporations are given a lifeline until the next set of customers is screwed.
The free market would have allowed those banks to fail and their customers would have lost all their savings. Personally I'd prefer if they'd bailed out the customers instead, but that still counts as a state intervention.
The idea that businesses operate with laser focus on revenue is fantasy. Businesses are filled with individuals acting mostly on emotions and vibes, people who waste time empire building, etc.
That is true, but it eventually catches up with them. On the whole, large organizations with this kind of internal environment stagnate and are unable to innovate any longer. They then resort to buying startups to acquire products or talent.
Disregarding externalities is the essence of free market dogma. Whether it's pollution, cheating customers, forcing unpaid overtime on employees, unsafe workplaces, collusion and price fixing. It's a disastrous race to the bottom unless "Big Government" puts rules in place to get companies to engage in positive-sum behavior.
And that's the key issue. Positive sum (along with "first, do no harm") behavior is what makes societies healthy and prosperous. Laissez faire free market capitalism rewards extractive actions over positive sum actions with predictable catastrophic consequences.
No, some amount of "free market" leaning is useful. But absolute free markets are catastrophic to society. I'm not aware of any major countries that have an actual free market. They all have laws limiting what companies are allowed to do.
They probably mean in the context of the thread. Layoffs are not a good thing, definitely not with Bandcamp, where the curators and writers are essential. But they are specifically bad in this context if they target union team members.
It looks very much like they layoffs were structured to provide plausible deniability for firing the union organizers and a majority of union and union-eligible employees.
Unions exist for the direct benefit of the employees. Firms can't exist without employees. Why do you think that unions are parasites? Do you think employees are parasites on firms?
Is it not likely that those most vested in unionization, particularly those who want to take on greater union roles, are those who already recognize that their job is in a more precarious position?
If you recognize yourself as an important player in the organization, with a strong individual bargaining position, it seems likely that unionization would be seen as less pressing. Such a person may be willing to join a union in effect, but doesn't have the same kind of incentive to make a union happen.
It is certainly not surprising that the more precarious jobs are the first to go.
Do you perhaps know how this works legally? I'm curious. Did their contracts under Epic say something in the lines of, "on the event of ownership change your contracts are null and void" just like that?
My estimation is that Epic sold all of the IP (name, other trademarks, code, infrastructure, etc) along with the right to be the successor to the extensive license agreements and contracts that they held. Included in this is HR records, which allows the new owner to make offers to the folks that Epic is no longer employing after the deal finishe(d/s).
M&A transactions can get pretty complicated for exactly these reasons; frequently, they disassemble the entire set of assets for sale and divvy them up across one or more buyers, who will pick and choose what they want and then reconstitute whatever they have purchased to their desired degree.
"Hey, we sold your entire department's work to this subsidiary, but we're keeping you as part of the parent company. Oh look, there's no work for you to do! You're all laid off. I hear this new subsidiary is hiring."
That is still a lay off. If the company is acquired you don't get to pick and choose what contracts it had are valid, you have to argue your new contract is similar employment terms or you have laid someone off.
If I understood correctly, they are claiming that Epic effectively laid off everyone and sold some of the assets to SongTradr. SongTradr then made offers to half the previous employees. As these people were not previously SongTradr employees, SongTradr hasn't laid off anyone because of their union activities - they didn't employ them in the first place. At least I expect that's their argument.
Seems like the way the sale was set up, it was deliberately done to avoid any commitments to the Bandcamp workforce. No idea of the legality of this, but if I was a Bandcamp employee that was lucky enough to move to SongTradr, I'd be polishing my resume, because it doesn't bode well for them being a good employer.
But it would still set the /precedent/ that you can lawfully shed troublesome employees who you could otherwise not fire by changing the ownership structure of a company.
#1 by itself is not illegal. When companies move a factory overseas they also just fire everybody. Not nice, but not illegal.
> #1 by itself is not illegal. When companies move a factory overseas they also just fire everybody. Not nice, but not illegal.
It's not illegal in se, but it is illegal if it's done in order to retaliate against employees for organizing, in order to target union employees, in order to undermine a union, etc.
There's a question of enforcement, and there's the challenge of proving that to the requisite legal standard. But assuming the facts are established, it's actually a very clear violation of the NLRA.
Maybe lesson for next time: have some "sleeper cells" in the company that are not part of the union who can slow down development, create bugs, and waste time, accidentally check in AWS creds, etc.
Aside from sounding like an idea my 14-yr-old son might suggest, if you actually want to promote organization as a superior arrangement for software development and tech companies this would make them look worse. Most of us are too busy working to play Tom Clancy.
I don't know about elsewhere, but under UK law this would be illegal - precisely to stop this sort of thing happening.
The new company has to offer employees a "transfer of previous employment" - so even though you're working for someone else, your history at the previous company is moved over with you. So if they wanted to get rid of you, they would then have to go through a redundancy process - which involves explaining why they're letting you go, offering you alternatives and giving you a payout based on your length of service.
But in this case apparently they didn't actually sell the company, so no employees moved. The employees were still employed at Epic, until laid off by Epic. So presuming there was a violation of labor law (in the US or hypothetically in the UK) wouldn't all liability rest with Epic? Unless the argument is that it really _was_ a sale of the company, which probably rests on very technical arguments specific to the jurisdiction.
I think how it gets prosecuted also depends on if there is a way to prove collusion between the two companies in this. It is absolutely fishy that Epic laid everyone off just before the sale/transfer concluded to Songtradr and both companies can currently pretend they did nothing wrong and hurting the union was an accident of bad timing and Songtradr especially looking "clean" hiring back in "waves" based on BS metrics and "goodwill" since it could have just not offered jobs back to people already laid off by the previous owner. It can be hard not to imagine that there wasn't some "golf course handshake" on the whole thing, but proving that existed may be tough to do, especially if the collusion was literal golf course handshakes with no paper trail.
In the US, we reward companies coming up with clever loopholes to screw people over. In Europe they see these tricks for exactly what they are and punish these companies anyways.
The Songtradr press release says "we have acquired Bandcamp" - which to my ears sounds like "we have taken ownership of the company registration" (in UK terms). In which case TUPE would apply, if they were Bandcamp employees. Even if Bandcamp was dissolved as a company, I suspect there would be a case for TUPE seeing as the acquisition happened so soon after the dissolution.
If they were Epic, not Bandcamp, employees then Songtradr would be within their rights to proceed as they have. But Epic would have had to go through a redundancy process (including explaining why it's happening, detailing the alternative tactics they have explored and trying to find other roles within the organisation for the affected employees).
Of course, it's all immaterial as UK law doesn't apply (and I only took a short qualification in it so I know it's fiendishly complex anyway).
EDITED to remove information I had included in the original post
The probability of getting caught multiplied by the economic value of the consequences of getting caught is the only thing that matters in business in the US. If that number is zero or close enough to zero, then the activity is effectively legal.
Yes. They acquired the company for no logical reason, did nothing with it, and then dumped it rather than spin it out because they don't care and want their money back.
From the perspective of a Bandcamp customer, does any of this actually affect their ability to browse, buy, and listen to music? "ruin" implies the quality degraded, while "nothing" implies a neutral progression.
The only degregation here is the layoffs from the torch passing, but I believe Bandcamp still has more employees now than they did before being acquired.
Nearly the entire editorial staff have been laid off, for music fans /artists of certain genres, these were the only people writing about their music. That's a significant degradation. The employee head count bit needs a citation I think, I wasn't aware that Epic had hired anyone at all into the Bandcamp team during their brief custody which would make that statement completely impossible.
what did they edit? im honestly curious as in my perception bandcamp is something that i get a link to from a band and that i then use to buy music. have problably spent a couple of 100 € over the years there.
i just did and almost missed it. it looks like ads for albums except there is a small "feature" string. i'm honestly not sure i ever visited this page before. always went directly to the band site.
to understand my POV better, my usecase is:
- band that i like and follow (mostly newsletter, some social media, rarely friends that mention it drecty) sends an update "hey new stuff, click here"
- i click the link, listen a bit, buy and download
I understand perfectly your POV, but it's not the experience of all of Bandcamp's users, particularly artists who release there, DJs, or fans of niche genres. The loss of the editorial team is huge to these groups.
And it was 118 at the time of layoffs, as you'd see in pretty much every article (and Wikipedia) talking about the topic. I can't exactly pinpoint how much they had when Epic swooped in, but even Bandcamp had a modest growth over the pandemic.
And my condolences for the editorial. I didn't even know Bandcamp had articles before reading this comment.
> They acquired the company for no logical reason, did nothing with it, and then dumped it rather than spin it out because they don't care and want their money back.
They acquired it to use as a tool in their antitrust lawsuit against Google.
Seems more like the layoffs were about laying off the union members. Some CEOs perceive unions as cancer that has to be stopped from metastasis. In countries with stronger union protection laws this move would have been illegal
The executive class exploit the labour of the working class to benefit themselves. CEOs are in general opposed to collective action among the workers beneath them as any shift of power to the workers necessarily represents a loss of power for the executive.
It's probably illegal even in this case, as the US does have some union protection laws. But AFAICT enforcement is very lacking. The typical theory versus practice scenario where in practice they are not really effective.
I wonder if a compromise between "French-style" and "American-style" would be the government taking over the layoff business. Need to cut headcount? Send the Department of Labor your payroll, and they'll tell you who to lay-off.
I can't wait for the next layoff where my newly hired star performers get laid off because some bureaucrat thought tenure was more important than job performance or whether they were working on an important project or not.
I'm not at all "spamming" it, I posted it where it was relevant as an example of a problem I had with recent union activity?
I don't understand the issue with that? It's just as relevant to this thread's conversation.
I might be "double dipping" by using the same example? But I hardly consider a second post about the same topic to be spamming.
So...sorry for not leaving to find a different example that I found relevant to the conversation? But it was pretty much the same conversation about the same issues people may have with unions.
I guess that's a great thought experiment and would be interesting, but given the current stranglehold that corporate special interests have in washington I have my doubts about anything like that ever happening in our life times.
It is theoretically illegal in the US. It's just plausible that Rentseekr have managed to either stay within the letter of the law while violating its spirit, or have produced enough plausible deniability to deter a legal challenge.
Here's the bit of the article they put in the middle after all the outrage:
> "On Monday, October 16, 2023 over half of Bandcamp was laid off as a result of Epic Games’ divestiture to Songtradr,” Bandcamp United said in a statement. “Of those laid off, 40 were in the union bargaining unit out of a total 67 members. None of the eight (8) democratically elected bargaining team members received a job offer."
I can't be bothered to work out the odds on that happening randomly but by intuition is that it's not super unlikely. Especially when you consider that the kinds of people who have time to lead a union are likely to be the kinds of people without important jobs.
> the kinds of people who have time to lead a union are likely to be the kinds of people without important jobs
... Wow. That's something you'd never hear in Europe (outside of a golf course, at least).
For the record, leading a union is an important job, and all that's required to want the job is a sense of fairness.
In reality, many people balance multiple responsibilities, including leadership roles in unions alongside demanding jobs.
The statement undermines the significance and complexity of leading a union. Union leadership often requires strategic thinking, negotiation skills, and a strong understanding of labor laws, which many would consider important skills.
People with high-responsibility jobs may still prioritize union involvement because they see it as a vital activity that aligns with their career or personal values.
Stereotyping people who are involved in union leadership as having anunimportant job is a damn near uniquely American notion. It's the result of decades of mind-warping propaganda.
Applying stereotypes to a person is not the same as saying a phenomenon exists (in this case they said nearly-exclusively) in country. By way of examples:
"Americans are fat" is a (negative) sterotype.
"Americans get poor value for money in healthcare" isn't.
Of course it could do with some context, and some might see it as offensive, but:
"Is America really the most obese country in the world? Well, not quite, it ranks as the 12th most obese country worldwide, but number 1 when considering high-income countries"
why did you dishonestly add a completely unrelated idea to make your point? Because you couldn't make it with the case at hand? Americans are subjected to decades of mind-warping propaganda (in a way that other countries are not?) is not a stereotype?
> That's something you'd never hear in Europe (outside of a golf course, at least).
Well I am in Europe and don't play golf.
> The statement undermines the significance and complexity of leading a union. Union leadership often requires strategic thinking, negotiation skills, and a strong understanding of labor laws, which many would consider important skills.
I think you misunderstood. I didn't say that leading a union isn't important. If anything I said the opposite! Leading a union is a lot of work. People who have a high profile or very busy job just aren't going to have time for it.
> is a damn near uniquely American notion. It's the result of decades of mind-warping propaganda.
My thoughts too. This is going to be tedious for those of us with larger collections… too bad there doesn’t seem to be a way to bulk download from my library.
We've been developing a curated alternative to Bandcamp for electronic music, which also replaces Soundclound and Mixcloud. It's called Formaviva (https://formaviva.com)
We are a bootstrapped team of musicians, loyal to independent music so we want out platform to stay that way.
> Unless otherwise stated, Samorastnik d.o.o. and/or its licensors own the intellectual property rights for all material on Formaviva.
Where's the "otherwise" for people that post music on your platform?
I was actually searching for your legal status (which kind of legal persona you are and in which jurisdiction). I couldn't find a thing on your website.
To be honest, according to our potential misbelief about the world and how it works treating the project as a "sacred child", which might be an attitude very unknown to some of you here, it hasn't striked us that someone would go to look and read the Terms of Service, before really looking at the site, its mission and the music.
Perhaps you haven't had a chance to arrive there yet, but we will take your comment as a recommendation for the improvement, which will be implemented in the coming days so that also "law-oriented music lovers" will be pleased with the law-confirming evolution.
It did not occur to you that musicians would look at the terms of their contract?
You plan to, but have not yet, implement unspecified changes, not for musicians but 'law-oriented music lovers'?
I am just about speechless. May your 'sacred child' not come to term.
edit: I can't find any sign that anybody else anywhere is even aware of this… if what you mean is that the project is JUST you, and there won't be anybody else signed to your project, then apologies, carry on :) however, that's super not anything like Bandcamp.
I apologize if this got transmitted in the inappropriate form.
Could you share your perspective on what would be the most productive terms for the independent musicians and what all would you expect them to entail?
Honestly, sometimes I wonder that too... since most independent musicians are broke and underappreciated, it might be better to start a crypto project..
If you were really on the independent musicians side, the default should always be that they retain all rights to their own work.
That is what was attractive about Bandcamp for musicians, they were merely a payment processor.
I find it so weird to read these stories on how Americans cope with unionizing. In the Netherlands where I live it is very common and normal to be member of a union. Most branches have a union, IT sector is a "free sector" and does not have a union. My wife works as a teacher and she is member of a union.
Or Prospect https://prospect.org.uk/, a non-aligned (they don't give money to political parties) union of "scientists, engineers, tech experts and in other specialist roles".
Umbrella companies are going to be in for a rude awakening sooner or later
As someone who's outside IR35 I can't see the point in being inside rather than just taking a full time role with a company, sure there's some flexibility but the disadvantages outweigh the advantages in my view
There's a common misunderstanding regarding umbrella companies and their relation to IR35 legislation. Contrary to some beliefs, umbrella companies aren't subject to IR35. This regulation is designed for individuals who offer their services through an intermediary which they either manage or hold a financial stake in. However, when you're employed through an umbrella company or a large consultancy, you're considered an employee of that entity, thus IR35 doesn't apply in this context. Therefore, there's no impending "rude awakening" for umbrella companies concerning IR35.
The challenge in regulating umbrella companies lies in the similarity of their business structures to those of large consultancies. They operate nearly identically, and differentiating between the two would require an additional, layer of regulation that could potentially face legal objections.
IR35 itself is more about preventing professionals from departing large consultancies, establishing direct client engagements, and consequently, fostering competition. Ultimately, many small enterprises begin with the business owners personally providing services until they expand sufficiently to employ additional staff. However, IR35 essentially nips that in the bud and ensures the talent stays in the employment pool, corporations can exploit.
Apart from agreeing the IR35 applies to people who sell their services through a PSC I have a very different take on to that…
IR35 is about making up the loss in revenue of employers National Insurance, as PSC shareholders can avoid NI by paying themselves mainly in dividends rather than a salary. The dividend tax makes up for the lack of employees NI on dividends but there’s no employers equivalent.
Large companies use umbrella’s because they don’t want to take on the burden of employing contractors but depending on how the relationship is setup is the umbrella becomes the contractor’s employers (assuming engaged direct rather than through their PSC) and that means the contractor has a whole set of employment rights — sick, holiday, pension that the umbrella is now responsible for
What's the issue if it only applies to contractors?
I'm very pro-union btw but my understanding is that IR35 doesn't apply to FTEs, so no need for full union rights - at least in the case of short-term contractors (who choose money and flexibility over security). Agency temps (on equivalent or lower pay than FTEs) are a different matter and may need protection. Long term contractors are disguised FTEs so their choice again, probably not normally an issue.
But perhaps I'm misunderstanding the law or the point?
The IR35 has been changed so that now client / deemed employer can decides if employment rights can be afforded.
Whether to hire someone as an employee, on FTE or in-scope IR35 is a business decision. If businesses wanted everyone could be hired as a "contractor" without employment rights from tomorrow. It's not like workers have a choice now, apart from looking for a job elsewhere.
IT doesn’t traditionally gafe unions in the USA. Teachers are unionized here and are one of the most powerful political forces. They are also a likely reason why so many people here don’t like unions.
> Teachers are unionized here and are one of the most powerful political forces.
This does not seem compatible with all the stories I've heard about underpaid teachers having to buy material for their students out of their own pocket. I'm sure it somehow ends up both being true in a twisted way, but it still sounds strange.
If you think about it, American teachers are the most obvious example of why unionization doesn't necessarily improve anything at all. An average class of 24 costs just short of $700k per year to the citizens of New York City and the cost is rising rapidly every year. Meanwhile, teachers are supposed to be underpaid, overworked and exploited.
I guess teachers are supposed to take solace in the fact they are very powerful.
That is an absurd conclusion to draw without looking at the details of what the various organizations and institutions actually structurally do in practice.
It's not like the whole system is a magical black box that just does what it does and there is no way of knowing what is going on.
"Buying things out of pocket" was such a smart tactic from the union. Have each teacher buy a box of pencils for a few dollars and complain loudly so people think you are spending much more.
They do in many cases, it doesn't help because it's such an easy PR story. They just ask for more. The objective can never be "stop this group from wanting more money" because human desire is infinite.
So when one of my high school teachers had a projector bulb die but they couldn't afford any more bulbs that year, she should've just bought one and submitted it to the county for reimbursement? Or when I repaired their laptop carts with duct tape and prayers, they should've just expensed new ones?
That's incredible, I can't believe they were all were so stupid! /s
I guess that wasn't one of the many cases that I was referring to, where, when given a supply budget, the union immediately claimed it was too small. It was increased, they still claimed it was too small and wanted more. You'll notice the omnipresent demand of "more" never a specific amount mentioned unless it is something wildly impractical for anchoring purposes.
Of course, no matter what budget is promised, it can be misspent, and the tendency for administrators of all sorts of organizations to only spend on splashy new things they can brag about and not cover boring operations and maintenance of existing equipment is well known.
And in the EU it is probably why they have free healthcare, high minimum wage, work weeks of 34-38 hrs, welfare, 8 hour work days, overtime after, high proportion of part time workers, and highest productivity per hour in Germany.
But yeah, unions, hate what you gotta hate. I personally hate long hours for bullshit pay.
US median income, even disposable income after all the medical/housing costs, is higher than all of the large EU countries (France, Germany, etc). So if anyone has bullshit pay, it’s the Europeans.
The list below represents a national accounts derived indicator for a country or territory's gross household disposable income per capita (including social transfers in kind). According to the OECD, 'household disposable income is income available to households such as wages and salaries, income from self-employment and unincorporated enterprises, income from pensions and other social benefits, and income from financial investments (less any payments of tax, social insurance contributions and interest on financial liabilities)…
This indicator also takes account of social transfers in kind 'such as health or education provided for free or at reduced prices by governments and not-for-profit organisations.'
The USA wallops even tiny, rich Luxembourg. There are some not-insignificant Covid-related distortions here, will be interesting to see the 2022 numbers.
The opposite is true in my experience. The stats are very clear but Europeans never seem to accept that maybe their perception is skewed, it's a weird form of nationalism.
(I'm not American, it's just something that I keep observing recently. Europeans have a much harder time reflecting on issues Europe has. It reminds me of Americans back in the early 2000s.)
Median household net worth (assets - liabilities, not including NPV of future cash flows from personal labor income) in the US is $192,900 according to the latest Fed data: https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/scfindex.htm
A lot of European countries have a higher household debt load than the US. Compared to Europe, especially the richer parts of Europe, the US compares favorably:
I pay 9% of my income in Poland for the public healthcare I couldn't use due to enormous queues. Therefore I pay subscription to the private medical provider, pay for dentistry, for all the medicine prescribed by any doctor(public as well).
What percentage of income typical software spends for medical insurance and bills?
In the US? Having to go to the hospital, having an illness etc can cost tens of thousands of dollars. Other countries pay more per paycheck, we pay a lot more per bill.
Going to the hospital would bankrupt me even as a relatively well off software engineer and even with my decent (work-tied) healthcare I still have months of wait time. In order to get into a doctor I made an appointment in February for a visit in September.
Well, it's not really free healthcare, at least not here in Finland. You're expected to spend at least an hour every day exercising with all the time we have off here to make sure you don't get super sick in the first place. In practice then we actually work 45 hours a week every week.
Would love a deeper explanation of this! Is it voluntary or required for all employers or what? There seems to be a Finnish program called Fit For Life originated in 1995 but I can’t tell if it’s compulsory and/or effective?
Until fairly recently (in historical terms) civil servants were not allowed to form unions in the US. Nowadays the civil service is a stronghold of unionisation in the US.
> Moe points out that Roosevelt, "an ardent supporter of collective bargaining in the private sector, was opposed to it in the public sector."[11] Roosevelt in 1937 told the nation what the position of his government was:
>> All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service. It has its distinct and insurmountable limitations when applied to public personnel management. The very nature and purposes of government make it impossible for administrative officials to represent fully or to bind the employer in mutual discussions with government employee organizations. The employer is the whole people, who speak by means of laws enacted by their representatives in Congress. Accordingly, administrative officials and employees alike are governed and guided, and in many instances restricted, by laws which establish policies, procedures, or rules in personnel matters. Particularly, I want to emphasize my conviction that militant tactics have no place in the functions of any organization of government employees. Upon employees in the Federal service rests the obligation to serve the whole people, whose interests and welfare require orderliness and continuity in the conduct of government activities. This obligation is paramount. Since their own services have to do with the functioning of the Government, a strike of public employees manifests nothing less than an intent on their part to prevent or obstruct the operations of Government until their demands are satisfied. Such action, looking toward the paralysis of Government by those who have sworn to support it, is unthinkable and intolerable.[12]
Of course, how typical of FDR to regurgitate a bunch of mumbo jumbo. Good for thee but not for me. In the end the federal government is just like any other employer.
No it’s not. The reason being the public sector Union gets large enough to pick winners. The winner is the person who approves their contract and budget and is likewise incentivized to grow the Union more to secure more votes.
That famously powerful voting bloc, federal civil servants. You always hear about what the federal civil servant lobby is pushing for and the concessions they squeeze out of anyone who's running for office.
Teachers unions are pretty notorious, rightly or wrongly. And other civil service unions have significant impacts as well. (Not sure why you single out federal civil servants compared to other levels of government?)
IT Teacher (professor) part of a union here.
Unions in the U.S. are incredibly weak. U.S. unions can barely represent, much less collectively bargain. That's why software engineers keep failing to unionize.
My union wants to pay tenured CS/IT folks less than non-tenured English Professors. English profs here had the biggest raise in decades, going from 62k to 80k.
They want to pay IT/CS profs 69k. Where I am (Seattle) that's considered Low Income...
Software engineers fail to unionize because most of them know it’s a bad deal. Tenure in and of itself has 0 to do with your value as a software engineer.
But yes your point is right on in that the unions are useless. In large part because they are a corrupt themselves and their grift is taking a vig on employment.
I think you're doing downvoted because you put words into the parent comments now that weren't there. They didn't say unions are useless. They said American unions are weak. The implications are very different.
"Unions of type T are weak, therefore all Unions are without purpose" is not logical.
A poor implementation of a system is not a case against the system, particularly when other countries have proper implementations of the system.
(BTW I'm discussing things with the opinions given by others. I certainly don't think unions, even in the US, are particularly weak or useless. The president had to take action to prevent a particularly useful and impactful railworkers' strike last year. Teachers in Virginia got good pay raises after a strike several years ago. Writers and actors are fighting for their long-term survival against large studios.)
> Teachers are unionized here and are one of the most powerful political forces.
I cannot even imagine what sort of lens you'd have to be looking through to identify teachers as "one of the most powerful political forces" in the United States.
Certainly the awesome political power they wield hasn't helped to increase salaries (compare them to any other credentialed profession requiring a college degree), or prevent charter schools from eating away at public school funding, or to restore some of the pension benefits that were taken away in the eighties. [0]
That means the teacher unions, public schools, and/or lawmakers in CA kind of suck. (I lived there but I never had kids there, so I don't have any deep knowledge on the matter, except that #3 is really obviously true)
It doesn't mean teachers are "one of the most powerful political forces" in the United States. It's like a tangent within a tangent so I guess there's not much more I'd say about that claim, other than... it's a really weird, obviously wrong thing to assert.
>Certainly the awesome political power they wield hasn't helped to increase salaries (compare them to any other credentialed profession requiring a college degree), or prevent charter schools from eating away at public school funding, or to restore some of the pension benefits that were taken away in the eighties.
I cant speak for the nation at large, but this doesnt track with my experience in california.
Public school funding has massively increased. It has gone from somewhere around 9K/student in 2012 to $24k/student in 2023. With an average class size of 29, that is $700k per class per year.[1] They are rightly scared of charter schools and private school vouchers.
California teaching is a decent profession on average, but compensation is extremely seniority based, with senior teachers payed 2X new hires, while doing essentially the same job (~$50k vs $100k) .[2] this is an internal struggle that most US unions have. Based on US union law, there is one union while in Europe employees can shop between multiple. As a result, US unions suffer from a tyranny of the majority which will sacrifice minority member interests for that of the majority.
I have a friend in a public utility union where the union fought against WFH for IT workers, simply because the field workers were jealous.
IT here is also a priviledged sector, in that it's in most cases an employee's market - few people in IT have their job or the wages at risk, layoffs are rare, etc.
There are some unions for IT personnel, but they aren't very popular or well-known.
There's also the mandatory employee representation (called the Ondernemingsraad in Dutch); every company over 50 employees is required to have one of those. But again, this is rare in IT companies. In part because a few companies I've worked for, IT providers / consultancies, use the 'cell division' tactic (https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celfilosofie), where a company is divided up into smaller cells of at most 50 people, either by geographic location or specialism, each operating as their own company (on paper).
On the surface this is clever because it means the colleagues will be able to know everyone, or a department is specialized, or a company's finances is more secure. But underneath, it means no cell will ever become large enough to require employee representation. On the surface there is no need because everyone is paid and treated well, but at the same time, another one of these was sold to investors and has shifted course, buying up companies across europe now. I think employees would like to have a say in that, but that's not good for the owners / shareholders.
In practice the OR (Ondernemingsraad) is also going to give you limited protection during lay-offs.
What happens during lay-off is they just present the OR with multiple plans.
Plans which include more people laid off but leaving departments where the OR members are in out of it versus plans which effect less people but which included departments which included the OR members themselves. Good chance people will choose self preservation over the greater good. I've seen it happen at companies.
Good analysis. My view on these topics is: always cover your (collective) ass as much as possible, with papers and laws holding your back. Because NOW the company/managers can be really smart and in good faith people, but in the future they might change their mind or being replaced.
Same in Germany but e.g. I work in a company that does mechanical engineering, so I can join the IG Metall. If I'd work for the public I could join Verdi etc. However, I believe there is also no specific Union for "pure" IT.
If I understand correctly, this isn't true. There are laws that make this effectively true, but that's not quite the same thing.
For example, secondary boycotts are banned. This limits the rights of workers and unions to freely associate and mobilize for their interests. That little doozy was rationalized by the excuse of protecting the economy (read: the status quo).
Ianal, and idk if this is a distinction without a difference; but it seems worth pointing out.
I may be wrong, but I think it's the other way around. The law allows only company-level unionization, but there are ways to get effective sectoral bargaining agreements sometimes.
In Europe, we have laws that encourage it. For example, Finland has generally applicable collective agreements. If a large representative majority of workers achieve agreement with enterprise representatives in an industry sector, the agreement can become generally applicable. Every employer must observe at least the minimum provisions of a wide national collective agreement once it's considered representative in the relevant sector.
(Finland does not have laws about minimum wage. There is very little need for them because generally applicable agreements set the minimums.)
I don't. I guess you're right that even if they did, they'd do so without publicity.
I've seen arguments saying they are still against it, because in the long run, if UAW workers get way better salaries/benefits than Tesla workers, they'll unionize or leave for a union job regardless.
In other words: they want to keep exploiting their workers as much as possible for as long as possible.
Just a factual example, in Sweden this year the union agreed wage increase for IT workers was 3.5% against an almost 10% inflation year-on-year and almost everyone is unionised. In an unionised sector in the US this would have been cause for immediate strikes.
In Sweden (and many other european countries) unions work with government and companies to make the business succeed and that success be spread to the employees, this means the bad times are also amortised by the workers as well.
It is not perfect but it is not a zero-sum game which keeps both sides more aligned. I wish I could have had a 10% raise to match inflation, but I have been getting ~1% raises above inflation for the past several years so it kinda makes up for it.
i don't see how uaw bargaining is good for tesla. that just sounds like capitalist logic with unsubstantiated data. wouldn't higher wages at a ford factory will force telsa to match those wages if they want to be competitive in the labor market?
maybe the owning class should take less profit so the consumer doesn't have to take on that extra cost, but unfortunately the incentive structure of capitalist enterprise doesn't work like that.
> higher wages at a ford factory will force telsa to match those wages if they want to be competitive in the labor market
Given perfect mobility, yes. But the labor market Tesla and foreign manufacturers in the United States compete in are separate from those of the UAW's. The evidence for this is in their present labor cost differential: $45 and 55/hour for Tesla and Toyota, respectively, vs $65/hour for UAW factories, en route to $100+ [1].
Keep in mind, too, that union jobs are supply constrained. The UAW represents about 200,000 automotive workers [2]. That's a fifth of all motor vehicles and parts manufacturing workers [3].
> maybe the owning class should take less profit so the consumer doesn't have to take on that extra cost
It's going the other way. Tesla can cut prices to below where Detroit can turn a profit. That matters when the latter are asking for capital to fund their investments.
One solution would be to tax non-union produced cars such as to equalize the gap. But again, that would require a state to trade their consumers' welfare for another's employees'. A better one is to pass into law worker protections for all Americans.
This is not correct. The current UAW strike is to get back benefits the union voluntarily gave up during the 2008 recession because they wanted to keep the Big 3 alive. The union is absolutely willing to bargain in a way that is beneficial to both employees and the companies long term.
What about SAG-AFTRA and WGA? These seem like sectoral unions. Actors and writers move between projects owned by different companies but continue to be protected by the same union.
Can't downvote this due to comment age but please don't use unnecessarily inflammatory language. You and I both have issues with unions but they are not "infestations"
Companies play zero sum games against workers regardless of the existence of unions. Do you know how many times I've heard that a company I work for has posted record profits, but can't supply the yearly bonus because we gotta tighten up the belt on spending?
If companies were less abusive and not ran by sociopaths in the US we wouldn't see the acceleration of unionization like we are.
Yeah American companies go scorched earth against any union activity. The Starbucks in my city unionized and they immediately shut it down and fired everyone. And look how long the writers strike went on- how much money did that cost them versus the cost of just negotiating a little
Honestly I feel like it just must be egotistical powerful men who don’t want to lose control over those they see as beneath them, to the point that they’re willing to do the wrong thing from a business point of view.
Unions in America are much more militant and much less cooperative, much more likely to go to zero-sum negotiations than in Europe. They also are far far far more corrupt than unions in Europe.
This is just saying "union bad" in more words. The recent WGA strike and Teamsters strike at UPS both got terrific results for workers. The UAW and SAG-AFTRA are also very effectively striking right now.
That's not "just" what is being said. Unions are generally good in the US, but the tactics have aligned across industries. Notably, the teacher's unions, police unions, and often utility unions are horribly corrupt.
I believe the union-busting tactics of the 20th century are a big reason for the corruption of many unions: the ones that could stand up best to union busting were the ones management and politicians were physically afraid of meaningfully challenging.
That said, I live in North Carolina, where public sector unions are illegal (no state, county, or local agency is allowed to engage in collective bargaining with its employees). Sure, there are things like the NCAE, but in practice they're all completely powerless - aside from creating proposals which the NCGOP will subsequently ignore in favor of diverting more public funds to under-performing for-profit charter schools under the guise of "school choice," the only thing the NCAE really provides to teachers are benefits that the state doesn't. To quote a comment I wrote last January (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29885392):
> There's also another factor at play: in many states, the power of unions is quite weak. E.g. public-sector employees in NC cannot collectively bargain, which is why they're able to get away with paying teachers horrendous wages. Want to strike? Go on ahead, pay your sub for the day (or your contract will not be renewed) and go down to Raleigh, where the legislature will recess and most of them will literally just go home and ignore all the people with picket signs.
Is it possible that this is caused in part by corporations being much more militant and much less cooperative, as evidenced by what they do to employees when there isn't a union?
If the corporation refuses to cooperate (and this seems to be the norm), the union's only option is to fight.
In the UK we have large unions that represent the individuals regardless where they work. I’ve not heard of company-specific unions here, although I’ve not looked for them either. Presumably companies must still recognise the unions.
Is it more common in the US to have company-specific unions? Are the large “independent” unions present at all?
I would assume that being larger and independent of an employer would make them more useful to their members.
Watching, casually, the news of Bandcamp’s and Moog’s unions over the last year, I couldn’t shake the feeling they wouldn’t work out as they’d be too small and likely their leadership inexperienced.
They weren't a company-specific union but a branch of OPEIU which looks like a general union for what letting agents call "professionals". To translate what I think was happening into British parlance: they were trying to negotiate employer recognition plus a collective bargaining arrangement.
I don't know if their leadership was good or not but American trades unionism is pretty different to ours. Employees typically don't have a huge amount of legal rights and so getting your workplace unionised is much more of a battle than here. On the other hand, America has de facto closed shops which are illegal pretty much everywhere in Europe.
I've worked for a company in the UK which had a "staff association", which was orthogonal to any part of the business (i.e., no conflicting interests) and as such operated as a de facto union -- in the employee assistance and collective bargaining senses -- for the company's employees. While it was recognised by HR, ultimately its functions were incorporated by HR into the company as a matter of policy and the independent association was disbanded, amongst much consternation from the loss of true impartiality.
In Austria, companies can have a Betriebsrat, the... company-council, I suppose. It's made up of employees and they have some legal powers like delaying someone getting fired, they should provide legal health and generally support employees in any kind of "altercation" with the employer/manager side etc.
It's not mandatory and not all companies have it. I once joked, at my first job: "We should create a Betriebsrat!", my boss took me to his office and explained to me for an hour how horrible those are for a company. Companies are absolutely not allowed to prevent employees from forming one and he was incredibly afraid of having one in his company...
The US has an ultra-employer-slanted legal system, where a workplace changing hands can have the new owner firing all employees then deciding whom to re-hire, rather than needing cause for any termination, and being required to act with minimal good faith, to hold a session hearing with candidates for termination to allow them to make their case for keeping them in employ etc.
But, hey songtradr, here some ideas for Bandcamp's new name!
Not every employee is a good negotiator. And poor negotiators get underpaid in a market system even when they are great at their job. Unions fix this market inefficiency by having good negotiators act on their behalf.
The company doesn’t pay for the increased cost though. I pay as a consumer. What do I get in return, especially since I’m not in nor have any interest in joining one?
As a consumer you benefit from maximally exploited workers. This is why rich countries import so many products from poor countries that have barely any labor protections.
In the good old days companies paid strike-breakers to crack skulls and sometimes kill employees who agitated for better working conditions. It is because of collective bargaining that workers got a 5 day work-week, mandatory holidays, sick leave, maternity leave, a basic pension, and the right to a safe workplace. Many have died to ensure these basic rights for everybody.
In the good old days employers didn't have to take factory safety into consideration. If you got crippled by factory machinery you would get fired and live the rest of your short life in destitution. Let's go back to that system. Employees will be free to choose the factory that maims them. The cost savings will surely be passed on to the consumer.
Consumers don't get anything. This is not about them.
This is about workers making sure to be treated fairly and using their power (the collective productivity they stand for) to bargain better conditions with employers.
How else do you want to balance out the power distribution?
"Why should I care if a company I give money to treats its employees as slaves or as actual human beings?"
A minimal dose of empathy towards fellow humans is a good reason, at least in my opinion.
a) they can always go work for another company, that is the main point here
b) who the fuck are you to tell people how much their work is worth? commie much? how about you mind your own business and let other people make their own decisions.
Bandcamp has served me well for many years, but I don't use it anymore.
I would really like to see something like Castopod [0], but for artists! Spinning up a website where you showcase and sell your music should (and could!) be as easy as using Wordpress, either via a subscription or self-hosted – on your own domain.
Being plugged into the Fediverse makes it much easier to interact with fans and build a connection with your audience. It also makes it easy for people to share and talk about a track or and album. None of this requires that you tie yourself to yet another VC-funded startup and a closed garden.
Maybe someone is building something like this already, that I am not aware of?
If you're not a technical type you will not be bothered with setting up a website so that's why I think centralized services will always win.
It's similar to why people don't make their own websites but just post to social media.
I can imagine a 1-click solution that would set up everything. But bandcamp also has this functionality where labels can list their artists etc so I think it wouldn't work that well.
Thats why I used Wordpress and Castopod as examples, as both offer subscription services in addition to self-hosting. The most important part is the option to use your own domain name, so an artist can take controll over its own brand and keep options open for the future.
Wordpress has already integrated with the Fediverse, btw!
People need to stop spouting the idea that plugging into the fediverse is "easy." Maybe for you, maybe for me, but the vast chorus since Twitter started circling the drain says otherwise.
While I am a fan of federated social, it does not solve the problem for artists of replacing Bandcamp in any way, shape, or form. Bandcamp provided a storefront, payment handling, a distribution mechanism[1], and a potential audience + editorial that kept people coming back.
A Castopod for Musicians does none of this.
[1] Distribution of digital media, anyway. Distributing physical media was still an exercise left to the artist.
For another perspective, in Germany, if you are an elected representative of the workers (Personalrat) you have special protection against being laid off during your term. It's basically impossible (technically it is but it never happens and the requirements are very strict). There's pros and cons to this of course.
These are not the union bargainers though but rather the people who represent workers' interest in the company (they need to sign off on contract changes etc.). The bargainers are usually working for the union and not a company.
> Songtradr had no access to union membership information and we executed our employment offer process with full-consideration of all legal requirements
I know this won't be a popular thing to say, but I'd like to take a moment to thank Songtradr for consulting their lawyers and full-considering all legal requirements.
I believe them when they say they didn't legally acquire the union's documentation on membership. But they "carried out a comprehensive, full company evaluation that involved a detailed examination of each role" and seem pretty anal about their legal requirements. It's become expected that a prospective employee's social media accounts will be "evaluated" as part of the hiring process, so I imagine that was the case here, too. (Do you think any of the union members, the union-curious or even the anti-union weirdos ever mentioned the union on twitter?)
It goes on to explain that the "evaluation considered several factors such as product groups, job functions, employee tenure, performance evaluations[0]," and amusingly "the importance of roles for smooth business operations".
[0] performance evaluations were just one of several factors evaluated (comprehensively) in the detailed examination during the full company evaluation
> I know this won't be a popular thing to say, but I'd like to take a moment to thank Songtradr for consulting their lawyers and full-considering all legal requirements.
That's just the bare minimum they have to do to not get sued, is that really thankworthy?
You are here, so you are also HN. There are also other HN comments here that disagree with the parent post just as you do. Saying what HN does or does not do is almost always going to be provably false and tends to add nothing of value to the conversation. I would even go so far as hypothesizing that on any given controversial topic there tends to be a large divide of opposing opinions on clear display. But maybe I just think that because I'm HN.
They consulted their lawyers to be able to structure the buyout and the layoffs in such a way as to have plausible deniability for busting the union. Are you saying that it's to their credit to not have bulled forward with blatantly illegal union busting, but rather to have done enough diligence to possibly have stayed within the letter of the law?
Well, I did say I knew that wouldn't go down well here...
No, nobody should be thanking them for this.
We should be mocking them for making such a ridiculous, offensive and typical statement. As if anyone would expect them to not have the forethought to check where the line would be. As if a company protecting itself in the usual way is a reason for why no actual people should think ill of them. As if we should be thanking them.
Note that all they are saying is they weren't given access to membership information. The only way they could have had access is if it were given to them. When I say "legally acquire" I'm not ruling out other means of accessing that information directly, but the trick being performed here is mentioning this when it's irrelevant. They don't need access to membership information to know who is "on their side".
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[ 0.30 ms ] story [ 368 ms ] threadThe problem then becomes bargaining—companies (see Starbucks) can drag out negotiations indefinitely. This part of labor law probably can’t be changed without congress unfortunately. The PRO Act included rules which forced companies to negotiate within a certain time window but it didn’t pass.
This is true for any and all wage based labour.
Somebody wasting it by fucking up the project by mismanagement or misappropriation is a loss for us all.
Individualism sure is cancer.
If I am paid to dig holes, then a hole is not worth anything to me except for what someone will pay for it.
I'm not going to stay at home and dig all these holes in my back yard and glimmer with glee at all this surplus value that I've kept to myself.
Code is the exact same. Me writing a python module to process a CSV file is not at all valuable to me, but the wage I'm paid for making it, is.
It's not exploitation. It's a very easy trade.
True you possibly couldn’t get that y on your own. But someone got it, and it wasn’t you.
If my neighbor wants a new fence (the Y), offers me $50 to dig a hole (the X-Y) to put a fence pole in.
I dig a hole, i get $50. He gets closer to a fence. we have both profited, who is exploited?
Or if you want to go even more basic:
he wants a fence, he pays me $500 to build a fence, i build the fence and get $500. who is exploited?
Note these are real examples from real life that i deal with.
The value of the fence is X and you got X.
For me it's $500, for my neighbour it's $5000 - because it stops rabbits from eating his garden and stray dogs or whatever.
If it's $5000 value to my neighbour, should I have charged more even though I would've accepted $500? Who would have been exploiting who then?
This is directly analogous to my employer as well, except replace "neighbour" with boss, and "fence" with code. It's still a voluntary trade.
So yes, if it’s worth more and someone pays more then you get more. That’s not at all the point.
But if you are paid per hour and you produce many more fences than is required to pay your wage, you are being exploited.
How about when I buy eggs from the grocery and value them more than they cost me, so that there is consumer surplus. Is that exploitation?
Having people produce something and not paying them what it is worth so someone else can profit - is exploitation.
Remove the prejudice from the word. Just like if you “exploit a coal seam” or “exploit sunlight to generate electricity”. You are deriving value from something where the benefit is more than the cost. When the exploitation crosses a human, it (rightly) takes on a negative connotation.
There just too many people who want to make games and budgets are limited while competition is high. There is very few companies that are highly profitable, but majority of people wouldn't want to work for them.
Is it still shitty offer? Yes, but it's people's choice to work there.
Also platforms like consoles and Steam take their 30% cut, then publisher / investor take their 30-60% cut and you also have to pay taxes on every step. Usual game studio that working using publisher or investor money only get 20-30% of gross sales.
Large companies are able to make conditions better and they actually have higher salaries and better work life balance whithin the market, but since for everyone else it's run to the bottom they have countless number of potential new employees.
PS: I am CTO of small game development company and to make games I have to be okay that I'll earn 3x less than I would as middle software engineer in fintech. Game dev is tough industry to work in, but it's always by choice.
Literally everyone who works in game dev are able to find better paid job elsewhere: gambling, marketing, fintech, etc. People just love making games and dont want to move elsewhere.
Why should people just have to leave the industry they have trained for because of the pigheadedness of their wannabe employers?
Divide first, by implying that some class of workers are not worthy of collective bargaining agreements.
Then conquer, because unions aren't powerful.
For instance, blue-collar professions do not have much of these, so being out of any agreement would be a huge disadvantage for the worker; for technology in general (talking here about software engineers specifically, I do not know other workers in tech) an union would be beneficial but not critical since this professional has some of the attributes described above.
I don't know that I really understand what you mean. Not sure why those, even were they true, would mean people should get fired if they try to unionize. Maintaining high income and "monopoly of work" is one of the points of unions.
Come to Italy some time.
Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37935333
Bandcamp is heading for the dead pool, and it fucking sucks because it's my go to online music store. God damnit Epic.
[1] https://www.nlrb.gov/about-nlrb/rights-we-protect/the-law/di...
> “Of those laid off, 40 were in the union bargaining unit out of a total 67 members. None of the eight (8) democratically elected bargaining team members received a job offer.”
I assume I'd have to use NCR or something to calculate that. I know the upper (rarest) bound is 1/2^40, but it's likely much more likely, and not random.
Given that 50% of all employees were laid off, what were the odds of at least 40 employees out of 67 randomly-selected employees getting laid off?
[This is the LibreOffice formula: "in 67 trials which each have a 0.5 chance of success, what is the probability of seeing between 40 and 67 successes?"]One-tailed p-value of 0.07, two-tailed p-value of 0.14. So the odds are about 1 in 7, or 1 in 14.
You might want to ask yourself "Do I really believe that, if I thought I might be about to get fired, that would have no influence on whether I tried to join a union?" [Answering this question in the negative means you can justify using the one-tailed p-value, but it also means the odds of getting fired should be substantially above 50%.]
Note also that this number shifts substantially as you move the odds of getting laid off away from 50%. At 53%, you have a one-tailed value of 16.44%. At 47%, it's 2.5%.
Modelling any of these assumptions yields an arbitrary probability of your own choosing.
This feels like the wrong conclusion to draw (especially the second part), but I suck at statistics so someone please explain where I'm off.
Extreme example: suppose a company has 100 employees. Four of them are in the union bargaining team and they just happen to all work for the widgets department because of an accident of history or randomness etc. The widgets department has 10 people overall.
Now the company decides for business reasons entirely unrelated to unions, that thanks to GPT they don't need so many people in the widgets department. So they fire 8 people from widgets. Assume further that they went out of their way to protect the union bargainers: of those 8 people fired, only 2 are in the union bargaining team. (That means that the remaining 2 widgets people are both union bargainers.)
Even though the company went out of their way to protect the union bargainers, statistically they only laid off 8% of the company, but 50% of union bargainers. Would that be illegal or even unfair?
(In the real world, I am fairly sure that union bargainers are concentrated in some departments. Mostly because it attracts certain kinds of people, and different departments also attract certain kinds of people.
But, of course, I have no clue what the reality inside of Bandcamp was like. I'm just speculating about hypothetical examples.)
My example crucially hinges on the company being able to convincingly argue that they singled out that particular widget department for reasons unrelated to the union. If they can't make that argument, or someone even manages to proof that they fired from the widget department _because_ of the union people, then they would be in deep trouble.
This isn't the cleanest example, since the comparison at the bottom can't be drawn at all. But the way the problem is narrated, it would counterfactually have exhibited the paradox.
Edit: also, another confounding factor that hasn't been discussed is job role/department. Layoffs and union membership are definitely not evenly distributed across role/department, but there is not enough info in the article to know if the layoffs were targeting specific roles or uniform across the company.
>> You might want to ask yourself "Do I really believe that, if I thought I might be about to get fired, that would have no influence on whether I tried to join a union?"
You actually want the odds of a specific set of 40 individuals getting laid off. It looks like Bandcamp had 118 employees and 60 layoffs per various news outlets (and on the wikipedia page [0]). Assuming each employee was equally likely to get laid off given the target retention [1], you could compute this from the binomial distribution using "number of ways to predetermine those 40 are getting laid off, plus 20 from the remainder, divided by number of ways to select 60 individuals out of 118".
Or, more concisely, (78 choose 20) / (118 choose 60), which is actually closer to 10^-16 (2 orders of magnitude more unlikely than the simple approximation of 2^-40, which assumes an infinitely large pool).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandcamp : "Songtradr stated that only 60 of Bandcamp's previously 118 workers had been offered a contract."
[1] This is by no means guaranteed.
Well, close. I've computed the odds that at least 40 of a group of 67 special people get laid off.
There is another comment in this thread suggesting that 67 is the number of bargaining team members. I don't know, because I haven't read the article. So my calculation might or might not be right, depending on whether you interpreted the article correctly or the handful of people taking the other position did. My interpretation was that 40 out of 67 union members got fired, which appears to have been wrong.
However...
> You actually want the odds of a specific set of 40 individuals getting laid off.
I definitely don't want that. You never want to make a comparison against a specific outcome when you ask "what are the odds?" like this. All specific outcomes are rare, so that question will never tell you anything informative. (I almost wrote "will never tell you anything useful", but if what you're looking for is a scapegoat, you might find the calculation you propose useful for that. It's not useful for anything else, and frankly it's a disgrace that you suggested it.)
edit:
This is what the article says:
> “On Monday, October 16, 2023 over half of Bandcamp was laid off as a result of Epic Games’ divestiture to Songtradr,” Bandcamp United said in a statement. “Of those laid off, 40 were in the union bargaining unit out of a total 67 members. None of the eight (8) democratically elected bargaining team members received a job offer.”
So it looks like there are these groups:
- bandcamp employees (number unknown)
- union members (number unknown)
- union members on the bargaining team (67)
- union members on the bargaining team who got laid off (40)
- union members elected to the bargaining team (8)
- union members elected to the bargaining team, who got laid off (8)
This suggests that the calculation I gave was the same one that was sought, and also that the base rate, as far as we believe in it, was over 50%. Remember that shifting the odds of being fired from 50% to 53% more than doubled the odds of seeing the pattern we did see.
118 (ironically, not 120) per https://finance.yahoo.com/news/half-bandcamps-120-person-sta...
I incorrectly conflated the number of laid off union members with the total number of "special" individuals, while only 8 of them were actually "special" (i.e. democratically elected bargaining team members). It'd be more accurate to describe that probability of the impact to the bargaining team as (110 choose 52) / (118 choose 60) which comes out to about 0.35%, not too far off from the 2^-8 estimate (0.4%) that your approach of using the binomial distribution on this same set would result in. Both approaches would yield similar results, and the result is still somewhat in the realm of plausible deniability.
> All specific outcomes are rare, so that question will never tell you anything informative.
I'm not describing any specific outcomes in this case, though. You could throw up your hands and say "oh, we laid off these specific 60 people, there's only a 10^-34 chance of picking exactly those 60 people out of 118". That would absolutely be useless.
I'm describing the event that "all of this one group got laid off" as a subset of the space of possible outcomes given what we observed, and ascribing a probability to that event.
I will admit I used the wrong inputs, but I stand by my approach.
in any country which properly enforces labor protection law laying of any union leaders without the agreement of the union is extremely hard and requires missteps of the members like e.g. stealing. Or really unusual situations like you lay of half of the members and over half of the members have young children (or e.g. are disabled, project leaders etc.) but non of the union members have any of that. The likelihood of which is basically 0 in practice.
The reason is often racism. This time it could legitimately be illegal union busting.
But that would lead the way to the question of why this was a redundancy rather than dismissal for cause.
Im not any sort of lawyer let alone an employment lawyer, but I’m sure there are some employment lawyers getting in touch with these folks now to test their interest in pushing a case.
Because if yes, that’s not a good look for them at all and is kind of a perfect ammo for the anti-union side.
which you seem to eat up and want to spit right back at people
Your highest performing state is temporary. There will be times where you’ll have off days. You will deal with death in the family. You will be eventually injured. If you aren’t already disabled, you will eventually be (this is just old age). You may become a parent. You might immigrate and come under restrictive visa. You’re a human being with fluctuating states, same as everyone else, and an abusive employer shouldn’t get to power trip over you just because they don’t think it’s legitimate enough for them or something.
So yes, there’s a lot of reasons why a “high performer” might want to be in a union. There’s a lot of life shit we all go through.
Edited to add: this is not the mention your employer might just pull some crap like nepotizing a promotion over you, where a union would come in handy handy!
Even if you think there should be a social safety net for these types of circumstances, it makes little sense for employers to provide it. For one, it has the usual problems of tying important services to employment, similar to how healthcare is in the US. It also puts an undue burden on small businesses. You run a 10 person startup and one of your employees got a long term disability? Congratulations, you have to now find a replacement AND continue paying them. Large companies have law of large numbers on their side, but as an unlucky small business that's 10% of your payroll.
>Edited to add: this is not the mention your employer might just pull some crap like nepotizing a promotion over you, where a union would come in handy handy!
1. has there been a good track record of unions being able to successfully prevent cases like these?
2. Given the level of corruption associated with unions, at least in the US, you're just replacing one problem with another.
So the contract only covers time? Not actual work, but only time? Do I get to spend the time how I want as long as there is a paper trail that it was your time I just wasted?
> The company isn't a charity.
Yet both are legal and social constructs and not something you can make up on the fly to fit your personal preferences.
> it makes little sense for employers to provide it.
I have been worked to exhaustion for one employer. You don't get to reap the profits and socialize the costs, that only incentivizes more abuse.
> You run a 10 person startup and one of your employees got a long term disability?
So if that person was you would you fire yourself and move onto the street in front of your former business?
In the case of a small startup, long term disability insurance should cover the living costs of that disability. Yes, that person should be let go, even a founder, if they are unable to perform their duties. But they shouldn't be kicked the street, and the company also shouldn't be on the hook for their care. Either through premiums or taxes, this situation should be accounted for ahead of time. Employment shouldn't be a lifetime obligation of a company.
I'm not sure whether this is supposed to be gotcha at my wording, but it's pretty obvious that if you're paying for someone's time, there's an expectation that they're doing what you want them to do. Otherwise it's like ordering an airbnb but you don't get to use it.
>Yet both are legal and social constructs and not something you can make up on the fly to fit your personal preferences.
Let's go with the legal construct then. Most companies are not in fact "charities" as defined in Internal Revenue Code (26 U.S.C. § 501(c)).
>I have been worked to exhaustion for one employer.
No one is forcing you to work "to exhaustion".
>You don't get to reap the profits and socialize the costs, that only incentivizes more abuse.
If you read my previous comment carefully you'd note that I was only against leaving the responsibility of providing those services to companies. That does not preclude companies paying for those services in some way. Most developed countries don't leave the responsibility of providing healthcare to companies, and instead use a combination of public/private insurance schemes that companies and individuals pay into. Are you against that as well, because that would allow companies to "reap the profits and socialize the costs"?
>So if that person was you would you fire yourself and move onto the street in front of your former business?
In reality there are other considerations for key employees like the CEO which complicates this, but in principle? Yes. The CEO has a fiduciary duty to shareholders and if he's incapacitated and unable to fulfill his duties he should step down rather than using the company as a personal rainy day fund.
It was indeed a good question, getting you closer to the truth: No, the employee isn't getting paid for time. No, the employee isn't getting paid for results. The employee is getting paid for fulfilling their terms of an employment contract which may include terms regarding time, results, and benefits that treat the employee as a human being, rather than a cog.
So the main reason to give such benefits to an employee of yours would be because the contract you signed says you have to.
So maybe firing someone for underperforming is abusive?
That's one important role of unions, but it's not the only one. The primary purpose of unions is to allow employees to negotiate with employers on a more equal playing field. Without unions, the power imbalance generally ensures that employees are at a disadvantage when it comes to negotiating a fair deal.
I don't think they should offer protection for non-performers – outside of situations where a life event has mad a performer a non-performer for some reasonable amount of time.
And while unions aren't homogenous, they generally don't protect incompetence. I've known people in unions that got fired for poor performance, generally. But if I was a cook and cut off a finger while making some company profitable, my performance would certainly suffer while it was healing, and lots of companies world very much rather stop paying me. So in that case yes, I very much hope that a union would protect people from that performance-related loss of employment.
They tend to insist on due process for adverse actions, and management tend to hold out the idea that being able to dismiss arbitrarily without evidence or process is essential to efficiently dealing with incompetence.
What I said doesn't require everyone to be "motivated by greed for personal wealth and status". The effect will still be present even if only a fraction of people behave that way.
>Actually most aren't.
Source?
Perhaps, but there's also a real chance that the union structure you end up with ends up being net negative for top earners. If you're in the top 10%, what makes you think the bottom 90% won't vote for policies that end up redistributing your wages to them?
Also as I said in my other comment[1], whether this is actually true is irrelevant. All that matters is that it sounds plausible and some fraction of people believe it. Perception is reality in this case.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37942073
We already have the bottom 10% (executives) doing that. We would need evidence to be convinced that your scenario would plausibly happen if workers had more power and executives less.
As to why a talented free agent would want to join a union. It seems to me that in an industry with strong union presence then union is obvious to join. It provides so many protections and adds leverage to intangibles that even high earning individuals can’t negotiate for.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compensating_differential#Empl...
Those things are usually much more important than pay and benefits, and when union negotiations stall, it's more usually about that sort of thing than about money.
I hate to bring up the old example, but it's used because it nicely illustrates the value of unions for everybody -- not just the union members. Things like having a 40 hour workweek and weekends only happened because of unions.
If you want to know the odds, you'd have to know their criteria. You can't assume that it was random, because it definitely wasn't. (Though, I've seen the aftermath of a random layoff, I'd take criteria'd layoff every day, even if I'm the one with the pink slip.)
It was quite the weird coincedence that people who had an excellent performance, but refused to renegotiate their old contracts in an earlier stage, were all laid off.
At the very least, for the sake of optics, they shouldn't have fired the union reps. Not all of them anyway.
We're all making assumptions here, but let's assume they had legitimate business reasons for the layoffs. What you suggest is that they make less optimal decisions for the sake of optics.
In a free-market economy, the companies that make less optimal decisions will have their lunch eaten by those that don't.
In a race to the bottom, concern for others is a liability. Ugh.
But was any of that state 'power'? Or state weakness?
When the downfall of some of these companies takes more than a life time, who gives a hoot?
Lots and lots of companies are starting to be too big to (fully) fail.
And the bill isn't delayed by a lifetime either.
And that's the key issue. Positive sum (along with "first, do no harm") behavior is what makes societies healthy and prosperous. Laissez faire free market capitalism rewards extractive actions over positive sum actions with predictable catastrophic consequences.
You mean like firing the union bargaining team or laying off half your workforce?
And that's one of the reasons we don't have free market economies in general; because they are extremely harmful to society as a whole.
China survived communism because it implemented free-market reforms (while retaining centralized control in the political structure).
I'd say generally, the free market is what makes economies work.
Edit: minor rewording
Yeah sure, why care about the people that built the working machine and their family, as long as the 1% can get profit out of the machine?
The Musk management style is common in this type of acquisition.
Unions are parasites and sources of great evil. Want to control a company? Found one, or buy its shares.
If you recognize yourself as an important player in the organization, with a strong individual bargaining position, it seems likely that unionization would be seen as less pressing. Such a person may be willing to join a union in effect, but doesn't have the same kind of incentive to make a union happen.
It is certainly not surprising that the more precarious jobs are the first to go.
The company is being acquired and then they are choosing not to issue a bunch of people contracts.
M&A transactions can get pretty complicated for exactly these reasons; frequently, they disassemble the entire set of assets for sale and divvy them up across one or more buyers, who will pick and choose what they want and then reconstitute whatever they have purchased to their desired degree.
Seems like the way the sale was set up, it was deliberately done to avoid any commitments to the Bandcamp workforce. No idea of the legality of this, but if I was a Bandcamp employee that was lucky enough to move to SongTradr, I'd be polishing my resume, because it doesn't bode well for them being a good employer.
1) Fire everybody
2) Create new corporate entity
3) Rehire the meek and compliant
4) Sell corporate entity back to original company
Judges tend to get very cranky when they have to deal with shenanigans like these.
The question really should just be in #1 is legal. The extra shenanigans doesn't change that question.
#1 by itself is not illegal. When companies move a factory overseas they also just fire everybody. Not nice, but not illegal.
It's not illegal in se, but it is illegal if it's done in order to retaliate against employees for organizing, in order to target union employees, in order to undermine a union, etc.
There's a question of enforcement, and there's the challenge of proving that to the requisite legal standard. But assuming the facts are established, it's actually a very clear violation of the NLRA.
They were told if they didn't sign a worse deal they would be fired, causing a fight with the union.
The new company has to offer employees a "transfer of previous employment" - so even though you're working for someone else, your history at the previous company is moved over with you. So if they wanted to get rid of you, they would then have to go through a redundancy process - which involves explaining why they're letting you go, offering you alternatives and giving you a payout based on your length of service.
I think how it gets prosecuted also depends on if there is a way to prove collusion between the two companies in this. It is absolutely fishy that Epic laid everyone off just before the sale/transfer concluded to Songtradr and both companies can currently pretend they did nothing wrong and hurting the union was an accident of bad timing and Songtradr especially looking "clean" hiring back in "waves" based on BS metrics and "goodwill" since it could have just not offered jobs back to people already laid off by the previous owner. It can be hard not to imagine that there wasn't some "golf course handshake" on the whole thing, but proving that existed may be tough to do, especially if the collusion was literal golf course handshakes with no paper trail.
This should be illegal but it just sounds like good free market business.
If they were Epic, not Bandcamp, employees then Songtradr would be within their rights to proceed as they have. But Epic would have had to go through a redundancy process (including explaining why it's happening, detailing the alternative tactics they have explored and trying to find other roles within the organisation for the affected employees).
Of course, it's all immaterial as UK law doesn't apply (and I only took a short qualification in it so I know it's fiendishly complex anyway).
EDITED to remove information I had included in the original post
Epic ruined it.
The only degregation here is the layoffs from the torch passing, but I believe Bandcamp still has more employees now than they did before being acquired.
to understand my POV better, my usecase is: - band that i like and follow (mostly newsletter, some social media, rarely friends that mention it drecty) sends an update "hey new stuff, click here" - i click the link, listen a bit, buy and download
And it was 118 at the time of layoffs, as you'd see in pretty much every article (and Wikipedia) talking about the topic. I can't exactly pinpoint how much they had when Epic swooped in, but even Bandcamp had a modest growth over the pandemic.
And my condolences for the editorial. I didn't even know Bandcamp had articles before reading this comment.
They acquired it to use as a tool in their antitrust lawsuit against Google.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/04/epic-games-drags-ban...
The executive class exploit the labour of the working class to benefit themselves. CEOs are in general opposed to collective action among the workers beneath them as any shift of power to the workers necessarily represents a loss of power for the executive.
I don't understand the issue with that? It's just as relevant to this thread's conversation.
I might be "double dipping" by using the same example? But I hardly consider a second post about the same topic to be spamming.
So...sorry for not leaving to find a different example that I found relevant to the conversation? But it was pretty much the same conversation about the same issues people may have with unions.
Some court cases in the US have said contractors with no autonomy get the same rights as employees, has anyone made that argument in France?
> "On Monday, October 16, 2023 over half of Bandcamp was laid off as a result of Epic Games’ divestiture to Songtradr,” Bandcamp United said in a statement. “Of those laid off, 40 were in the union bargaining unit out of a total 67 members. None of the eight (8) democratically elected bargaining team members received a job offer."
I can't be bothered to work out the odds on that happening randomly but by intuition is that it's not super unlikely. Especially when you consider that the kinds of people who have time to lead a union are likely to be the kinds of people without important jobs.
Also can't they just elect new leaders?
The meeting does sound suss though.
... Wow. That's something you'd never hear in Europe (outside of a golf course, at least).
For the record, leading a union is an important job, and all that's required to want the job is a sense of fairness.
In reality, many people balance multiple responsibilities, including leadership roles in unions alongside demanding jobs.
The statement undermines the significance and complexity of leading a union. Union leadership often requires strategic thinking, negotiation skills, and a strong understanding of labor laws, which many would consider important skills.
People with high-responsibility jobs may still prioritize union involvement because they see it as a vital activity that aligns with their career or personal values.
Stereotyping people who are involved in union leadership as having anunimportant job is a damn near uniquely American notion. It's the result of decades of mind-warping propaganda.
"Americans are fat" is a (negative) sterotype.
"Americans get poor value for money in healthcare" isn't.
Of course it could do with some context, and some might see it as offensive, but:
"Is America really the most obese country in the world? Well, not quite, it ranks as the 12th most obese country worldwide, but number 1 when considering high-income countries"
https://www.forbes.com/sites/omerawan/2023/01/25/has-the-obe...
Well I am in Europe and don't play golf.
> The statement undermines the significance and complexity of leading a union. Union leadership often requires strategic thinking, negotiation skills, and a strong understanding of labor laws, which many would consider important skills.
I think you misunderstood. I didn't say that leading a union isn't important. If anything I said the opposite! Leading a union is a lot of work. People who have a high profile or very busy job just aren't going to have time for it.
> is a damn near uniquely American notion. It's the result of decades of mind-warping propaganda.
I am not American.
There are also a bunch of GUI tools that claim to download libraries (search for "bandcamp downloader") but I haven't used any of them.
We are a bootstrapped team of musicians, loyal to independent music so we want out platform to stay that way.
We're also hiring: https://formaviva.com/jobs
PS: I'm one of the team members
From the "Terms of Service":
> Unless otherwise stated, Samorastnik d.o.o. and/or its licensors own the intellectual property rights for all material on Formaviva.
Where's the "otherwise" for people that post music on your platform?
I was actually searching for your legal status (which kind of legal persona you are and in which jurisdiction). I couldn't find a thing on your website.
Perhaps you haven't had a chance to arrive there yet, but we will take your comment as a recommendation for the improvement, which will be implemented in the coming days so that also "law-oriented music lovers" will be pleased with the law-confirming evolution.
You plan to, but have not yet, implement unspecified changes, not for musicians but 'law-oriented music lovers'?
I am just about speechless. May your 'sacred child' not come to term.
edit: I can't find any sign that anybody else anywhere is even aware of this… if what you mean is that the project is JUST you, and there won't be anybody else signed to your project, then apologies, carry on :) however, that's super not anything like Bandcamp.
Could you share your perspective on what would be the most productive terms for the independent musicians and what all would you expect them to entail?
But there is still little hope (I hope)
https://formaviva.com/khoros-records/f-h-l-rmxs
Is there anything else in particular that you would find important to address?
Any potential ambiguity in the TOS will related to your concern will be thoroughly assessed.
The company information has been added to the TOS page as well.
[0]: https://www.cwu.org/
As someone who's outside IR35 I can't see the point in being inside rather than just taking a full time role with a company, sure there's some flexibility but the disadvantages outweigh the advantages in my view
The challenge in regulating umbrella companies lies in the similarity of their business structures to those of large consultancies. They operate nearly identically, and differentiating between the two would require an additional, layer of regulation that could potentially face legal objections.
IR35 itself is more about preventing professionals from departing large consultancies, establishing direct client engagements, and consequently, fostering competition. Ultimately, many small enterprises begin with the business owners personally providing services until they expand sufficiently to employ additional staff. However, IR35 essentially nips that in the bud and ensures the talent stays in the employment pool, corporations can exploit.
IR35 is about making up the loss in revenue of employers National Insurance, as PSC shareholders can avoid NI by paying themselves mainly in dividends rather than a salary. The dividend tax makes up for the lack of employees NI on dividends but there’s no employers equivalent.
Large companies use umbrella’s because they don’t want to take on the burden of employing contractors but depending on how the relationship is setup is the umbrella becomes the contractor’s employers (assuming engaged direct rather than through their PSC) and that means the contractor has a whole set of employment rights — sick, holiday, pension that the umbrella is now responsible for
I'm very pro-union btw but my understanding is that IR35 doesn't apply to FTEs, so no need for full union rights - at least in the case of short-term contractors (who choose money and flexibility over security). Agency temps (on equivalent or lower pay than FTEs) are a different matter and may need protection. Long term contractors are disguised FTEs so their choice again, probably not normally an issue.
But perhaps I'm misunderstanding the law or the point?
Whether to hire someone as an employee, on FTE or in-scope IR35 is a business decision. If businesses wanted everyone could be hired as a "contractor" without employment rights from tomorrow. It's not like workers have a choice now, apart from looking for a job elsewhere.
There's also IWGB Game Workers for relevant workers https://www.gameworkers.co.uk/
This does not seem compatible with all the stories I've heard about underpaid teachers having to buy material for their students out of their own pocket. I'm sure it somehow ends up both being true in a twisted way, but it still sounds strange.
I guess teachers are supposed to take solace in the fact they are very powerful.
It's not like the whole system is a magical black box that just does what it does and there is no way of knowing what is going on.
That's incredible, I can't believe they were all were so stupid! /s
Of course, no matter what budget is promised, it can be misspent, and the tendency for administrators of all sorts of organizations to only spend on splashy new things they can brag about and not cover boring operations and maintenance of existing equipment is well known.
But yeah, unions, hate what you gotta hate. I personally hate long hours for bullshit pay.
adjusting for cost of Living, healthcare, insurance, childrearing costs (free education) and taxes i betcha that statement is factually wrong
The list below represents a national accounts derived indicator for a country or territory's gross household disposable income per capita (including social transfers in kind). According to the OECD, 'household disposable income is income available to households such as wages and salaries, income from self-employment and unincorporated enterprises, income from pensions and other social benefits, and income from financial investments (less any payments of tax, social insurance contributions and interest on financial liabilities)…
This indicator also takes account of social transfers in kind 'such as health or education provided for free or at reduced prices by governments and not-for-profit organisations.'
The USA wallops even tiny, rich Luxembourg. There are some not-insignificant Covid-related distortions here, will be interesting to see the 2022 numbers.
(I'm not American, it's just something that I keep observing recently. Europeans have a much harder time reflecting on issues Europe has. It reminds me of Americans back in the early 2000s.)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_househo...
i mean, i live in the netherlands, and i pay (and it's not that cheap) for my family's healthcare. and it's obligatory.
I pay 9% of my income in Poland for the public healthcare I couldn't use due to enormous queues. Therefore I pay subscription to the private medical provider, pay for dentistry, for all the medicine prescribed by any doctor(public as well).
What percentage of income typical software spends for medical insurance and bills?
Going to the hospital would bankrupt me even as a relatively well off software engineer and even with my decent (work-tied) healthcare I still have months of wait time. In order to get into a doctor I made an appointment in February for a visit in September.
I have absolutely no idea what you are on about, this is not as common as you seem to think. Who is expecting this of you?
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-sector_trade_unions_in_... for background.
> Moe points out that Roosevelt, "an ardent supporter of collective bargaining in the private sector, was opposed to it in the public sector."[11] Roosevelt in 1937 told the nation what the position of his government was:
>> All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service. It has its distinct and insurmountable limitations when applied to public personnel management. The very nature and purposes of government make it impossible for administrative officials to represent fully or to bind the employer in mutual discussions with government employee organizations. The employer is the whole people, who speak by means of laws enacted by their representatives in Congress. Accordingly, administrative officials and employees alike are governed and guided, and in many instances restricted, by laws which establish policies, procedures, or rules in personnel matters. Particularly, I want to emphasize my conviction that militant tactics have no place in the functions of any organization of government employees. Upon employees in the Federal service rests the obligation to serve the whole people, whose interests and welfare require orderliness and continuity in the conduct of government activities. This obligation is paramount. Since their own services have to do with the functioning of the Government, a strike of public employees manifests nothing less than an intent on their part to prevent or obstruct the operations of Government until their demands are satisfied. Such action, looking toward the paralysis of Government by those who have sworn to support it, is unthinkable and intolerable.[12]
It’s a massive conflict of interest.
But yes your point is right on in that the unions are useless. In large part because they are a corrupt themselves and their grift is taking a vig on employment.
If something is weak (like the unions), will it ever be useful?
"Unions of type T are weak, therefore all Unions are without purpose" is not logical.
A poor implementation of a system is not a case against the system, particularly when other countries have proper implementations of the system.
(BTW I'm discussing things with the opinions given by others. I certainly don't think unions, even in the US, are particularly weak or useless. The president had to take action to prevent a particularly useful and impactful railworkers' strike last year. Teachers in Virginia got good pay raises after a strike several years ago. Writers and actors are fighting for their long-term survival against large studios.)
I cannot even imagine what sort of lens you'd have to be looking through to identify teachers as "one of the most powerful political forces" in the United States.
Certainly the awesome political power they wield hasn't helped to increase salaries (compare them to any other credentialed profession requiring a college degree), or prevent charter schools from eating away at public school funding, or to restore some of the pension benefits that were taken away in the eighties. [0]
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32542324 (I am delighted to report that the "Nobody wants to teach anymore" comments are up to 666 points exactly at this moment in time)
Only a handful of teachers have been fired in the last 20 years in California
It doesn't mean teachers are "one of the most powerful political forces" in the United States. It's like a tangent within a tangent so I guess there's not much more I'd say about that claim, other than... it's a really weird, obviously wrong thing to assert.
I cant speak for the nation at large, but this doesnt track with my experience in california.
Public school funding has massively increased. It has gone from somewhere around 9K/student in 2012 to $24k/student in 2023. With an average class size of 29, that is $700k per class per year.[1] They are rightly scared of charter schools and private school vouchers.
California teaching is a decent profession on average, but compensation is extremely seniority based, with senior teachers payed 2X new hires, while doing essentially the same job (~$50k vs $100k) .[2] this is an internal struggle that most US unions have. Based on US union law, there is one union while in Europe employees can shop between multiple. As a result, US unions suffer from a tyranny of the majority which will sacrifice minority member interests for that of the majority.
I have a friend in a public utility union where the union fought against WFH for IT workers, simply because the field workers were jealous.
https://edsource.org/2023/california-leaders-should-focus-on...
https://www.cde.ca.gov/fg/fr/sa/cefavgsalaries.asp
There are some unions for IT personnel, but they aren't very popular or well-known.
There's also the mandatory employee representation (called the Ondernemingsraad in Dutch); every company over 50 employees is required to have one of those. But again, this is rare in IT companies. In part because a few companies I've worked for, IT providers / consultancies, use the 'cell division' tactic (https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celfilosofie), where a company is divided up into smaller cells of at most 50 people, either by geographic location or specialism, each operating as their own company (on paper).
On the surface this is clever because it means the colleagues will be able to know everyone, or a department is specialized, or a company's finances is more secure. But underneath, it means no cell will ever become large enough to require employee representation. On the surface there is no need because everyone is paid and treated well, but at the same time, another one of these was sold to investors and has shifted course, buying up companies across europe now. I think employees would like to have a say in that, but that's not good for the owners / shareholders.
What happens during lay-off is they just present the OR with multiple plans.
Plans which include more people laid off but leaving departments where the OR members are in out of it versus plans which effect less people but which included departments which included the OR members themselves. Good chance people will choose self preservation over the greater good. I've seen it happen at companies.
In Europe sectoral unions and sectoral bargaining is the norm. In the US federal law does not allow that. Each firm must unionize individually.
In the US unions and enterprices play zero sum game against each other. If the firm unionizes, the firm loses relative to non-unionized competition.
Example: the current UAW (United Auto Workers) dispute in the US. If UAW wins, unionized enterprises lose to Tesla.
If I understand correctly, this isn't true. There are laws that make this effectively true, but that's not quite the same thing.
For example, secondary boycotts are banned. This limits the rights of workers and unions to freely associate and mobilize for their interests. That little doozy was rationalized by the excuse of protecting the economy (read: the status quo).
Ianal, and idk if this is a distinction without a difference; but it seems worth pointing out.
In Europe, we have laws that encourage it. For example, Finland has generally applicable collective agreements. If a large representative majority of workers achieve agreement with enterprise representatives in an industry sector, the agreement can become generally applicable. Every employer must observe at least the minimum provisions of a wide national collective agreement once it's considered representative in the relevant sector.
(Finland does not have laws about minimum wage. There is very little need for them because generally applicable agreements set the minimums.)
AFAIR Tesla follows the typical US corporation stance of "kill it with fire" against unions. A sick version of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend"
How do you know they aren't? They wouldn't exactly run out to the press and yell "HEY EVERYONE WHO ISN'T WORKING FOR US JOIN THE UAW".
I'm not saying they are; I'm asking, how do you know they aren't?
I've seen arguments saying they are still against it, because in the long run, if UAW workers get way better salaries/benefits than Tesla workers, they'll unionize or leave for a union job regardless.
In other words: they want to keep exploiting their workers as much as possible for as long as possible.
In Sweden (and many other european countries) unions work with government and companies to make the business succeed and that success be spread to the employees, this means the bad times are also amortised by the workers as well.
It is not perfect but it is not a zero-sum game which keeps both sides more aligned. I wish I could have had a 10% raise to match inflation, but I have been getting ~1% raises above inflation for the past several years so it kinda makes up for it.
how does that work?
Their costs are higher. (So far, I haven't seen evidence of higher productivity among unionized auto workers sufficient to make up for the cost gap.)
maybe the owning class should take less profit so the consumer doesn't have to take on that extra cost, but unfortunately the incentive structure of capitalist enterprise doesn't work like that.
Given perfect mobility, yes. But the labor market Tesla and foreign manufacturers in the United States compete in are separate from those of the UAW's. The evidence for this is in their present labor cost differential: $45 and 55/hour for Tesla and Toyota, respectively, vs $65/hour for UAW factories, en route to $100+ [1].
Keep in mind, too, that union jobs are supply constrained. The UAW represents about 200,000 automotive workers [2]. That's a fifth of all motor vehicles and parts manufacturing workers [3].
> maybe the owning class should take less profit so the consumer doesn't have to take on that extra cost
It's going the other way. Tesla can cut prices to below where Detroit can turn a profit. That matters when the latter are asking for capital to fund their investments.
One solution would be to tax non-union produced cars such as to equalize the gap. But again, that would require a state to trade their consumers' welfare for another's employees'. A better one is to pass into law worker protections for all Americans.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_United_Auto_Workers_strik...
[2] https://www.npr.org/2023/10/19/1206209107/united-auto-worker...
[3] https://www.bls.gov/iag/tgs/iagauto.htm
If companies were less abusive and not ran by sociopaths in the US we wouldn't see the acceleration of unionization like we are.
It sounds exactly like America then.
Honestly I feel like it just must be egotistical powerful men who don’t want to lose control over those they see as beneath them, to the point that they’re willing to do the wrong thing from a business point of view.
That's not "just" what is being said. Unions are generally good in the US, but the tactics have aligned across industries. Notably, the teacher's unions, police unions, and often utility unions are horribly corrupt.
That said, I live in North Carolina, where public sector unions are illegal (no state, county, or local agency is allowed to engage in collective bargaining with its employees). Sure, there are things like the NCAE, but in practice they're all completely powerless - aside from creating proposals which the NCGOP will subsequently ignore in favor of diverting more public funds to under-performing for-profit charter schools under the guise of "school choice," the only thing the NCAE really provides to teachers are benefits that the state doesn't. To quote a comment I wrote last January (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29885392):
> There's also another factor at play: in many states, the power of unions is quite weak. E.g. public-sector employees in NC cannot collectively bargain, which is why they're able to get away with paying teachers horrendous wages. Want to strike? Go on ahead, pay your sub for the day (or your contract will not be renewed) and go down to Raleigh, where the legislature will recess and most of them will literally just go home and ignore all the people with picket signs.
If the corporation refuses to cooperate (and this seems to be the norm), the union's only option is to fight.
Is it more common in the US to have company-specific unions? Are the large “independent” unions present at all?
I would assume that being larger and independent of an employer would make them more useful to their members.
Watching, casually, the news of Bandcamp’s and Moog’s unions over the last year, I couldn’t shake the feeling they wouldn’t work out as they’d be too small and likely their leadership inexperienced.
I don't know if their leadership was good or not but American trades unionism is pretty different to ours. Employees typically don't have a huge amount of legal rights and so getting your workplace unionised is much more of a battle than here. On the other hand, America has de facto closed shops which are illegal pretty much everywhere in Europe.
It's not mandatory and not all companies have it. I once joked, at my first job: "We should create a Betriebsrat!", my boss took me to his office and explained to me for an hour how horrible those are for a company. Companies are absolutely not allowed to prevent employees from forming one and he was incredibly afraid of having one in his company...
But, hey songtradr, here some ideas for Bandcamp's new name!
* Banned Camp
* Boot Camp
* Sudden Death Camp
* Union Busting Camp
* Camp Greed
etc.
In the good old days companies paid strike-breakers to crack skulls and sometimes kill employees who agitated for better working conditions. It is because of collective bargaining that workers got a 5 day work-week, mandatory holidays, sick leave, maternity leave, a basic pension, and the right to a safe workplace. Many have died to ensure these basic rights for everybody.
In the good old days employers didn't have to take factory safety into consideration. If you got crippled by factory machinery you would get fired and live the rest of your short life in destitution. Let's go back to that system. Employees will be free to choose the factory that maims them. The cost savings will surely be passed on to the consumer.
How else do you want to balance out the power distribution?
I would really like to see something like Castopod [0], but for artists! Spinning up a website where you showcase and sell your music should (and could!) be as easy as using Wordpress, either via a subscription or self-hosted – on your own domain.
Being plugged into the Fediverse makes it much easier to interact with fans and build a connection with your audience. It also makes it easy for people to share and talk about a track or and album. None of this requires that you tie yourself to yet another VC-funded startup and a closed garden.
Maybe someone is building something like this already, that I am not aware of?
[0]: https://castopod.org/
I can imagine a 1-click solution that would set up everything. But bandcamp also has this functionality where labels can list their artists etc so I think it wouldn't work that well.
Wordpress has already integrated with the Fediverse, btw!
While I am a fan of federated social, it does not solve the problem for artists of replacing Bandcamp in any way, shape, or form. Bandcamp provided a storefront, payment handling, a distribution mechanism[1], and a potential audience + editorial that kept people coming back.
A Castopod for Musicians does none of this.
[1] Distribution of digital media, anyway. Distributing physical media was still an exercise left to the artist.
These are not the union bargainers though but rather the people who represent workers' interest in the company (they need to sign off on contract changes etc.). The bargainers are usually working for the union and not a company.
I know this won't be a popular thing to say, but I'd like to take a moment to thank Songtradr for consulting their lawyers and full-considering all legal requirements.
I believe them when they say they didn't legally acquire the union's documentation on membership. But they "carried out a comprehensive, full company evaluation that involved a detailed examination of each role" and seem pretty anal about their legal requirements. It's become expected that a prospective employee's social media accounts will be "evaluated" as part of the hiring process, so I imagine that was the case here, too. (Do you think any of the union members, the union-curious or even the anti-union weirdos ever mentioned the union on twitter?)
It goes on to explain that the "evaluation considered several factors such as product groups, job functions, employee tenure, performance evaluations[0]," and amusingly "the importance of roles for smooth business operations".
[0] performance evaluations were just one of several factors evaluated (comprehensively) in the detailed examination during the full company evaluation
That's just the bare minimum they have to do to not get sued, is that really thankworthy?
this is extremely shady, and I don't know why people are trusting the source directly lol. they wouldn't say they did anything untoward, ever
There's nothing here to be thankful for, not a damn thing.
It's disgusting
Well, I did say I knew that wouldn't go down well here...
No, nobody should be thanking them for this.
We should be mocking them for making such a ridiculous, offensive and typical statement. As if anyone would expect them to not have the forethought to check where the line would be. As if a company protecting itself in the usual way is a reason for why no actual people should think ill of them. As if we should be thanking them.
Note that all they are saying is they weren't given access to membership information. The only way they could have had access is if it were given to them. When I say "legally acquire" I'm not ruling out other means of accessing that information directly, but the trick being performed here is mentioning this when it's irrelevant. They don't need access to membership information to know who is "on their side".