Kickstarter will not voluntarily recognize its employee union | Hacker News Reader

Kickstarter will not voluntarily recognize its employee union

theverge.com

38 pointsmoate27 comments

If Kickstarter will not voluntarily recognize the union, then the union should go on strike and remain on strike until Kickstarter recognizes them.

Well yea, they're going to have a ton of options once organization is complete.

I think most of the CEO's comments about why they're not recognizing the union feel pretty standard from the management's standpoint.

Kickstarter could give a bonus to everyone who does not join the strike, then fire everyone else and replace them. Sure, it could end up being more costly, but there are options.

The labor laws prevent them from doing that. It's this lack of contract liberty for one side of the negotiations between unions and employers what makes the effect of unions harmful.

I have a feeling that a company like Kickstarter making a move like that isn't just "costly". Seems more like mutually assured destruction. The PR fallout of a move like that is going to cause some serious hiring problems going forward. Plus the loss of domain experience alone would be massive.

It would be interesting exactly what sort of union some tech worker groups are planning on working on / how they think it would operate.

My experience with US unions is that they're largely just another layer of bureaucracy that can be as unresponsive as any management structure, and in many cases you can't quit the union in the sense that you still work in the system / rules they negotiate. The reliance on seniority in US unions (granted not all do) tend to result in limited prospects for new people and protections for older workers who often see little value in expanding skills since time alone provides all the protection / advancement they need.

Also the exact protections you get from a union are negotiated and not necessarily what you want / expect ...

Not sure why FUD like this keeps popping up every time a tech company workforce wants to unionize.

There are many different types of unions. The types of unions that organize low-wage workers aren't the same unions that organize high-wage workers or workers in talent-based fields like Hollywood, music, etc.

Workers choose what they want the union to be, and how it is organized, as part of unionizing.

> Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

s/Socialism/Unions/; s/America/Tech/; s/poor/workers/; s/millionaires/billionaire founders/

Unions did take root in America. For a time all major industrial sectors were dominated by unions. It resulted in America losing its manufacturing edge and seeing most manufacturing migrate to Asia. The entire passenger rail service also went bankrupt due to the demands of the Brotherhoods, which had a stranglehold on the industry.

Today, besides a few notable exceptions like Hollywood and the screen actors guild, unions are only growing in the public sector, and that's because taxpayers are forced to subsidize their inefficiency.

Also, socialism did take root in America. Look at the percentage of GDP consumed by government spending since 1900. It's steadily grown, especially on social welfare programs. America paid a very heavy price to gain real world experience with unions/socialism. Let's hope that after paying the price from that century-long mistake, it learns a lesson.

Interestingly enough, America's manufacturing prowress also coincided with the prowress of unions.

It was the rise of the executive class that doomed both America's manufacturing and its unions. It turns out that when the people who don't actually make anything have total leverage, they do a good job of fucking everything up.

The entire passenger rail service also went bankrupt due to the demands of the Brotherhoods, which had a stranglehold on the industry.

This is simply false. Passenger rail service went bankrupt as a result of many forces, including the rise of the automobile and the dominance of the cargo transport industry in America, which owns almost all of the rail lines in the US and prioritizes freight shipping over passenger conveyance.

  America's manufacturing prowress also coincided with the prowress of unions.

It coincided with World War II and its aftermath. You're confusing cause with effect.

And I think the word you want is "prowess".

No, American manufacturing started losing its competitive edge in the heydey of unions. It is only because American manufacturing saw a market decline that union membership rates in the private sector declined.

When US manufacturing was expanding the fastest was when unions had no power, in the late 19th century, and that was also when wages were increasing at their fastest rate. Unlike the post-war wage growth, the wage growth of the late 19th century did not come at the expense of the industry that was providing those wages.

>>This is simply false. Passenger rail service went bankrupt as a result of many forces

You should read up on the agreement that the brotherhoods forced on the passenger rail lines and what that did to their financial position. The growing power of the brotherhoods is primarily what did the rail lines in.

Any time someone criticizes unions, these conspiracy theories pop up. No one is spreading FUD. They're relaying their experiences with unions, which in no way contradicts your statement that there are many types of unions.

As someone with experience the idea that the workers choose is a bit laughable.

Once established the union is largely inflexible and not likely or able renegotiate the structure... that is just how it works historically.

Folks mentioning it isn't just FUD because you don't agree, for some of us it's experience.

Out of curiosity, what sector are you talking about? Not generally, but your specific experience?

I've been on both sides of the table for multiple union negotiations, including several unsuccessful ones that failed due to management interference.

Some of the unions were for low-skilled laborers. Others were for highly-skilled talent-based workers. And two were government unions. Each union was differently organized to meet the needs of its specific set of workers.

You can't make blanket statements like "once a union is established its largely inflexible" since the history of American unions is expressly opposite of that statement. Every major union has undergone massive structural changes multiple times. Unions have merged, split up, merged again, died, resurrected, etc. A history of American unions would be as complex as Game of Thrones, with even more violence and only a bit less sex.

The sad part is that someone thinks that starting a union is going to make anything better. If they unionize it's just an early death rattle for Kickstarter. I know they've got some shit going on, but this just adds gas to the fire.

I think we're seeing the start of a push for Unionization in the tech sector. The old concepts of what a Union is supposed to be are starting to change, and the whole "power to the individual" culture in the industry is starting to lose some of its shine.

I don't see how labor organizing, in either this specific case or generally in the industry, is a bad thing. Yes, it makes it harder for kickstarter management, but that doesn't mean they'll crumble.

The concepts of unions aren't changing. Unions as a whole are shrinking because the "power of all" has been found out to be bullshit. New sectors unionize and find out they make just as much money but are now shoe horned into group think and pay losing the ability to thrive as an individual which eventually just results in the lowering of quality, expectations and results. I don't know of a single good example of unionization in the tech sector or in fact any new sector in the last 20 years that has resulted in positive outcomes. I'd love to see an example if there is.

If everyone thinks they're the magical special worker who can command the top tier of their sector's pay scale, then no, unions don't work. However, that's statistically impossible. Most people are, by their nature, average. You might lower your ceiling in the union, but you also might raise your floor. This is of course assuming that a union is even involved in wage negotiations at all. It's also possible that you just have a trade organization that can exert pressure on the organization in other ways, and focus more on "quality of life" issues that most tech people are actually concerned about.

I'm still waiting for an example of a sector that has benefited from newly becoming union? So far as far as I can tell every example is nothing but a billboard for "DO NOT ENTER".

Dangerous manual labor roles, like those served by UMW and UFW, certainly benefited upon their organization decades ago, but labor law and enforcement is much stronger now.

Labor organizing is a bad thing because laws as they stand allow unions to over-ride the contract liberty of companies. This gives them enormous power that lets them engage in rent-seeking behaviour. There is plenty of economic scholarship on the efficiency hit companies take from unionization, and plenty of anecdotal examples of major American industries crumbling after coming under the thumb of powerful unions.

You lost me at "labor organizing is a bad thing"...

There are some flaws in the labor laws in the US, and the first thing that comes to mind is the fact the "Union Monopoly", ie once a Union is established there's no competition. If you allowed for competitive union practices, then you no longer allow for rent seeking by that union because someone can always just organize a different, "better" union. I don't really care which happens first (union formations or reform to labor organization laws) but both would be my goal for a long term solution.

If contract liberty were guaranteed, unions would lose any utility they have to their members. Before labor laws were crafted, unions used their numerical advantage to intimidate companies and other workers into respecting their monopoly on a workforce. With labor laws, that monopoly is guaranteed by the law. Either way, unions only work with a force-backed monopoly. If a company can fire workers when they unionize or strike, they will.

A potentially viable free market alternative to unions is worker coops. They have the resource-pooling and sharing of unions, but without the coercion and rent-seeking.

You: Labor organizing is bad.

Also you: a free market alternative to <organized labor> is <organized labor>.

You hate the word union. You seem to have a problem with how unions function in the US. I agree! Having all carpenters represented by a single union isn't necessarily as good an answer as having all carpenters represented by several unions. It creates other problems (unions competing against each other leading to race to the bottom rating, mass firings, etc) but it's really no different than companies just hiring non-union laborers now and would hopefully lead to a larger percentage of labor represented by orgs and not individuals.

There absolutely should be laws in place preventing retaliation and allowing organizations, I just don't think the US model has done well.

I don't see any moral justification for violating someone's contact liberty. If someone does not want to employ unionized workers, or workers who go on strike, they should not be forced to. Freedom is a two-way road. You have a right to do whatever you want including organize and strike but you do not have a right to force other people employ while you do these things.

I simply cannot wrap my mind around the idea that it is morally permissible to restrict freedom-of-association/contract-liberty in this way.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com