Kickstarter Has Fired Two Union Organizers in 8 Days
slate.com
slate.com
However plenty of other companies successfully did that, so Kickstarter surely can too.
Can any employees chime in
Employees are in a vulnerable position. It makes sense for them to join together and jointly hire lawyers and professional negotiators.
A company that forbids you from joining a union is abusive.
I've been in a union and it was super helpful.
Your start-up team wouldn't sign an agreement with a VC without consulting an attorney. Why should your employees sign an employment contract without getting outside advice and help?
This is really good point.
Another anecdote: I’ve been in an unions and it did nothing for us. We were still working minimum wage.
The union wanted to ensure management adhered to the company’s stated values, notably in pay equality and standing up to fascists.
Reading the article, it turns out it's about a comic book posted on Kickstarter that explicitly condones and encourages solving political differences with violence, this breaking their ToS. In particular, this work encouraged violence against fascists, so it's a relatively defensible position, but it's totally not as clear cut as you make it out to be. I'm not entirely sure I think it's right to encourage violence against any group, even ones I despise. I understand that their ToS block it.
In fact, I'm confused that one would unionize over their employer blocking a work that violates their ToS.
I think this is totally a matter of the ToS and what it says, and in those terms the matter seems entirely clear cut. In terms of the ToS it (the comic book) seems in no way defensible.
Aside from that, I don't see how anyone can claim to be against solving political differences with violence if they make exceptions to that rule.
I know I simply paraphrase here: their own TOS says, that there are no copycat products allowed. They need to have huge improvement over the original.
The other day they had a featured product, which I immediately recognized as simple copycat of a typical Chinese product. I know the German FBA version. I pointed that out to Kickstarter. They told me, no it isn’t because it has a major improvement. The major improvement was that it was simply missing a feature and the imitated wood housing was a different imitated wood.
TL/DR as long as it brings money in Kickstarter don’t care about their own TOS.
I mean, just imagine an investor asking a company if their workers are so bad that they need an HR department.