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Comment by djrogers | Hacker News Reader

Not a big fan of this headline - it's inflammatory and incomplete. This is one (unproven and completely unsubstantiated) accusation from one side of the story, made in a handful of tweets. Kickstarter also tweeted, and of course denies this:

https://twitter.com/kickstarter/status/1172230162588536833

The problem with this type of link on HN is that it's not a 'story' - there's no investigative reporting - heck there's no reporting at all. Unfortunately this is a story is that most people will look at it and believe whichever side lines up with their personal belief system, in spite of a complete absence of facts.

The pro-union people will believe this is union busting no matter what is said or proven, and the pro-corporate people will believe that this individual deserved to be fired for other reasons.

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What are the chances of three people trying to unionize in a company being fired in a very short span of time for 'performance' reasons? Are you holding out until the company says 'Ok, caught, yes, we did fire them for trying to unionize'?

>What are the chances of three people trying to unionize in a company being fired in a very short span of time for 'performance' reasons

Pretty good. The type of person looking to form a union in software dev where there isn't one is usually someone very unhappy at the company which as a very high correlation with not performing well (at least in the eyes of their manager).

[Citation needed]

I think you are crossing a sea of assumptions to get to "pretty good".

Why would you form a union if you are happy with the arrangement with your employer?

Really? I'd never dream of trying something like that except from a position of strength.

I could definitely a envision a theoretical situation where three poorly performing employees decide to unionize to protect themselves, then eventually get fired for poor performance.

Is that what happened? I don't know, but I'm not going to trust two tweets from two parties whose interests are against one another.

Ok, fair enough. Then maybe do a google on this and read some more, see if stuff over and beyond the 'two tweets' is going to sway you that this is retaliation pure and simple.

Shouldn't you be applying Occam's razor here? Attempting to make a conspiracy out of an attempt to unionize seems like a rather poor argument.

In this case, the employees coming out with this knowledge have everything to lose because they could easily be blacklisted from further jobs. Kickstarter has no reason to not deny their accusations and has everything to gain from it.

If someone is risking a their livelihood to say something like that, then perhaps we should take what they're saying with a larger grain of truth. Otherwise we'd be saying that whistleblowers and the PR arm of a company have exactly the same weight.

I don't think this is the best place to apply Occam's razor. Why would I want to rush to a conclusion based on a couple of tweets by someone I know so little about? I don't know his personal circumstances, I don't know what he wants to accomplish or what he stands to win or lose with those tweets, I don't really know what interest the company would have from firing him and the others or to lose from a union. I know nothing of this so I don't see the need to pick a side on a conflict that has little to do with me.

If a few months from now, I read an article about what just happened now and it turns out that the company ends up being fined or something because the motivations behind firing him are actually what he claims, then it's the moment we can start being outraged, not before.

You need to back up your claim with evidence. In order to establish a union, you'll need at least 30% of the workers signing a petition. Would you sign such a petition if your incompetent colleague put it forward to you in the hope of protecting their job? Honestly, your scenario is far-fetched.

In order to establish a union, you'll need at least 30% of the workers signing a petition

Why do you, what's the reasoning behind that kind of law? And to whom do they petition - does the company have to agree, or rather, does the employer have the right to forbid employees from forming agreements between themselves? It sounds counterintuitive when you only need 1 person to start a company, or 2 people to have a contract, and when employers have no other control over who employees meet with and little control over how employees spend money (e.g. 'work dress code').

I don't know the answer to your questions, but it is simply the law unless the employer voluntarily recognizes the union. Obviously employers don't have much incentive for doing so.

source: https://www.nlrb.gov/rights-we-protect/whats-law/employees/i...

In order to establish a union, you may need 30%, but how much do you need to TRY to establish a union? After all, they didn't succeed? How many of their coworkers signed?

Besides, there may be many people who think having a union is always a good idea, so they would sign without thinking about it much.

If you're a poorly performing employee, why would you even bother going to all the effort of forming a union? Besides that, they'd been there for a very long time, awful weird that they suddenly have performance issues in tight correlation with the unionization effort. The employees were rightfully upset about the company protecting the feelings of Nazis and unionization would allow them to actually have a say in decisions like that.

I don't know. Are you saying the odds can be calculated? Presumably it's not impossible, and so it's fair to object to the post on the grounds that it's one-sided and doesn't fairly expose other viewpoints on what happened.

'what are the chances' is a statement of incredulity indicating that the chances are likely to be on the low side which means the writer believes that something else is afoot.

The odds can't be calculated but I see no need for that, on a company the size of Kickstarter the chances of the three people who just happen to be busy trying to get a union organized after many years of otherwise uneventful employment are nil.

In theory pigs can fly, in practice, if you see a pig flying it is usually good practice to check which airborne vehicle they were tossed out of.

I know of no theory predicting porcine aeronautics :). In any case, the point is that it is not impossible that what you consider very unlikely is exactly what happened. So we wait for all the information before making judgements.

> So we wait for all the information before making judgements.

There is absolutely zero chance that 'all the information' will ever come out. The people directly affected will have nothing to lose, the remainder will be afraid for their jobs and will not talk or will only talk off the record. The company will claim it was nothing of the sort. And yet, magically, no union will ever be formed.

Maybe if I was having unrelated problems at my job, me personally, I might consider trying to start a Union so as to make my employer terrified of firing me.

I’m saying thus not theoretically, but a buddy just the other day was joking-not-joking about doing that at his job.

So who knows?

I think your buddy joking-not-joking about it is slightly different than someone who has worked somewhere for 8 years straight claiming that is exactly what happened to him and two other co-workers. Keep in mind that they are killing their chances of being employed by any other union-shy workplace which is 'most of tech'. So there is significant downside to this. Also note that he refused to sign an NDA that would have prohibited him to talk about it and which would have put money in his pocket, so there is some evidence that this person - by his own claims - is rather principled.

And then there is that other article linked in this thread which provides a ton more circumstantial evidence.

>What are the chances of three people trying to unionize in a company being fired in a very short span of time for 'performance' reasons?

I don't know. What are the chances? Did anyone verify their stories?

Yes, somebody did. But of course nobody will come out with their name attached that still has a job to lose.

What are the chances that 3 of the 435 fired Uber engineers had considered the concept of unionizing as its a general topic now?

With that perspective I think its highly probable of such firings happening in a short time span

Did any of them step forward with those claims?

Are the numbers here 'Kickstarter fired 435 people and 3 of them claimed they were trying to unionize'?

From the slate article: "Afraid that they would be dismissed next—and that they didn’t have enough leverage to pressure Kickstarter over ethical issues the next time there was a disagreement—employees started discussing a union."

Sounds to me like they saw the writing on the wall.

And 14 of the 15 people eligible out of the 28 people backing unionization at Kickstarter got a raise or promotion...

Hmm...

I know a handful of people at Kickstarter, including some of the union backers. A fair number of employees have concerns about how the folks trying to organize the union have acted. Seems they deliberately have gone to the press as leverage against the company rather than work to get employees to back their cause.

It's a 140 person company and they only have the public support of 20% of the staff.

So you are confirming they were fired for trying to unionize? Thank you. It is interesting that the 'going to the press' bit gets trotted out as if that is something the employees should not have done. Companies go to the press all the time when it suits them, but employees using the press as leverage is beyond the pale.

Of course they would go to the press, if retaliation is imminent that is one of the last ways in which an employee might defend themselves. It wouldn't be the first time that the press served to right a wrong, and it certainly won't be the last.

If 20% of the company supported unionization that makes it 150/5 = 30 people at most, 3 of which have been fired in a very short window of time. That's going to help a lot in the inevitable court case.

How do you even read that as that?

All I said was that 28 people in the company publicly stated their support for a union (there's 42 needed to establish one).

15 of those 28 people were eligible for a promotion or raise. 14 of those 15 received their promotion or raise.

Doesn't look like union busting at all to me, but thanks for putting words in my mouth.

My comment about the press was because the pro-union group is having a hard time getting those 14 additional people they needed to support them and in the meantime have created a ton of bad press for the company, which does impact the assets of the very employees they're supposed to be supporting the interests of.

> 28 people in the company publicly stated their support for a union (there's 42 needed to establish one).

It is not unreasonable to suspect that if 28 people are openly in support that there are 42 in total.

> Doesn't look like union busting at all to me, but thanks for putting words in my mouth.

You'd have to show that in the 'control' group of 120 other employees 12 or more got fired; not that 14 of the people in the group that supported unionization got a raise. They are - presumably - not the organizers, which is what matters here.

> My comment about the press was because the pro-union group is having a hard time getting those 14 additional people they needed to support them and in the meantime have created a ton of bad press for the company, which does impact the assets of the very employees they're supposed to be supporting the interests of.

And my point is that if you fire the organizers and get away with it that there won't be any union regardless of how many people would have supported it. If they took a vote and lost then that's that and business as usual, no need to fire anybody.

The company wants the union organizers to vote. It has said as much.

The union organizers don't want a vote, they want Kickstarter to voluntarily recognize them.

This is in the articles, man...

That still does not give the company the right to fire them, which is the law man... And the company could recognize the union if it wanted. So a vote is not mandatory.

Note the subject of the post: "Kickstarter employees fired for trying to unionize". That's either true or it is not and so far you have not brought anything to the table that suggests it isn't retaliation for exactly that, and in fact substantiated numerically that the chances that it is not retaliation are vanishingly small.

They aren’t independent samples though. They could all have gone on a downward spiral of disgruntlement at around the same time (on the order of months), and then once management finally got around to doing something about it, they started the termination processes at the same time (on the order of days).

I think pressuring for a vote early is of benefit because another vote can’t take place for some time period afterwards. The organizers want to stall a vote for as long as possible to work up support before this happens. While it’s illegal to fire a worker for trying to organize, it’s entirely legal to fire that same employee if they are violating company policies to further that organizing effort. I don’t know that this is what happened but is often the case I’ve seen. Misuse of company resources, disruptive behavior, not completing tasks, using paid time to do union work, bad for morale of other employees, creating hostile environment for other employees, etc.

Not critiquing you in particular, but it's not strategically unusual to fire one group of people, buy another off, and tell the rest that it's proof unions are nothing but trouble and if they play nice they might get a raise at the right time.

This is how power operates, you can see exactly the same dynamics at work in countries that have been through a military coup.

Aka plata o plomo. Not that the company would literally have anybody murdered but the prospect of 'promotion or termination' has much the same effect. It splits the camp.

What of it though? That's like saying only 5 out of 100 employees at a company are in the C-Suite and they've gone straight to negotiating with a bunch of VCs instead of involving all the employees in the financial decision-making.

Maybe they were trying to unionize to prevent being fired, as they already knew their performance was lacking?

After 8 years and counting for at least one of the three? If your performance is lacking you won't get around to unionizing because your co-workers will see through that ruse in a heartbeat. According to one - insider informed - commenter here about 20% of the company was in favor, not enough to put it to a vote but apparently enough of a reason to ask the company to recognize the union voluntarily. So this was not just a couple of people organizing a union to avoid their own termination.

Why did they want to form a union, after 8 years?

I think some people will always be in favor of a union, no matter what. It's also an ideological thing.

> unproven and completely unsubstantiated

Very little in this world is proven, but this is certainly substantiated.

First off, an on the record first person accusation from an involved party is by itself compelling evidence, secondly, the story has in fact been supported by credible journalistic outlets with multiple sources.

What a dysrationalist comment. I'm the last person anybody would call pro-union and I think this has all the smell of union busting.

What you describe is what I've heard summarizes the state of KS. Both sides are entrenched and talking past each other while the actual product and company continue to slide into the gutter.

Seems to me both sides would rather plant their flags and signal allegiance to the outside world than come up with a real solution.

Kickstarter is on its way out.

Very interesting theory. Virtue signaling instead of solution finding at the company level.

It's the same thing happening in Politics. But it's also why I'd argue people are realizing how fake this whole charade is as our society falls further into the gutter.

And truly it is more fun to work together solving hard problems rather than screaming past each other. We've been so isolated, our whole lives, only now are we realizing what it means to be in the public. Vulnerable yet strong (I may be projecting here).

> it's not a 'story' - there's no investigative reporting - heck there's no reporting at all.

https://slate.com/technology/2019/09/kickstarter-turmoil-uni...

> Kickstarter also tweeted, and of course denies this

Of course denies this. I stand with the workers.

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