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Comment by wellthisisgreat | Hacker News Reader

Wow this really sad, provided Kickstarter is one of the nicest places to work at and their public benefit corporation was not empty words.

These people ruined a really nice NYC company for everyone around. Anyone running their company who thought of making the workplace a bit different will expect the kind of crowd from this photo to show up and implode it.

One thing is if the conditions were bad, there was insane overtime, the pay was low etc etc., but no, none of that applies to the people on the photo.

This is why we cannot have nice things.

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Can you elaborate how Kickstarter is now ruined? As a creator and backer, this makes Kickstarter better for me. The organization as a whole is maddeningly unresponsive to me, but the workers who voted for, and organized, the union have been my strongest advocates.

Why do you hate people making Kickstarter what it is? The people actually doing the work want a union, how is that ruining the company?

The whole thing started as political stunt sort of due to the neo-nazis' outcry over some anti-fascist project. It was a mess (of course not sympathizing with Breitbart at all for the record).

And now they just added a whole new overhead of dealing with their initiative. Look at that one-pager of extremely poorly formulated demands. Obviously the company will have to spend resources sorting this out, through lawyers, through hiring MORE managers to deal with these managers. KS is NOT a bad place to work at by large margin it's a GOOD place to work at.

I am hearing already around here in NYC that no I don't want to go work there next to these folks, I am a developer not a polit-sci wannabe etc.

The spectacular outcome would be if KS fails to raise more funds because of this which is quite a possibility.

I'm just annoyed because there are so many people out there working in supermarkets treat like dirt, yet 'software engineers' who are paid huge amounts still want to unionise? Where exactly is the struggle here?

I am not anti-unionist by a country mile, but I can't sympathise with this group.

You can only unionise if you struggle?

I view unions as something that's only essential in the worst case scenario. If you truly need one then I fully support that, but they come with a huge cost to innovation. It's important to not forget the trade off.

Hate to break it to you, but "unions are ok but only under specific circumstances I describe" is anti-union.

They're always 'OK' (I'm not saying they're immoral) but they do come with a cost (to innovation, to efficiency) that should not be ignored.

What exactly is "ruined" about Kickstarter when the employees unionize?

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