Medium Tells Journalists to Feel Free to Quit After Busting Union Drive | Hacker News Reader

Medium Tells Journalists to Feel Free to Quit After Busting Union Drive

vice.com

61 pointsjbegley34 comments

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26561811

> The "voluntary separation program (VSP)” as Williams is calling it, will allow writers to “choose to leave the company and receive a lump sum payment of five month's salary to give a buffer to find their next job.

Five months severance sounds unusually generous. Kudos to Ev Williams for offering such a nice parachute to go along with the business model change. It isn't the writers' fault that the business changed underneath them, so giving them ample time for the transition is deserved and decent.

5 months is crazy generous in the news industry. Everyone I know in journalism over the years has generally gotten 0 days to prepare and 0 dollars to cushion any blow.

A little tangential, but I definitely wouldn't characterize this as a business model change. For some reason people interpret everything Medium does as a pivot. But the business model has been stable for three years.

5 months severance is a bribe to try and keep employees quiet and mitigate the risk of a lawsuit and/or PR disaster.

Baseless assertions can be dismissed without evidence. Surely they wouldn’t send out an email to the whole company if they were overly concerned about keeping this quiet.

A lawsuit over what? I'm not sure if it's a wise business decision for Medium to make these kinds of seismic shifts all the time, but you can't generally sue your boss for making bad decisions.

To me this is just another piece of evidence that traditional "journalism" is dying or maybe dead. (And what I mean is big media organizations that hire writers who's job is to gather and report news).

This is of course getting lost in the big-tech-vs-unions narrative - but at the end of the day the traditional journalism part of Medium was not going to keep the boat afloat, union or not. And as Ev alludes to - the problem is trust.

I think Substack is the future for real actual journalism, and I think Ev is right that individuals are where the trust is earned nowadays. I think Substack is the only place we're going to see actual critical thinking and analysis, and maybe the only place for real breaking stories that go against the common narrative.

Anecdote Time: I have several friends who are journalists at major newspapers. They used to be people who loved to fight authority at every turn. They were critical of all politicians regardless of party, and would never take a corporate PR team's statement at face value. I'm not sure what happened - but they all follow the same set of talking points now. Not one is skeptical of anything the Democratic politicians do, and I haven't heard one of them criticize a single thing the current administration has done.

So really - what future do journalists have if they all think the same? What future do they have if they let the same corporations and politicians write their stories for them? No wonder trust in media is at an all time low.

I really don't understand the lack of unionisation in the USA. In Europe it is endemic, even in tech, and seems to have nothing but positive impact for workers. (I'm represented by Syndicom.)

There is power in a union.

> There is power in a union

I agree, but also with the caveat that the union has to be good. And I think that was a significant issue here which is that there isn't union know how about how to organize and operate in a pre-IPO, pre-profit, pre-critical-mass startup.

Anyone who has worked at startups knows that there are ways workers get screwed that are specific to startups. The whole idea of liquidation preference for example is nutty given that a 1x return doesn't change a fund's dynamics but does rob employees of a meaningful chunk of cash.

But then the other dynamic is that there is both a very real chance of the company failing and everyone losing their jobs and of the need for some people to lose their jobs in order for everyone else to keep them.

I think unions could work in pre-IPO startups if they were aligned with the IPO. There would still be a lot to bargain for and they could help soften the downside of failure while chiseling off more equity for the staff.

But this unionization effort didn't seem particularly savvy about the dynamics of being pre-IPO. For example getting busted by "investors might not want to invest if this succeeds" is not a particularly savvy way to go down. I wouldn't want people bargaining on my behalf who hadn't proactively predicted that concern and countered it.

But that's not particularly a knock on Medium's organizers. I just think this is an area of unionization that hasn't been invented yet and it would have benefited from people who saw it that way.

This is probably not a super popular opinion (and it's just that) but monopolies are difficult to sustain without legal support. They tend to either collapse or get worked around.

I imagine even with legal support, many industries could work around them anyway. Except for jobs that rely on local workers, I can't help but think that the long term reaction to unionization in, say, the tech world, would involve (more) jobs being outsourced to other countries.

Sure, you could try to outlaw that, but these regulations always seem to have loopholes. You'd need unions with basically no borders stretching across continents, which I frankly find terrifying.

> seems to have nothing but positive impact for workers.

Having been IT in an international company, I can tell you that we were not fond of some of the European unions because they would push back against anything that anyone over there didn't like. This included things like "you guys need to stop using Windows 7 on 5-year-old laptops and start using Windows 10 like the rest of the company". I guess maybe from their view that was still a "positive impact for workers", but they were a huge pain point.

My experience in the same kind of setup is that such an upgrade comes bound with all kind of modern workplace surveillance tools (hello Zscaler and SSL termination), so the pushback is actually very much warranted under European customs/laws, even though misjudged from the US/management side.

The USA is very friendly to large corporations. Larger corporations are not friendly to unions. The USA is not friendly to unions.

There is an incredible amount of anti union propaganda in the USA.

From what I can see, in tech, it's because they fear a union will bring them down as the cost of lifting sub-par developers up. They mistakenly think that because relative to other workers they are paid and treated well that the qualifier "relative to other workers" is irrelevant. The reality is different, of course, but they're too busy looking down from their rock at everyone else to notice the mountain the owners are towering over them on.

In at least the communities I’ve been a part of, there’s a huge distrust of unions. They’re politically aligned and historically had ties to organized crime. These days, they’re often seen as at best self serving.

Unions are also blamed (rightly or wrongly) for the downfall of Detroit and auto manufacturing in the US. For tech, the view I’ve seen is “things are good, why risk it?”

> Unions are also blamed (rightly or wrongly) for the downfall of Detroit and auto manufacturing in the US.

What killed off the textile mill manufacturing in North Carolina, a state with the lowest (tied with South Carolina) unionization in the country?

The difference is unionized factory workers in the 1930s in Michigan sent their children to college, like Larry Page's auto worker grandfather. Non-unionized North Carolina textile workers could not afford college, and their children worked at textile mills until they closed down, and their grandchildren are in worse shape than they were.

It's about politics and our never ending culture war. My university's grad students had an organizing campaign. Organizers used the standard SJW rhetoric - dismissing people who had questions with condescending answers like "clearly, if you read about the history of labor movements, you'd agree with us" and "look another person regurgitating anti-union propoganda." Unions also donate dues to political parties (really only one of them).

If american union organizers signalled they really cared about positive impact for workers rather than pushing one side of the culture war, they'd be more successful.

To be blunt, European tech companies don't seem to be doing amazing vs. their American competitors. You can see why American companies wouldn't necessarily look to their practices as a model to emulate.

It’s true that American companies are hard to beat on their fields such as workers exploitation (Amazon), privacy violations (Google, Facebook), anti-concurrencial practices (Microsoft, Google), censorship (Twitter, Reddit), tax evasion (Apple, all GAFAM actually), etc. Real amazing job indeed.

What makes you think unions are the cause of these differences?

Scale perhaps? Imagine if your union were two orders of magnitude larger. Would pathological behaviors emerge?

> "We are making some changes to our editorial strategy and leadership and giving a voluntary exit option to employees who would like to take a different path,"

A 'voluntary exit option' Is that sarcasm?

No. They are being offered five months of pay and six months of healthcare to quit now. Or they keep their job. It is a personal choice.

This is a remarkably generous offer too. Most people getting buyouts are lucky to get around 1 week per year of service and no healthcare. Five months pay and six months of healthcare is enough time to build an MVP.

They are being bribed to leave quietly and not make a public stink.

Nobody owes them anything. This seems much better than nothing.

No, it means you can quit and get severance. It's acknowledging that this isn't what people signed up for and taking responsibility

As a long time Medium author and publisher and occasional business partner I have all kinds of feelings.

But the main one is about the need for urgency.

One basic way to read these changes is that it just looks like Medium getting savvier about what drives and grows their subscription business. There's been no pivot there. The challenge for them still is to get their subscription business over the hump.

And the hump they have been at for awhile is that the subscription has been growing despite being generally meh quality. It's just $5 and a lot of people like supporting authors that way. But what are the ways to go from meh to great?

What I think Medium found is that they were getting better value by spending in other places. For example, I was part of bringing the back catalog of The Pragmatic Programmers books onto Medium. That was a deal that was relatively economical and had a direct hypothesis related to growing the subscription. For programmers now, at least, they have a nice headline for why a programmer would spend $5.

So to see Medium focus more on what's working to actually tip the subscription over puts me at ease because I still see the company has being in a zero to one situation. It could succeed, but it hasn't yet.

I didn't even realize Medium employed journalists. I guess they started as a blogging service and then added that?

But taking your name recognition as "that big blogging site where any idiot can write whatever they want" to "source of researched news from paid journalists" is a tough direction.

He talks about this idea of credibility being built by individual people now rather than brands, but how much of that is because he's starting from a brand that was founded on having no editorial credibility?

This is not a dupe. The Vice article adds context to the Medium staff post.

It's interesting to note that if the union drive had been successful it would have likely meant the death of the company since they'd be unable to pivot.

I don't think this is true. I read the feedback from investors of "We won't invest if there is a union" as posturing to get a better deal. But that's still something that would impact employees because it would lead to more dilution. That's why I think a union is only going to succeed in pre-IPO startups if they are specialized in the dynamics of these types of companies. Medium is on the path to IPO (maybe surprising to some people), so having a union form in a way that dilutes your equity is counter to the goal of the union benefiting the employees.

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