Bandcamp Unionizes
bandcampunited.org
bandcampunited.org
I wasn't aware of that, that deeply sucks. Bandcamp was the premiere place for me to buy DRM-free music and know my money was going to the artist at a transparent and fair price.
Unionising certainly seems especially important for these folks in light of that, I wish them all the very best.
My impression is that epic bought them for sort of the same reason Microsoft bought linkedin. They don't make tons of money, but they enhance the pipeline of artists and musicians available to the game industry.
Of course I have no idea if that's why they did it, but epic has definitely shown interest in steering the direction of the game industry in the past, and aligning the talent pool with their way of thinking is maybe a good way to do that.
That would be SoundCloud. Bandcamp is a marketplace and a pretty good one.
The good news about this is that none of this should impact Bandcamp negatively, neither as a consumer or an artist, not unless you see more avenues to sell your music/merch as a bad thing. Bad news is your favorite Bandcamp artist will sell out ;)
Enjoying my life, working on things that inspire me, not following tedious news about tech industry mergers and acquisitions.
Not dismissing the news as unimportant, it is important. It's just boring and I wish we lived in a world where everything good wasn't subsumed into soulless corporate behemoths.
So far Epic still seems to have a tiny bit of soul. But that'll gradually fade as it does with every huge company and in ten or fifteen years it'll be another Adobe/Autodesk.
Anyway I don’t want to bore you, but yes I agree that less mergers would be nice. And the bandcamp news was very worrisome, and I’m sure at some point things will turn to shit.
Instead of paying $10+/mo for a streaming service, I spend $10+ on an album each month.
I first check the band/label website to see if they have a download.
I then use bandcamp if the band is smaller and on there, falling back on 7digital or HDTracks when they are larger and not.
All to say is, I just didn't know they were bought by epic, I just usually get linked to artist pages
As for Epic, we can't know until they speak to any specific reasoning, but unions don't necessarily imply active or anticipated poor treatment from the employer. It's pretty normal to want input into decisions that affect your working conditions, and unions are a legally-protected way to do that.
Wish them luck in keeping that fairness to the artists and themselves going strong.
I feel like that’s a pretty smart change to make when you go from an apparently reachable and (I assume) fair leadership you knew, to… Epic Games.
It will be a bleak day when BC hits the skids, as inevitably happens with any such service (unless not backed by a solid non-profit).
Not necessarily. All a union is is a way of collectively negotiating. Whether those terms include stipulations about the way creators are treated is up to the union's members.
"You are required to bargain over mandatory subjects in good faith, which includes the duty to provide relevant information to the union upon request and to refrain from unilaterally changing any of those terms and conditions without first notifying the union and bargaining with the union to lawful impasse. The duty to bargain in good faith does not mean, however, that you must reach agreement with the union on any proposals; rather, it merely requires you to approach bargaining with an open mind and desire to reach agreement, and that, if you reach an agreement, to sign the resulting written document.
"You may also choose to bargain with the union about permissive subjects, which is anything that is not mandatory or unlawful."
There is a private non profit entity (with a "it's complicated" relationship to the government) for consumer protection in my country to which you can go for little money and ask them to help when you suspect a company is acting illegally.
They'll advise you, help you write letter, link you up with a lawyer or sue on your behalf. Sometimes they go after companies for things like "creative" TOS or to have courts clear up grey area of the law.
Recently they became one of the few entities who can start the entities who can start the local "equivalent" of a class action suit.
As a whole it's working pretty great.
Important to note "equity" not "equality".
Equality means each individual or group of people is given the same resources or opportunities. Equity allocates the exact resources and opportunities needed to reach an equal outcome.
Not my kind of place.
It's not "fair" and "equal" that someone who isn't working gets paid, but we need to take care of those who need help the most.
Equity had tradeoffs, equality has tradeoffs too. I think equity sounds like a more appropriate word for what a union does. Do you disagree?
i.e. roles and promotions reserved for people of certain races and genders.
They mention equitable conditions and economic stability for their colleagues. Which, imo, is a main purpose of a Union.
Here you find plenty of “equitable” and “equity” comments…
10 years ago, if someone said kids should have the right to education equally, that always meant taking especially care of the poor ones. It didn't make sense to send a million dollars to a public school and another to a private - that would have considered very dumb.
So why did we twist the old term, introduce a new one and now get into semantic discussions instead of discussing rights and policy?
> We are committed to protecting the benefits we have, fixing historical disparities within and across departments, and promoting equitable conditions and economic stability for all of our colleagues
Equality and centralisation go hand in hand, as evidenced by every communist/socialist regime ever and the simple insight that suppressing human nature requires a suffocating (secret) state police that controls every aspect of its subject's lives, and they cannot co-exist with freedom and de-centralisation.
It is more likely that you have consumed too much American based anti-union media, happily pushed by corporations whose profits would be threatened and politicians whose campaign contributions would be threatened by stronger unions. I accept that US unions have had a bad history but if you step outside of that narrow viewpoint there is a lot of benefits to unions and organised workforces.
You sound like a typical vulture capitalist. So with your disdain for labor, I suggest whatever great lofty idea or concept you have, do it all yourself. Development. Engineering. Marketing. Sales. Service. You can't. You need that labor you so airily brush off with the 1953 bugaboo of communism.
Solidarity forever.
Its always funny how socialists think employers simply hire some labour and then steal their wages.
You of course ignore my main point. Go make your earth shattering life changing product without labor and see how far you get. You throw around buzz words like communism and socialism without apparently knowing the distinction between them, using them as if they were a bludgeon to smash those who disagree with you.
Honor Labor.
There is none, as the underlying model of the world is the same. Its a different in degree, not in kind.
Why do you keep dodging my real point? Go make your great idea entirely by yourself. Then you can keep all the moneys. Great ideas are a dime a bale. Making them happen requires people willing to make it happen other than yourself. Why should they get anything other than the maximum they can extract from you, in the same way you extract the maximum possible from your customers?
I'm genuinely curious what people are like who believe cooperation and mutual support is against human nature. Do you perform a daily cost-benefit analysis to consider whether to leave your spouse for another candidate? Do you eject your children from your home if they don't deliver sufficient value? Do you slam the door in your neighbor's face if they ask you for a cup of flour on a Saturday night and can't immediately repay you or sign a credible contract with interest?
> disparate outcomes are the result of imaginary malignant oppressive forces
Funny. Most people seem to agree that different starting conditions are likely to yield different outcomes. I struggle to imagine your reasoning for why wealth is so unevenly distributed and why this inequality persists over generations assuming you aren't a believer in eugenics (i.e. natural superiority by bloodline).
> freedom
Freedom to what, specifically?
> de-centralisation
Someone recently said to me "When tech dudes say de-centralisation they always mean de-regulation" and I have no idea what made me think of that.
> every communist/socialist regime ever
Yes, let's not look up what those words mean or else we'll risk finding out what leftist thinkers thought about the Bolsheviks before they successfully purged all other revolutionary movements. Communist Russia killed ten billion people and its Gestapo surveillance state kept track of every resident, Mao Ché Minh banned religion and gave Cuba bad WiFi, Marx was a Leninist and Stalin his prophet.
Let's not think about the uncanny parallels to surveillance capitalism, the economics at scale of monopolist corporations like Amazon, the industry poisoning our water and scorching our Earth, the way our entire collective wealth (however minute it may be for each of us) hinges on our collective capacity to extract natural resources for a pittance from the Third World so we can sell refined goods back to them at a profit for loans they can never repay. The Bolsheviks may have created housing for all unhoused people but the houses were ugly and the consumer goods were outdated, thank god we ended up on the right side of the international pissing match that nearly drove us to extinction so let's not bite the hand that begrudgingly feeds us if we give it every waking hour as labor because this is just the natural state of human existence: some have it all, the rest of us lives on scraps. The guns and bombs staring us down aren't to keep us in our place but to keep us safe against the others who want what we have and want to take away our freedoms. We must surpass, we must compete, we must be better than the Reserve Army of Labor or else society will collapse. Solidarity is defeat, cooperation is death. After all, this is how man evolved: the primordial Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, standing alone in the desert, fruits of his labor in hand, staring down the sabre tooth with entrepreneurial spirit, the self-made man, standing on the shoulders not of giants but of those he outcompeted because they were inferior to him.
Pardon the prose but in the spirit of competition your comment did not warrant anything less fanciful.
Tech worker unions can't really strike because the ratio of red and blue M&Ms in one of the thirty free snack rooms is slightly off. They need something else to rile people up.
However, kudos to them if they’ve found a verifiable model that takes into account all historical injustices done to all people who are currently in the US labour force (including new immigrants from Africa, South Asia, South America, Central Asia, etc).
I can speak from experience that leftist groups who otherwise hate the tech industry do celebrate tech unions.
In the government, where taxpayers pay for growing inefficiency, unions have only grown in strength.
You're quite right that this is a completely ridiculous argument.
A well paid slave, is still a slave.
It is simply risible to pretend that the tech-industry has not created a new generation of piece-workers. Or that conditions cannot be bad (even unacceptable) in a well-paid and otherwise privileged job.
Perhaps you simply lack insight to realise that by writing this comment you have become the thing my comment was mocking? :)
"You Gladiators, look at the purse awarded to you! And you call yourself a common slave! It is an insult to the slaves who toil in the mines!"
It absolutely does, by helping to (re)normalize the idea that the employer/union duality is the common, sensible, ubiquitous arrangement.
Unions traditionally refer to blue collar/factory work.
I don't know what the difference is.
A worker might get paid $1,000 in compensation every time an executive hits him with a baseball bat, but it doesn't make it okay. You might later increase the payment to $3,000 per blow. But it is still assault, even though that is a lot of money to be earning for a job that anyone can do.
https://www.latimes.com/world/la-xpm-2010-dec-01-la-fg-south...
It’s far more effective to unionize when things are going well rather than when things are going bad.
Detroit was the wealthiest city in the US in 1950, with the highest per capita GDP in the country. Over the course of the 1950s, 60s and 70s, the UAW union took over, with membership eventually peaking in 1978.
What followed was industrial collapse, and eventually, Detroit becoming a ghost town.
Unions are not good for labor at large, just the labor that is on the winning side of the zero sum rent extraction scheme.
There are anti-union folk who try to blame the unions for Detroit dying. This is ignoring the fact that GM took money that was meant for pensioners, and started spending it on non-pension related stuff.
Their pension savings dropped, and the companies couldn't meet the obligations they promised to. Those obligations were put in place because of the unions.
So yes, you could argue if it wasn't for the unions those pensions would've never been promised to. However, that's victim blaming the folks since the company decided to spend money that effectively wasn't theirs and was put away, and then cry for help after it got caught. Short term profits over long term longevity is what killed Detroit.
There were a lot of other things happening at the same time:
- NAFTA fucked over US industry. - White flight, caused by a multitude of reasons including xenophobia cut down the taxable population of the city. - Lack of oversight and regulations and mismanagement of the city of Detroit.
Blaming Unions for what happened is wild. Without the Unions, detroit would've never seen the boom that it did, and without the unions, the workers would've ended up in a worse situation considering what NAFTA did to US manufacturing.
Retail ownership may now make up a greater population but for the lower 50% of Americans, stock ownership has been declining. And for all but the top 10% of Americans, the amount of stock owned (as a fraction of all stock in circulation or even inflation adjusted value held) has been declining.
So in a very real sense, the stock market has an increasingly negligible direct impact on the lives of a significant chunk (if not a majority) of Americans (however it still may have an indirect effect via exposure from their employers).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_Unite...
> Unions are simply a rent-seeking mechanism to extract more wealth from the shareholders by restricting their contract rights.
and the choice between that money going to the workers creating that value vs the shareholders matters.
If ownership of stocks is concentrating and fewer working class Americans are owning stocks, then shifting wealth distribution from the shareholder towards the worker should generally be regarded as good for the working class. And regardless, maybe if more of the money went directly to the workers, they'd me more willing to put money into the market than they currently are.
Wages have stagnated, cost of living has continued to rise, and corporate profits have soared. It's really not a surprise why working class Americans don't invest in the market, they just don't have the money to "waste" or "risk" on it.
Capitalism is the only model that can maximize economic growth and social development. No amount of ideological wishful thinking will change that.
Wild. Even ChatGPT would yell at you for this hot take lol.
They were tenable. The execs literally spent money that wasn't theirs and then said oh no we don't have money left.
They took short term profits, over long term goals and commitments.
The tech workers are under the false assumption that they have the upper hand, in the midst of higher interest rates, competition between companies (reducing profit margins), AI (boosting non-english, non-western workforce skills higher bringing them near par to average western knowledge workers).
Companies will accelerate firing and blocking these groups going forward.
I, on the other hand, have worked multiple jobs where an expectation of 18 hour days 6-7 days a week is not out of scope for the role during periods of crunch. This brings my hourly wage based on salary down to that of someone working at McDonalds.
Who exactly is entitled?
I hate that there's no easy way to run the experiment, but when I talk to my parents about their life at my age, I'm often astounded at how much wealthier my life feels at $27k a year (though I am fortunate to rent a room for free, so my living standard is effectively ~10k higher than it would be for others at the same wage as me).
For what it's worth I'm from Denmark, so maybe its totally different in the US.
Even today tradespeople get paid $50k more per year than I do and they have far better conditions. They strike all the time and refuse to do work they aren’t paid for.
To weigh in a bit on some of the differences between employment in Denmark and the US.
- In the US there are no mandated (paid or unpaid) vacation days/time off (with the exception of 3-4 of the 50 states).
- There are no mandated paid sick days.
- You are granted at most 12 weeks of unpaid sick leave per year by the FMLA however if you actually take advantage of this, most companies will simply let you go for another, unspecified reason (as you are not required to document or explain why you have let go or fire an employee).
- There is no mandated paternity leave, paid or unpaid. Maternity leave falls under unpaid sick leave.
- On average (but not required), employees get 10-20 days of paid time off (combined between vacation and sick time).
- The US obviously has atrocious health care costs that unless you are very lucky end up eating non-negligible portions of your paycheck. (just insurance before any actual received care is on average is ~450USD/month)
- US Universities cost a lot of money and if you aren't going into the trades, you will be dedicating a large, non-negligible portion of your paycheck towards paying loans (avg: ~40k USD loans, ~150-300USD/month).
- In almost any part of the US outside of a small selection of major cities, you cannot work or live without a car. (avg car insurance ~150USD/month, avg cost of fuel ~150-200USD/month, maintenance, etc can be assumed to be another 25-100USD/month).
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That works out to on average around ~900-1200USD/month or ~10.8k-14.4k USD/year in costs (if you aren't going to university you can subtract 450USD/month or 5400USD/year from this) that are essentially unavoidable for the overwhelming majority of Americans which likely are avoidable in a country like Denmark as long as you don't live in an overly rural area.
Realistically this means that for the average American (~31k/year), anywhere from 17-46% of their income goes to expenses that aren't necessarily applicable to people in a decent chunk of western Europe (particularly the urban/suburban parts). And on top of this, for many Americans, any life complication or sickness that prevents them from working causes that percentage to rise (both from increased costs and decreased income).
If you made 31k/yr your healthcare subsidy under the ACA would put your premium at $0-10/month https://www.goodrx.com/insurance/aca/aca-income-limits
While there is no federal law for sick leave, many states have them, and even for states that don’t, local municipalities do which means a large portion of US workers do receive mandated sick time. https://www.paycor.com/resource-center/articles/paid-sick-le...
To a lesser degree, the same goes for maternity leave https://www.zippia.com/advice/average-paid-maternity-leave/ https://www.ncsl.org/labor-and-employment/state-family-and-m...
The car insurance part is also wrong. As is the part about being fired for taking sick time; it costs the average employer 7 figures to fight a wrongful termination suit. So even if they win, it’d have been cheaper to keep you on even if you did nothing. Employers in at will states can fire you for any reason but if you’ve had fine performance reviews leading up to your medical leave, only the stupidest employers would expose themselves to massive legal liability by firing you. I’m guessing you’re pretty naive to running a business because most employers and entrepreneurs I’ve talked to are quite aware of this and truthfully do have good will towards their employees anyway.
There’s more to pick apart here but tl;dr - no one in the US making 31k/yr is spending half their income on health insurance and car insurance. At the income level, your effective tax rate is 0% too cause of tax credits.
Which is an employer in every state except Montana. And let's not pretend that employees who are wrongly fired are willing/able to fight a long legal battle to prove their termination was illegal, so no matter how much it costs an employer it's still on the terminated employee to start proceedings. Unless it's a "slam dunk" case that a lawyer will take pro-bono and take money from the settlement or win, that person will need to pay out of pocket, which is out of reach for almost everyone.
I also would like to see the "7 figures to fight a wrongful termination suit" citation.
> While there is no federal law for sick leave, many states have them, and even for states that don’t, local municipalities do which means a large portion of US workers do receive mandated sick time.
Sure, but not everyone lives in the states that have paid sick leave, and only 14 states plus DC, plus a handful of other cities, actually do offer it. The majority of them additionally have a cap of 40 hours, after which it's going to be unpaid, so if you're unfortunately sick for longer than a week, you're kind of out of luck.
On top of this, the parent most likely meant mandated as in federally mandated, which is true, there is no federally mandated sick leave.
While the US isn't as bad as some people like to make it seem to be, it's also not that good for a lot of people, so please don't pretend it is.
You can start a new software company and run it the way you want as opposed to parasitizing an existing one. This isn't the 1800s where you have to go build an entire factory. This is software.
Employees forming a union isn't 'parasitizing' an existing one. It is clear you don't even understand the basics of what a union is or how it works. It is for the best if ignorant people like stop acting like you know what you are talking about instead of posting brain dead takes on the internet.
If the existing organization wanted a union, it would have established the union itself.
If it did not, it's parasitizion of an existing organism.
This is a mischaracterization of what unions do. When have you witnessed a union do this? That must be a remarkably powerful union to be making decisions for the entire organization.
Unions simply negotiate things related to their members, on behalf of their members. There's no "forcing" involved.
If a company doesn't want to meet the union's expectations for the wages and benefits of their members, it can simply fire all the union members or wait for them to strike and hire their replacements. After all, it's just software, how hard could it be to replace the entire team? Surely no harder than a single person simply quitting and building a competitor to Blizzard.
Not agreeing with OP, but you generally can’t fire striking workers. Replacements are difficult as you still owe the striking workers their positions if they return.
Lots of caveats to all of that, but it’s definitely not simple. If it were there would be very few private unions.
Regardless, unions are a net positive.
https://www.epi.org/publication/unions-and-well-being/
> We find that, on average, the 17 U.S. states with the highest union densities:
> have state minimum wages that are on average 19% higher than the national average and 40% higher than those in low-union-density states
> have median annual incomes $6,000 higher than the national average
> have higher-than-average unemployment insurance recipiency rates (that is, a higher share of those who are unemployed actually receive unemployment insurance)
And Especially "just form your own union" was precisly what this example demonstrated that is not valid. That union had enough political power to Force the State to autoenroll People that did not want to be part of that union because they did not see any benefit.
Anyway in the usa the population at large is utterly allergic to workers rights laws. The most rational way in the usa to ensure better labor rights is to form a Union.
For the Communists, I come from an ex-Communist country. Me and my children are still suffering from those conseguences and the communists in Italy tell me stories how they watched us in the television from their villas and Envied us..., while our govenment gave contributions to the Italian Comunist party and we the people had the moto "We will eat grass if we have to". that's the Disconnect they live in.
You're not replaceable. Those... those workers... They're replaceable. You're special. You negotiated and got a whole dime more for yourself. That makes you better than those... others.
Of course, if you'd joined a union, you'd have got a buck more, and better benefits. But no, you're Speshul.
Solidarity forever.
See how that works?
My parents were in a union and their parents before them. What are you talking about?
Of course they feel entitled to this, many young workers just entering the workforce (myself included) haven't known anything else their entire adult lives. How can you blame them and not the government and corporate cronies for instituting these terrible policies in the first place?!
thanks for the chuckle
and
> When we use our voices, we do so because we care about the future of Bandcamp
These two "principles" are in tension with each other, so it will be interesting to see how selfless (do what's best for Bandcamp, even it means I need to lose my job or get paid less or get less time off etc. etc.) or how selfish this group will be.
These aren't really in tension with each other at all.
> (do what's best for Bandcamp, even it means I need to lose my job or get paid less or get less time off etc. etc.)
Unions aren't particularly afraid of layoffs. They'll fight reductions in force (RIF) and unnecessary layoffs but the main focus is guaranteeing that those individuals who are let go get compensated adequately and are provided a sufficient cushion to bounce back and find their next job.
When it comes to priorities, number 1 and 2 are equally that the company survives and benefits are not cut. If you have to let people go to meet those priorities that is fine but as soon as you start carving away at peoples' hard earned benefits, then all of a sudden any perceived bump in the road can be used to undermine the union and your benefits.
One “solution” is to make big decisions by committee / vote, but then there’s no accountability or responsibility.
If workers want to control their destiny they should buy the company so they have real skin in the game, not tell shareholders/owners that they know what’s best…
Many countries are even talking about doing four-day weeks or six-hour days.
It is in the interest of the company to have happy, productive workers that stay because they enjoy their life and work. That is best done with generous compensation and whatever allows for a good work/life balance.
Yes.
If you sack half of your workers, your productivity will approximately double. But not for long.
If we are going to have malicious and incompetent people in the society, I am of the opinion that they should sink to the bottom, not rise to the top.
You, apparently, believe the opposite.
Of course, you are quite free to continue with that preference.
I'm not sure how exactly you read that given the context, but I agree with you.
As we've seen, capitalism has constantly driven itself in to crisis with those at the top always managing to protect themselves.
Maybe the rest of us will get a chance to insulate ourselves from our own incompetence rather than being simply crushed by management and laid off when their bad decisions have come home to roost.
If we're going to have crises, I'd rather they be of my own making, and I'd rather be looked out for.
Can someone explain this in plain english?
Expect a major downsizing in the next year or so.
No one cared about unions when they could easily find new jobs.
Now that's not so certain with the rise of AI. (Edit: and all these redundancies, yes)
The AI boom overall will most likely add more jobs to tech with everyone wanting to invest resources in it.
They are supposed to be the smart guys who make the big bucks in return for efficiently allocating capital to productive activities.
They, apparently, couldn't think of any productive activities, and instead have spaffed it up the wall inventing "taxis, but worse", an automatic plagiarizer, and a variety of unprofitable websites whose goal is to herd and trap users before making the website shit in exchange for money so they can milk cash from entrapped users before a competitor manages to scale their moat.
It's bizarre considering the scale of problems humanity faces (not even including the serious stuff like climate change) that these people cannot find any useful work for all those talented hands to be set to.
People are right not to have confidence in a system that seems to so have obviously and clearly failed to do things that you imagine any reasonably bright person would be able to do (ie. find useful and profitable things for talented people to get on with, given an unlimited free-money faucet for a decade and a half).
It can write you a function/method/script if you give it an outline of what you need but it's awful at anything remotely complex and everything it spits out needs to be understood by somebody so it can be checked.
It can save a developer time but it only replaces people in that one person can be more productive which is absolutely nothing new.
The reason for that is because it's not AI, it's ML. It doesn't understand anything.
Those languages came about during the boom of websites and apps, however.
And more code was being written, rewritten and maintained by coders--now, instead, it's looking like it'll be generated, tested, analysed and regenerated.
If one developer can all of a sudden do the work of four, I think leadership is just going expect higher output from the same number of people.
If AI gets to the point where an end user can easily describe the app or website they want, however, then it won't just be the programmers who are in trouble.
That being said, if you have the knowledge-working talent, organizational skills, ambition, and reputation necessary to start a successful guild, you can make a lot more money as a consultant, and money is a powerful motivator.
I think if, as an economy, we were geared more towards quality and building for the long-term, a software guild would emerge more naturally. We've optimized for a different system, that doesn't much reward the differential outputs of a guild-like association. Reasonable people can disagree on the relative merits of this system. :)
When you hired somebody from them, you knew you were getting the real deal. Their contracts included protection from off-the-clock hours, 4-day weeks, etc. They were also super transparent and accurate with the "level" of people you were getting. They charged a premium-level fee (read: not an exorbitant, luxury-level fee), but my company at the time was happy to pay – the marginal expense was basically insurance that nobody involved was going to be wasting their time. On every IC team they were embedded in, they got better performance reviews and 360 reviews than anybody else.
I think over the years, they (tragically, IMO) appear to have drifted away from this model, because they found they could grow faster by aiming more "mid-market"; my guess is that the pool of money on the buy side in the mid-market is larger.
Basically, mediocrity is the most profitable equilibrium. You have to possess some organizing principle that's more foundational than the pursuit of profit to avoid it. There's ways to do that without getting totally wonky. You could organize as a Co-Op (so you operate group-selfishly instead of leader-selfishly), register as a benefit corporation, etc.
--
As for the other examples, what I like about tech is that anyone can join the industry. I think the way attorneys and doctors have set up their profession works for them but it really makes it hard for anyone who didn't choose the golden path to join.
The most successful way to accomplish this level of organizing is forming a union.
"Union solidarity" is an important cover story for a host of behaviors that would otherwise be simply shocking.
Unfortunately solidarity strikes were so successful for workers for much of the 20th century, they were criminalised in parts of the English-speaking world from the 80s onward.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildcat_strike_action#Legality
>Wildcat strikes have been considered illegal in the United States since 1935
Sounds to me like the only time it becomes legal is if you were in a union and then leave while still employed at the same place
> Nevertheless, US workers can formally request that the National Labor Relations Board end their association with their labor union if they feel that the union is not adequately representing their interests. At this point, any strike action taken by the workers may be termed a wildcat strike, but there is no illegality involved, as there is no longer a conflict between sections 7 and 9(a) of the NLRA.
What do you think "formally request to end their association with their labor union" means?
>formally request that the National Labor Relations Board end their association with their labor union if they feel that the union is not adequately representing their interests
>At this point, any strike action taken by the workers may be termed a wildcat strike, but there is no illegality involved
Which is stated in wikipedia after:
>Wildcat strikes have been considered illegal in the United States since 1935
>Under the 1935 National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), federal courts have held that wildcat strikes are illegal and that employers may fire workers participating in them.
The wikipedia page literally says that you must end your relationship with the union due to inadequate representation
If there isn't a union then it wouldn't be considered a wildcat strike at all, therefore there must be a union at that workplace for it to be considered a wildcat strike and the person must be unassociated with that union due to inadequate representation for it to be a protected wildcat strike
https://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Wildcat+Strik...
At worst, the LLMs are able to explain this stuff correctly so you can just ask them.
Not sure whether this is saying that Bandcamp has already established a cooperative stance with the union, or if it's saying that doing so should be Bandcamp's next step. I'm hoping that it's the first option, but otherwise this is definitely a positive development.