It's illegal.See "Discriminating against employees because of their union activities or sympathies" [1] Enforcement is weak, but it's illegal.
[1] https://www.nlrb.gov/about-nlrb/rights-we-protect/the-law/di...
[1] https://www.nlrb.gov/about-nlrb/rights-we-protect/the-law/di...
Seems like the way the sale was set up, it was deliberately done to avoid any commitments to the Bandcamp workforce. No idea of the legality of this, but if I was a Bandcamp employee that was lucky enough to move to SongTradr, I'd be polishing my resume, because it doesn't bode well for them being a good employer.
1) Fire everybody
2) Create new corporate entity
3) Rehire the meek and compliant
4) Sell corporate entity back to original company
Judges tend to get very cranky when they have to deal with shenanigans like these.
The question really should just be in #1 is legal. The extra shenanigans doesn't change that question.
#1 by itself is not illegal. When companies move a factory overseas they also just fire everybody. Not nice, but not illegal.
It's not illegal in se, but it is illegal if it's done in order to retaliate against employees for organizing, in order to target union employees, in order to undermine a union, etc.
There's a question of enforcement, and there's the challenge of proving that to the requisite legal standard. But assuming the facts are established, it's actually a very clear violation of the NLRA.
They were told if they didn't sign a worse deal they would be fired, causing a fight with the union.
The new company has to offer employees a "transfer of previous employment" - so even though you're working for someone else, your history at the previous company is moved over with you. So if they wanted to get rid of you, they would then have to go through a redundancy process - which involves explaining why they're letting you go, offering you alternatives and giving you a payout based on your length of service.
I think how it gets prosecuted also depends on if there is a way to prove collusion between the two companies in this. It is absolutely fishy that Epic laid everyone off just before the sale/transfer concluded to Songtradr and both companies can currently pretend they did nothing wrong and hurting the union was an accident of bad timing and Songtradr especially looking "clean" hiring back in "waves" based on BS metrics and "goodwill" since it could have just not offered jobs back to people already laid off by the previous owner. It can be hard not to imagine that there wasn't some "golf course handshake" on the whole thing, but proving that existed may be tough to do, especially if the collusion was literal golf course handshakes with no paper trail.
This should be illegal but it just sounds like good free market business.
If they were Epic, not Bandcamp, employees then Songtradr would be within their rights to proceed as they have. But Epic would have had to go through a redundancy process (including explaining why it's happening, detailing the alternative tactics they have explored and trying to find other roles within the organisation for the affected employees).
Of course, it's all immaterial as UK law doesn't apply (and I only took a short qualification in it so I know it's fiendishly complex anyway).
EDITED to remove information I had included in the original post
> “Of those laid off, 40 were in the union bargaining unit out of a total 67 members. None of the eight (8) democratically elected bargaining team members received a job offer.”
I assume I'd have to use NCR or something to calculate that. I know the upper (rarest) bound is 1/2^40, but it's likely much more likely, and not random.
Given that 50% of all employees were laid off, what were the odds of at least 40 employees out of 67 randomly-selected employees getting laid off?
=B(67;0.5;40;67)
> 0.07103569
One-tailed p-value of 0.07, two-tailed p-value of 0.14. So the odds are about 1 in 7, or 1 in 14.
You might want to ask yourself "Do I really believe that, if I thought I might be about to get fired, that would have no influence on whether I tried to join a union?" [Answering this question in the negative means you can justify using the one-tailed p-value, but it also means the odds of getting fired should be substantially above 50%.]
Note also that this number shifts substantially as you move the odds of getting laid off away from 50%. At 53%, you have a one-tailed value of 16.44%. At 47%, it's 2.5%.
Modelling any of these assumptions yields an arbitrary probability of your own choosing.
This feels like the wrong conclusion to draw (especially the second part), but I suck at statistics so someone please explain where I'm off.
Extreme example: suppose a company has 100 employees. Four of them are in the union bargaining team and they just happen to all work for the widgets department because of an accident of history or randomness etc. The widgets department has 10 people overall.
Now the company decides for business reasons entirely unrelated to unions, that thanks to GPT they don't need so many people in the widgets department. So they fire 8 people from widgets. Assume further that they went out of their way to protect the union bargainers: of those 8 people fired, only 2 are in the union bargaining team. (That means that the remaining 2 widgets people are both union bargainers.)
Even though the company went out of their way to protect the union bargainers, statistically they only laid off 8% of the company, but 50% of union bargainers. Would that be illegal or even unfair?
(In the real world, I am fairly sure that union bargainers are concentrated in some departments. Mostly because it attracts certain kinds of people, and different departments also attract certain kinds of people.
But, of course, I have no clue what the reality inside of Bandcamp was like. I'm just speculating about hypothetical examples.)
My example crucially hinges on the company being able to convincingly argue that they singled out that particular widget department for reasons unrelated to the union. If they can't make that argument, or someone even manages to proof that they fired from the widget department _because_ of the union people, then they would be in deep trouble.
P(lose job | bargainer): 50%
P(lose job | not bargainer): 6.25%
-----widgets team-----
P(lose job | bargainer) 50%
P(lose job | not bargainer) 100%
-----everyone else----
P(lose job | bargainer) NaN
P(lose job | not bargainer) 0%
----------------------
This isn't the cleanest example, since the comparison at the bottom can't be drawn at all. But the way the problem is narrated, it would counterfactually have exhibited the paradox.
Edit: also, another confounding factor that hasn't been discussed is job role/department. Layoffs and union membership are definitely not evenly distributed across role/department, but there is not enough info in the article to know if the layoffs were targeting specific roles or uniform across the company.
>> You might want to ask yourself "Do I really believe that, if I thought I might be about to get fired, that would have no influence on whether I tried to join a union?"
You actually want the odds of a specific set of 40 individuals getting laid off. It looks like Bandcamp had 118 employees and 60 layoffs per various news outlets (and on the wikipedia page [0]). Assuming each employee was equally likely to get laid off given the target retention [1], you could compute this from the binomial distribution using "number of ways to predetermine those 40 are getting laid off, plus 20 from the remainder, divided by number of ways to select 60 individuals out of 118".
Or, more concisely, (78 choose 20) / (118 choose 60), which is actually closer to 10^-16 (2 orders of magnitude more unlikely than the simple approximation of 2^-40, which assumes an infinitely large pool).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandcamp : "Songtradr stated that only 60 of Bandcamp's previously 118 workers had been offered a contract."
[1] This is by no means guaranteed.
Well, close. I've computed the odds that at least 40 of a group of 67 special people get laid off.
There is another comment in this thread suggesting that 67 is the number of bargaining team members. I don't know, because I haven't read the article. So my calculation might or might not be right, depending on whether you interpreted the article correctly or the handful of people taking the other position did. My interpretation was that 40 out of 67 union members got fired, which appears to have been wrong.
However...
> You actually want the odds of a specific set of 40 individuals getting laid off.
I definitely don't want that. You never want to make a comparison against a specific outcome when you ask "what are the odds?" like this. All specific outcomes are rare, so that question will never tell you anything informative. (I almost wrote "will never tell you anything useful", but if what you're looking for is a scapegoat, you might find the calculation you propose useful for that. It's not useful for anything else, and frankly it's a disgrace that you suggested it.)
edit:
This is what the article says:
> “On Monday, October 16, 2023 over half of Bandcamp was laid off as a result of Epic Games’ divestiture to Songtradr,” Bandcamp United said in a statement. “Of those laid off, 40 were in the union bargaining unit out of a total 67 members. None of the eight (8) democratically elected bargaining team members received a job offer.”
So it looks like there are these groups:
- bandcamp employees (number unknown)
- union members (number unknown)
- union members on the bargaining team (67)
- union members on the bargaining team who got laid off (40)
- union members elected to the bargaining team (8)
- union members elected to the bargaining team, who got laid off (8)
This suggests that the calculation I gave was the same one that was sought, and also that the base rate, as far as we believe in it, was over 50%. Remember that shifting the odds of being fired from 50% to 53% more than doubled the odds of seeing the pattern we did see.
118 (ironically, not 120) per https://finance.yahoo.com/news/half-bandcamps-120-person-sta...
I incorrectly conflated the number of laid off union members with the total number of "special" individuals, while only 8 of them were actually "special" (i.e. democratically elected bargaining team members). It'd be more accurate to describe that probability of the impact to the bargaining team as (110 choose 52) / (118 choose 60) which comes out to about 0.35%, not too far off from the 2^-8 estimate (0.4%) that your approach of using the binomial distribution on this same set would result in. Both approaches would yield similar results, and the result is still somewhat in the realm of plausible deniability.
> All specific outcomes are rare, so that question will never tell you anything informative.
I'm not describing any specific outcomes in this case, though. You could throw up your hands and say "oh, we laid off these specific 60 people, there's only a 10^-34 chance of picking exactly those 60 people out of 118". That would absolutely be useless.
I'm describing the event that "all of this one group got laid off" as a subset of the space of possible outcomes given what we observed, and ascribing a probability to that event.
I will admit I used the wrong inputs, but I stand by my approach.
in any country which properly enforces labor protection law laying of any union leaders without the agreement of the union is extremely hard and requires missteps of the members like e.g. stealing. Or really unusual situations like you lay of half of the members and over half of the members have young children (or e.g. are disabled, project leaders etc.) but non of the union members have any of that. The likelihood of which is basically 0 in practice.
The reason is often racism. This time it could legitimately be illegal union busting.
But that would lead the way to the question of why this was a redundancy rather than dismissal for cause.
Im not any sort of lawyer let alone an employment lawyer, but I’m sure there are some employment lawyers getting in touch with these folks now to test their interest in pushing a case.
Because if yes, that’s not a good look for them at all and is kind of a perfect ammo for the anti-union side.
which you seem to eat up and want to spit right back at people
Your highest performing state is temporary. There will be times where you’ll have off days. You will deal with death in the family. You will be eventually injured. If you aren’t already disabled, you will eventually be (this is just old age). You may become a parent. You might immigrate and come under restrictive visa. You’re a human being with fluctuating states, same as everyone else, and an abusive employer shouldn’t get to power trip over you just because they don’t think it’s legitimate enough for them or something.
So yes, there’s a lot of reasons why a “high performer” might want to be in a union. There’s a lot of life shit we all go through.
Edited to add: this is not the mention your employer might just pull some crap like nepotizing a promotion over you, where a union would come in handy handy!
Even if you think there should be a social safety net for these types of circumstances, it makes little sense for employers to provide it. For one, it has the usual problems of tying important services to employment, similar to how healthcare is in the US. It also puts an undue burden on small businesses. You run a 10 person startup and one of your employees got a long term disability? Congratulations, you have to now find a replacement AND continue paying them. Large companies have law of large numbers on their side, but as an unlucky small business that's 10% of your payroll.
>Edited to add: this is not the mention your employer might just pull some crap like nepotizing a promotion over you, where a union would come in handy handy!
1. has there been a good track record of unions being able to successfully prevent cases like these?
2. Given the level of corruption associated with unions, at least in the US, you're just replacing one problem with another.
So the contract only covers time? Not actual work, but only time? Do I get to spend the time how I want as long as there is a paper trail that it was your time I just wasted?
> The company isn't a charity.
Yet both are legal and social constructs and not something you can make up on the fly to fit your personal preferences.
> it makes little sense for employers to provide it.
I have been worked to exhaustion for one employer. You don't get to reap the profits and socialize the costs, that only incentivizes more abuse.
> You run a 10 person startup and one of your employees got a long term disability?
So if that person was you would you fire yourself and move onto the street in front of your former business?
In the case of a small startup, long term disability insurance should cover the living costs of that disability. Yes, that person should be let go, even a founder, if they are unable to perform their duties. But they shouldn't be kicked the street, and the company also shouldn't be on the hook for their care. Either through premiums or taxes, this situation should be accounted for ahead of time. Employment shouldn't be a lifetime obligation of a company.
I'm not sure whether this is supposed to be gotcha at my wording, but it's pretty obvious that if you're paying for someone's time, there's an expectation that they're doing what you want them to do. Otherwise it's like ordering an airbnb but you don't get to use it.
>Yet both are legal and social constructs and not something you can make up on the fly to fit your personal preferences.
Let's go with the legal construct then. Most companies are not in fact "charities" as defined in Internal Revenue Code (26 U.S.C. § 501(c)).
>I have been worked to exhaustion for one employer.
No one is forcing you to work "to exhaustion".
>You don't get to reap the profits and socialize the costs, that only incentivizes more abuse.
If you read my previous comment carefully you'd note that I was only against leaving the responsibility of providing those services to companies. That does not preclude companies paying for those services in some way. Most developed countries don't leave the responsibility of providing healthcare to companies, and instead use a combination of public/private insurance schemes that companies and individuals pay into. Are you against that as well, because that would allow companies to "reap the profits and socialize the costs"?
>So if that person was you would you fire yourself and move onto the street in front of your former business?
In reality there are other considerations for key employees like the CEO which complicates this, but in principle? Yes. The CEO has a fiduciary duty to shareholders and if he's incapacitated and unable to fulfill his duties he should step down rather than using the company as a personal rainy day fund.
It was indeed a good question, getting you closer to the truth: No, the employee isn't getting paid for time. No, the employee isn't getting paid for results. The employee is getting paid for fulfilling their terms of an employment contract which may include terms regarding time, results, and benefits that treat the employee as a human being, rather than a cog.
So the main reason to give such benefits to an employee of yours would be because the contract you signed says you have to.
So maybe firing someone for underperforming is abusive?
That's one important role of unions, but it's not the only one. The primary purpose of unions is to allow employees to negotiate with employers on a more equal playing field. Without unions, the power imbalance generally ensures that employees are at a disadvantage when it comes to negotiating a fair deal.
I don't think they should offer protection for non-performers – outside of situations where a life event has mad a performer a non-performer for some reasonable amount of time.
And while unions aren't homogenous, they generally don't protect incompetence. I've known people in unions that got fired for poor performance, generally. But if I was a cook and cut off a finger while making some company profitable, my performance would certainly suffer while it was healing, and lots of companies world very much rather stop paying me. So in that case yes, I very much hope that a union would protect people from that performance-related loss of employment.
They tend to insist on due process for adverse actions, and management tend to hold out the idea that being able to dismiss arbitrarily without evidence or process is essential to efficiently dealing with incompetence.
What I said doesn't require everyone to be "motivated by greed for personal wealth and status". The effect will still be present even if only a fraction of people behave that way.
>Actually most aren't.
Source?
Perhaps, but there's also a real chance that the union structure you end up with ends up being net negative for top earners. If you're in the top 10%, what makes you think the bottom 90% won't vote for policies that end up redistributing your wages to them?
Also as I said in my other comment[1], whether this is actually true is irrelevant. All that matters is that it sounds plausible and some fraction of people believe it. Perception is reality in this case.
We already have the bottom 10% (executives) doing that. We would need evidence to be convinced that your scenario would plausibly happen if workers had more power and executives less.
As to why a talented free agent would want to join a union. It seems to me that in an industry with strong union presence then union is obvious to join. It provides so many protections and adds leverage to intangibles that even high earning individuals can’t negotiate for.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compensating_differential#Empl...
Those things are usually much more important than pay and benefits, and when union negotiations stall, it's more usually about that sort of thing than about money.
I hate to bring up the old example, but it's used because it nicely illustrates the value of unions for everybody -- not just the union members. Things like having a 40 hour workweek and weekends only happened because of unions.
If you want to know the odds, you'd have to know their criteria. You can't assume that it was random, because it definitely wasn't. (Though, I've seen the aftermath of a random layoff, I'd take criteria'd layoff every day, even if I'm the one with the pink slip.)
It was quite the weird coincedence that people who had an excellent performance, but refused to renegotiate their old contracts in an earlier stage, were all laid off.
At the very least, for the sake of optics, they shouldn't have fired the union reps. Not all of them anyway.
We're all making assumptions here, but let's assume they had legitimate business reasons for the layoffs. What you suggest is that they make less optimal decisions for the sake of optics.
In a free-market economy, the companies that make less optimal decisions will have their lunch eaten by those that don't.
In a race to the bottom, concern for others is a liability. Ugh.
But was any of that state 'power'? Or state weakness?
When the downfall of some of these companies takes more than a life time, who gives a hoot?
Lots and lots of companies are starting to be too big to (fully) fail.
And the bill isn't delayed by a lifetime either.
And that's the key issue. Positive sum (along with "first, do no harm") behavior is what makes societies healthy and prosperous. Laissez faire free market capitalism rewards extractive actions over positive sum actions with predictable catastrophic consequences.
You mean like firing the union bargaining team or laying off half your workforce?
And that's one of the reasons we don't have free market economies in general; because they are extremely harmful to society as a whole.
China survived communism because it implemented free-market reforms (while retaining centralized control in the political structure).
I'd say generally, the free market is what makes economies work.
Edit: minor rewording
Yeah sure, why care about the people that built the working machine and their family, as long as the 1% can get profit out of the machine?
The Musk management style is common in this type of acquisition.
Unions are parasites and sources of great evil. Want to control a company? Found one, or buy its shares.
If you recognize yourself as an important player in the organization, with a strong individual bargaining position, it seems likely that unionization would be seen as less pressing. Such a person may be willing to join a union in effect, but doesn't have the same kind of incentive to make a union happen.
It is certainly not surprising that the more precarious jobs are the first to go.
The company is being acquired and then they are choosing not to issue a bunch of people contracts.
M&A transactions can get pretty complicated for exactly these reasons; frequently, they disassemble the entire set of assets for sale and divvy them up across one or more buyers, who will pick and choose what they want and then reconstitute whatever they have purchased to their desired degree.