Fastmail Employees Form a Union
union.place
union.place
That seems hostile and designed to enable corruption
I think that some software engineers in Germany are covered by the larger unions like IG Metall and Verdi, but my understanding is mostly for those that work in companies that make physical goods like Mercedes, Siemens, etc.
1. Why did the Fastmail employees decide to form a union? Were the working conditions poor? Was the pay below market rate? Abnormal working hours? Not enough vacation or maternal/paternal leave?
2. Has Fastmail released a statement on this? What is their position?
3. Who comprises the leadership of this union?
4. What is the charter or mission of the union? (What are they seeking to accomplish or remedy?)
5. What percentage of Fastmail workers are members of the union? (Does the union have a target membership percentage?)
6. Is the union seeking to renegotiate the employment contracts of its members at this time? If not, are they expecting to in the future?
7. Will it be possible to work at Fastmail in the future without being a union member, or will union membership be (formally or informally) compulsory?
8. Who are the members of the union? (By job type, I mean. Engineers? HR? Janitorial staff? Managers?)
9. Does the union charge dues and how much?
10. Are there union meetings and if so, how often?
11. What action can a union member take if they disagree with a union decision, or the overall direction the union is taking?
While I know nothing about this specific campaign, I am a member of the union they purport to be joining and have worked on a half-dozen new organizing campaigns. Local 13000 is a real local, and it would make sense for them to be joining it.
Most of your questions can be answered by reference to labor law and the union's internal "law" (i.e. the CWA constitution, sector and local bylaws), both of which are available online. Here is what we can say at a high level based on those resources (and in a few instances, my personal experience of the union).
#3 - Per CWA guidelines for locals engaged in new organizing, the leadership of the unit will be an organizing committee that represents each work group in the sought bargaining unit. The typical guideline is a committee of at least 20% of the sought unit. The CWA does not go public with new units without at least of 70% of the unit expressing interest in writing ("signing a union card").
#6 - The use of the term "renegotiating" is misleading. Collective bargaining agreements supersede individual employment contracts by definition. Typically, the CWA conducts an election of workers in the unit to choose a bargaining committee, which then bargains with the employer assisted by paid staff and/or lawyers. In any case, the contract must be ratified by a majority vote of the members for CWA to enter into it. Only then would their "employment contracts" be superseded. That said, the overwhelming employment contracts in the united states do not bind the employer in any meaningful way, and are not meaningfully negotiated. Where there are meaningfully bargained contracts, such as in broadcasting or entertainment, union members can and often do allow certain provisions to remain in force, using the union contract to set a floor on conditions. This is very common in Hollywood.
#7 - This depends a great deal on where Fastmail conducts its business in a legal sense, and is a somewhat unsettled area of law with increasing relevance due to remote work. In the United States, unions have a "duty of fair representation" to represent every member of their unit, have basic democratic processes, etc. This is typical in democratic countries. It is also typical for union members to equally share the cost of running the union to ensure that there is no free-riding. In the United States, federal law mandates that unions have a duty of fair representation, but some state laws allow people to avoid paying their share of the costs of that representation. These so-called "right to work laws" were proposed in response specifically to African American workers in the South seeking to form unions that could not be undermined by free-riding (cf. the Memphis Sanitation Strike).
#8 - The union may propose any unit. The employer may challenge that unit. If challenged, the National Labor Relations Board determines whether the workers in the unit represent a "community of interest." This standard evolves constantly as successive administrations appoint members of the National Labor Relations Board.
#9 - This is determined by the executive board of the local, which is elected by members according to procedures in the local bylaws. In some locals, this will be a fixed amount; in others, it will be a fraction of gross income. I pay 1.67% of my overall income in dues and saw a raise substantially greater than that when we ratified our first contract. Some members saw raises as high as 10%.
#10 - See the bylaws for meetings in the local. The unit meetings would generally be organized by the elected bargaining committee, and then by stewards. All locals of the CWA will have a business meeting monthly, but individual units (i.e. groups of workers at a given company) typically meet more often and delegate someone to go to meetings of bodies representing larger groups. Activity in unions is, generally speaking, highly uneven. In my unit, there is some sort of union discussion in our slack daily. Tech worker units are, as a rule, more active than those in other fields.
#11 - See the local bylaws, sector, and international bylaws, which lay out a comprehensive system of elected offices, delegation of democratic authority. The primary recourse is to petition their elected officers/stewards, many of whom will be their immediate peers and have an interest in maintaining good relationships. Failing that, they can support the candidacy of new officers in regular elections. Failing that, they can run themselves. Outside the elective process, all officers are bound by the decisions of collective bodies like the local's executive board (which are recorded in meeting minutes all members have the right to access). Major decisions about union policy go to a vote of delegates to the international convention (there was one last year), many of whom are rank and file members. If any officer (or member) violates the the bylaws, the CWA has procedures (laid out in the links below) that allow members to bring up officers up on charges. Charges are ultimately evaluated by juries with rank and file representation. Finally, under some circumstances there could be appeal through the courts under federal laws like the Labor Management Relations Act and Labor Management Reporting Act.
Local Bylaws: https://www.cwalocal13000.org/_files/ugd/5e3432_517e9a7e2c71... CWA Constitution: https://cwa-union.org/for-locals/cwa-constitution
I'll also note that I had no idea when I wrote this (as most probably do not) that Fastmail is apparently an employee-owned company, which changes the color of this dramatically. I'm still not totally sure I see the point of the union in this case, but it means that some of my questions are essentially not applicable here.
I am a socialist, but I don't think it requires understanding of the socialist critique of capitalist social relations to see that worker ownership is not a generally applicable model for extending economic self-determination.
I have been ecstatic about the quality of service. Fingers crossed management does the right thing and retains their customers and employees.
If I lived in a place where there was an IT union like the Communications Workers of America union that covered IT people, I'd join. They are in a battle at the moment: https://cwa-union.org/news/cwa-leaders-and-federal-call-cent...
If he was the union wouldn't be necessary, right?
If anything, any negative reaction by Fastmail, the corporation will act as a signal for me to start thinking about moving away. You know a company is morally bankrupt if they fight their employees unionizing. I don't think Fastmail will do that though.
However - I'm not well versed in this area and willing to learn - why is this a 'good' sign?
The union/employer relationship is inherently hostile. The whole idea is that unionized employees can threaten production/profits as negotiation leverage.
Choosing that path means the employees have already given up on cooperation based on goodwill. It must take a very sour relationship to reach that point.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Convention_on_Human_R...
It is wacky that my ability to see a doctor is depends on my job. Losing my job and experiencing a medical emergency is a scarier proposition than losing a month or two of pay for me, tbh.
Do you have any source for this? It seems hard to believe but I haven't been able to find any studies yet. The best I've found so far says unionization has no impact on business survival: https://www.princeton.edu/~davidlee/wp/unionbf.pdf.
I'm also skeptical that you could really study this effectively, since non-unionized employees tend to benefit when unions are formed elsewhere in their industry. You'd need to compare a group of companies that unionized against a group of similar companies in the same time and place that didn't unionize and also were completely unaffected by the mass unionization of the first population.
Also I'm not sure what "supporting logic" is, I presented my logic and you can disagree with it if you want (usually using different logic, which you haven't presented), but there's no such thing as "supporting logic".
I don't think you understand what the price of a stock means ...
Well, the context here was your assertion that unions don’t act in the “long-term interest of a business”. Now, most people understand that share prices are bets on the future value, but also that it’s not a direct relationship because there’s an inherent tension between long-term and short-term interests. That plays out in questions about how much or whether to pay dividends (which has seen a big multigenerational shift in investor preferences), and whether a move which raises share prices is a long-term detriment.
We’ve seen a lot of the latter discussed here lately with tech companies doing broad layoffs to satisfy activist investors, despite research suggesting that companies making unforced layoffs tend to underperform over the long term.
Maybe neither side is planning on doing anything hostile, and they are all happy to have things clearly defined.
Edit: to add, I am not at all opposed to unions. They provide a valuable service in many industries.
I can absolutely see the benefits of a union if I felt I was being paid below my worth, if I was dealing with poor work conditions, or had no company provided insurance.
Which is the point of this conversation, when things are bad, you REALLY want a union. When things are good, it's hard to see the value of a union.
Definitely not how it works in Europe. Unions make it easier for companies to have predictable relationships with their workers, and sector-wide unions mean that a company doesn't have to worry about a labor agreement putting it at a competitive disadvantage.
The boss/employer relationship is inherently hostile. The whole idea is that bosses can threaten employment/wages as negotiation leverage.
You unionize in the good times so you’re protected in the bad times.
(Not saying that’s what happened here, just saying you cannot really judge what unionization means from the outside)
As for why that’s a good thing in general, that depends on how you feel about unions. If I have the choice between union made goods and non-union made goods, I buy the union made goods. So I’m always happy to see a company unionize.
Which is why unions work well for assembly line workers: the line moves at the speed of the slowest person on the line, so there is no way to be better than average. (the company/union can fire someone enough slower than average)
Even then, the lift from collectively bargaining probably outweighs your individual competitive abilities.
Also, the union doesn't have "promotion rules." The members themselves at those unions decided that's what they wanted to negotiate with their employer into a contract. There's no union rule that says that's what members on the bargaining team have to prioritize. The bargaining team can even prioritize performance pay! I will, however, grant that the very nature of democracy (in this case, workplace democracy) means some people will disagree about what to prioritize.
Even if you love your company, love how you're treated, and don't want anything to change, forming a union still gives you two big advantages. First, it gives employees more influence and voice over the future of the organization, and second it protects the current conditions you love so much and makes it much more difficult for management (which can change at any time) to take them away in the future.
Here's one illustrative example: the staff of Politico and E&E News announce they are unionizing (https://newsguild.org/staff-of-politico-ee-news-are-unionizi...). Why?
> “We want to establish certainty and codify all of the things that we like about E&E into this new world order,” said reporter Emma Dumain. “E&E News is the most family-friendly newsroom I’ve ever worked in,” she said. “I feel supported by my editors as a working parent and that support helps me be a better journalist.” She wants to make sure everyone has the same support, no matter who their editors are or who owns the company.
> Leah Nylen, who has been involved in four company sales over 15 years, said that each one led to changes in benefits, bosses and sometimes layoffs. The day the Politico sale to Axel Springer closed, management informed workers that because of an oversight their 401K would be frozen for the rest of 2021. “If employees had had a seat at the table, I doubt something as important as our retirement and healthcare savings would have been missed,” Nylen said.
Less than two weeks later, management voluntarily recognizes the union: https://newsguild.org/politico-ee-staffers-win-union-recogni.... Everyone seems pretty happy.
> With union recognition nailed down, Organizing Committee members immediately began informing coworkers about the new rights that brings. A legal protection known as “status quo” requires management to maintain the same wages, hours and working conditions that existed when the union was formed, unless they negotiate an agreement with the union or reach a final contract. “Just a week-and-a-half after going public, we have all of these new protections,” Snyder said.
How's it going two years later? Well, not great honestly, they still haven't agreed on a contract, but Politico is still going strong and I imagine most people there are still happy with their decision to unionize.
Here's an article about voluntary union recognition: https://www.americanprogress.org/article/voluntary-recogniti.... This is not an unbiased source, but you can ignore the framing if you want and just use it as a big collection of links to voluntary union recognition examples.
Any company would oppose their employees unionizing; they have a fiduciary duty to do so
Is that actually so?
Your second statement is categorical enough to be silly. In some cases it is true, but if you think a bit on it you'll soon realized it's not hard to construct cases where it is false.
As for fiduciary duty, there are several aspects in this context, which applies to all of your D&O's not the CEO particularly (and less concretely so employees). One is a duty of care (you have to do the job properly). The aspect you are talking about boils down to a duty to act in the best interests of the corporation as you understand them as a professional. That means that you cannot act in the best interests of any stakeholder, third party, or yourself at the expense of the rest. You can't collude with the employees to screw over the shareholders, or the with the majority shareholder to screw over the others, or with your brothers company for a contract, etc. etc. etc. This is commonly mistunderstood to mean "maximize short term shareholder value", but that is not correct. Now as the CEO the board has the right to fire you if they can (majority) agree that they don't like the strategic or tactical direction you are going and you refuse to change tack, but none of that means you have failed a fiduciary duty. If you make a decision and can back it up with experience etc. in some way that other people in your position would likely agree with being a viable plan, you are not in breach of fiduciary duty.
There are a bunch of other things, e.g. disclosure & loyalty, good faith action, etc. but you are getting hung up on the one that is usually misunderstood as a narrow interest in the shareholders.
This does not apply to reducing your material or compute bills. I can see how in the long run, a third-party making less money from you might affect their employees, but that's more of a long-term, weak and indirect effect.
Corporations aren't people, they don't need food, healthcare and happiness.
"No, I won't be (coming in on Sunday/'just doing this one extra thing before leaving after hours'/breaking company policy and legal requirements for safety or waste disposal or whatever), please see [section of union agreement], if you'd like to continue this discussion I can bring in my rep and, as required by policy laid out in [other section of union agreement], your boss, and we can all have a chat about this" will get a lot of abusive pricks to tuck tail and STFU in a hurry, with low risk of effective retaliation.
https://www.fastmail.com/digitalcitizen/the-future-of-ai-wit...
I wouldn't read too much into it. Unions are just a counterweight to corporate interests in the best case. The places that union bust out in the open are usually the worst offenders, and Fastmail doesn't seem to be that.
I don't have any insider knowledge at Fastmail, but the fact that a labor union could get organized and come into being without any drama from the company probably indicates that the upper levels of the company respect their employees enough to not fight its creation. Seems good, imo
I'm generally content with fastmail, but the webmail would need some polish. (and by polish I do not mean the user hostile react rewrites MS and Google are pushing)
- Hungarian translation is not the best (they provide it, thus I use it). It has missing parts, and sometimes problematic mistranslations. Localization (date format and date conventions) is sometimes incorrect in the calendar.
- Some calendar workflows are clunky and unintuitive.
- some other similar UX papercuts (don't get me wrong, others have theirs too, but it would be nice if fastmail would be better).
- The most annoying: if I'm logged in I need to open a private browser session to see their main site, as it instantly redirects me to the app, and I cannot access resource from within.
[0] https://www.fastmail.com/blog/exciting-news-fastmail-staff-p...
https://code-cwa.org/upcoming-trainings https://collectiveaction.tech/
Some sectors do not have sectoral bargaining but certain unions have agreements with some subset of employers in that sector to have all their workers covered by any deal that is struck. The incentive for employers in those sectors (i.e. automotive) to join these agreements is that desirable employees usually prefer unionized shops, as they have better overall compensation packages and perks. Also they might not want to become the target of strikes.
Not directly tied to unionization, workers in companies above a certain size have to be included in decision making (i.e. in public companies worker representatives get board seats) so a pro-union position often has a certain groundswell of support within a shop.
For historic reasons, in some sectors union membership is part of the "culture", as well. Historically, unions have had an important role in upwards social mobility, popular education, culture, etc.
You can go to a union's homepage and click "JOIN TODAY!" if you wish. It just doesn't create any obligation for your employer to care.
Not true for Norway, at least.
Edit: although I'm in tech I understand it covers everyone regardless of role
- Your union is likely to negotiate salaries and benefits with the umbrella organization that the employer is part of. Strikes are usually some employees across a range of companies, rather than everyone at a single company.
- If not, then the union can help you negotiate.
- The union will give you legal aid if needed, whether it's advisory or for a court battle. We have very strong worker's rights, but sometimes companies try to bend the rules.
- The union will arrange relevant seminars, courses etc. which are usually pretty cheap.
- Several parts of the Working Environment Act only apply to workers whose unions have agreements (tariffavtale) with the employer. For example, if you have such an agreement you're entitled to 5 weeks of vacation instead of just 4 weeks and 1 day.
https://lovdata.no/dokument/NLE/lov/2005-06-17-62
But most of this is moot, since many employees in most companies are organized anyway. Like all civilized countries, unionizing is a right.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Convention_on_Human_R...
Also usually when you hear that some group has 'formed their own union' they're still affiliating with an existing Union take the recently formed VFX Union, they're affiliated with IATSE.
Counterintuitively, Unions in the US have much more legal power in some ways than international counterparts - if they get officially recognized.
But official recognition is only workplace-to-workplace and has an election process to follow:
https://www.nlrb.gov/about-nlrb/what-we-do/conduct-elections
Since it's more all-or-nothing per workplace, your membership is basically tied to the shop. And for some of these newer workplaces, they might not want the baggage that comes with some of the older unions.
Some US unions work on a "hiring hall" model where your membership is not tied to a workplace. This includes electricians and plumbers and other tradespeople. And also actors and writers. But you cannot just join them if you want to. Generally you have to follow a several-year application or apprenticeship system.
It would be really hard to do sectoral bargaining in the US because there are vastly different costs of living across the country but each state is required to have free trade with each other. So to have New York workers bargaining for Alabama workers or vis versa would be a disaster.
It should also be worth pointing out that countries with sectoral bargaining also have huge number of self-employed and sole enterprise people. France has something like 2-3 times the number of self-employed people, and my understanding is that it's one of the only ways people in these economies can "opt-out" of bargaining agreements.
In most other countries, before that point workers can still be union members “at large” get support from members in other workplaces and from the central union in their quest to gain recognition in their workplace.
The IWW is an example of a union that accepts members from non-union shops both in the US and many other countries.
I can't think of anything worse for software developers than having some politically motivated organization to deal with in addition to management.
You can see how well unions have gone for software engineers in the past, (Boeing is one example that has a strong union) and compare it to the working conditions of non union places.
I understand it's 'en vogue' to support unions as a display of political affiliation, but the evidence is quite strong that it's bad for software engineers.
But I doubt you’ll get any advice for stopping it here. hn has turned into a midwit reddit when it comes discussion quality. I assume you should be allowed to continue working without joining the union or paying their dues.
> I can't think of anything worse for software developers than having some politically motivated organization
Unions are not politically motivated. They are a social collective response from workers to counteract the disproportionate power imbalance between employees and corporations. All great advancements in worker rights were done by some kind of collective organized pressure from workers vs employers.
> Does anyone have any resources for stopping unions from being formed?
Your servility wouldn't help you a thing if your employer decides to go through another round of layoffs. You are just a disposable cog in the machine for them. You could be next, and yet you are trying to disband the only group of people that are incentivised to help you: your fellow workers. It's also within workers full rights to unionize, this is something that your predecessors fought tooth and nail to obtain. Shame on you!
Unions provide job security for low performers, but do not protect against layoffs. You can check and see that plenty of people were laid off by the large tech companies all across the world, many of which who were in strong unions.
>All great advancements in worker rights were done by some kind of collective organized pressure from workers vs employers.
I can think of plenty of things that weren't because of unions. Stock options and RSUs have literally changed millions of engineers lives for the better, that was done because of the free market, not unions.
>You are just a disposable cog in the machine for them
And yet FAANG companies have had very generous severance packages, despite not having unions.
>yet you are trying to disband the only group of people that are incentivised to help you
No, they're only incentivized to help me when I am helping them. If I decide not to be in the union, that same group are going to work against me to get me fired or make me literally unhirable (by not being in the union).
That's what you're not understanding, there is a cost. The cost is that the union decides who is in the union, and tries to LIMIT your ability to get work if you don't go along with what they want!
That's why I'm going to do my best to ruin their chances of forming.
Generally individual merit pay isn't allowed though which is why so many in tech are against unions: we believe that some people are better than others and thus worth more.
I'm reading this as a sign of cultural stress unless we have evidence to the contrary. (EDIT: I didn't realise Fastmail has almost 1,000 employees, with many remote. That comes closer to where structure is merited, though I'd still argue that this points to dysfunction in the U.S.-HQ bridge given only the Americans are unionizing.)
Take this to an extreme: a start-up. A union is overly bureaucratic. I’d wager a union doesn’t start making sense until the lowest-ranking employee ceases to have on-demand access to senior management.
Sure. But if you had a grievance, you could voice it. And if you needed to pull some like-minded coworkers together to underline it's shared, that could be done ad hoc. If a 50-person company needs a union (because e.g. management refuses to listen) that's a problem. That's my point.
I don't know where the delineation is. But there is very obviously a point below which unionization is a sign of dysfunction. For the same reasons a middle-management layer or expansive C suite, below a company of a certain size, is a sign of dysfunction [1].
FWIW I don't think that's obvious at all. Even a small group of happy employees could form a union to set the current policies everyone is happy with in stone and protect themselves and future employees against potential changes in ownership or a downturn in company health.
I'm not arguing it couldn't be done, nor that it doesn't have benefits. Just that it has costs, and those costs at a small level should outweigh the benefits. While they're doing that, and maintaining that structure, they could be doing something else. (Something more enjoyable and lucrative.)
Wow. Considering they're not a US-based company this seems amazing (yes, I'm aware that unicorn startups need a zillion people because...reasons, but this is Fastmail not a unicorn).
When you are in a Union, part of your money goes to the union in order to, hopefully, make things better for you. This means the relationship between Union leadership and the Union members is just as important as between Union leadership and the company.
Historically, we have seen Unions bring things like worker safety to the forefront and do numerous things to help people out.
More recently we have seen more of a mixed bag. For example, I was recently talking with someone where the Union negotiated pay/benefits they got was less (before and after union dues) than the surrounding non-union competition.
Note, I'm not saying I'm pro or against unions. Just that they are fascinating to look at and what you see can be nuanced.
The UPS strike, on the other hand, was a resounding success. Swiftly resolved. Material pay and safety improvements. And a stable workforce for UPS in the midst of a broader labor shortage. Win win. (Yellow got fucked, but that's a different story.)
Congrats to the Fastmail team!
In a free market, the best option will win. When non-union jobs are better than union jobs the need for the union should vanish (in theory).
Don't like the way your city, county or state spends the tax money? You can vote to change it or you can move. You can even do it nationally by moving to another country that you think does it better.
We still get a choice.
On balance, having a choice is always better than the alternative.
They have to compete against other businesses to hire skilled positions.
They have to create an appealing enough opportunity to get people to apply and continue to work there.
Yes, but because they are a collective when they "purchase" skilled positions they are usually asking for more than one hire. Yes they are competing against other businesses, and the perspective hires are competing against the other hires. By the numbers, there are fewer businesses hiring then there are workers looking for that position. In other words, the businesses have more leverage then the workers in the form of purchasing power. The laws of supply and demand favor the business if there are no unions.
Edit: FYI: supply and demand for labor is equal when unemployment is at 0%.
I'm not sure if you mean that generally or just around employment and unions.
If you mean it generally then, just as a random example, should we make emission control on cars an optional extra? Let the free market customer decide if they want to pay extra for a catalytic converter.
out of how many workers total?
> In a free market, the best option will win. When non-union jobs are better than union jobs the need for the union should vanish (in theory).
If UAW is the best option and people want to join it...that is the best option winning.
Eliminate collective bargaining for a corporations, and then it would make sense to see things on an equal playing field.
The reason why employees jump from one company to another for salary boosts is because a corporation collectively bargains for salary, and this happens less so between different companies.
When an employee can just as easily pit one manager at a FAANG against another manager to bid for their salary to get a boost, as they can get a higher offer at another company to get a boost then this situation will be resolved.
As long as companies can say "you'll keep the same level and pay regardless of where you transfer within the company" because they've agreed to not complete against each other and instead collectively bargain for salary (and benefits) it will be an imbalance. And the only counterbalance is for employees to do the same.
The need for collective bargaining of labor is to balance the presense of collective bargaining by management.
So's murder, and yet that still happens.
They all used every excuse they have: overhiring, wars, inflation (which they partially helped create) to flood the market TOGETHER, thereby reducing the price of our labor. All while racking in record profits. All that perfectly legal, all that a form of them collectively bargaining to lower our labor value.
I am not hinting at a conspiracy here. I am merely pointing to the fact that when the megacorps saw an opportunity to: - reduce spending by cutting off positions
- boost their stagnating stock values
- lower the bargaining power of their workers and have an excuse to keep their wages low
they immediately, did it, in a uniform fashion, in 3 big waves in the last 1.5 years. That tanked the developer market and boosted their stock.
We can only speculate how much it was coordinated, and how much they all saw the same opportunity after the unstable right-wing man-child that is Elon Musk burned Twitter to the ground. While probably nothing that they did was provably illegal, nevertheless, it was at least amoral and had the effect of dramatically cooling the market and stagnating our wages.
> reduce labor value across the entire industry is so incredibly disconnected from reality
YOU have to be very disconnected from reality to not acknowledge that there are 1000s of things that companies agree behind closed doors that we are just hearing about:
- Google having a shady deal with Spotify where Spotify doesn't pay the Google Play store fee: https://www.pcmag.com/news/spotify-doesnt-pay-google-play-st...
- Or that Google is paying Apple 36% search revenue to stay the default search engine in Safari so it can keep (and exploit) its dominant position in search: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/14/google-pays-apple-36percent-...
- Or Apple's deal with Amazon to get cleaner Amazon listing pages: https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/10/23955934/apple-amazon-de...
So what makes you think that they didn't have some friendly chats over the pesky tech workers, or "laptop class" as Elon so lovingly calls us. Somebody gotta put those ingrates back to their place, no?
While you might be happy to accept being downtrodden by your corporate overlords, and worship the psychotic man-children that Musk, Bezos, Branson and Zuck are, in other countries we don't want to become like the US. A country where capitalism rages unchecked and throws workers rights, nature, and eventually the world under the bus in a never ending chase for growth is not how we want for us.
Well you see, there are these things called interest rates which effect the cost of borrowing.
And when those interest rates go up massively, like they did, this causes a completely predictable effect of it being more expensive to borrow and spend money.
And this has economy wide effects, that are what bog standard macro economics predicts.
The same megacorps that borrowed and overhired like insane during the pandemic to boost their stock price, now scream bloody hell and cut major portion of the people they just hired during the pandemic. That also boosted their stock price.Oh, and it allowed them to crank up their pricing models to the max, again boosting their stock price. I'd argue that it's the megacorps and their greed that are the major cause of the inflation that we experience recently worldwide.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/sep/25/inflat...
And please, stop using "macroeconomic factors" as an excuse for bad management (who made them overhire during the pandemic), greed, and lack of vision.
When a CEO makes 300 times the salary of their median employee (https://www.wsj.com/business/auto-ceos-make-about-300-times-...), the best way for the company to save money is to fire their C-suite for the "leadership" that brought it to be influenced by "bad economic headwinds" in the first place.
Stop defending corporations, what they do is inexcusable, amoral, and probably, some day, and with some scrutiny, illegal.
Oh yeah. That would be the organization that is in charge of deciding what the rates are.
Which would be the federal reserve.
They quite literally decide what the rate is.
> "macroeconomic factors"
Do you not know how interest rates and borrowing costs work?
It's pretty standard econ 101 stuff, about how interest rates effect the economy and effect hiring and firing rates.
You can read it in an economics textbook.
Here, it is pretty standard stuff: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phillips_curve
Its called the Phillips curve.
Companies have been using "macroeconomic" conditions as an excuse for increased prices and job cuts, but it doesn't hold up to the most basic scrutiny. Their profits have been increasing far beyond inflation. Whether it's FAANG or Big Egg[2], the fix is in.
Anyway, good on Fastmail employees. Makes this customer feel better about the company sticking to its principles.
1. https://www.allrecipes.com/new-ruling-in-egg-lawsuit-finds-e...
This has nothing to do with interest rates and I didn't make any comments about profits.
Here is a good overview about how interests rates are related to unemployment rates.
This is is like companies' belief that all employees are always on the bell curve, so the bottom x% has to get culled each year.
Anything to fit in the stats, right? I am actually inclined to believe that C level do think like that. This is both sad and terrifying, and also the reason why we need strong unions in the first place, so we don't end up merely a statistic on some boomer economy cultist's spreadsheet.
There is no free market. Everything is skewed to give an advantage to employers and capitalists.
Sounds like freedom of association with me.
You wouldn't complain about a corporation signing an exclusive contract with another corporation (even for supplying labor), why is it a problem when it's a collective of workers imposing that restriction rather than a corporation?
Is the free market only for corporations? Does everyone else have to just take what they can get individually?
> Sounds like freedom of association with me.
Hey as long as it goes both ways. It would equally be freedom of association to fire any union employees.
Oh wait, that's illegal.
So instead of that, a fair compromise is that it should be equally illegal for firing someone either if they join or don't union a union.
That's what right to work laws do. They give equal protections to both union and non union employees.
No. Federal law and jurisprudence prohibit making union membership a condition of employment but compel unions to represent non members. So called right to work laws allow non members to withhold payment for the compelled representation.
So the whole point is that the other person who I was responding to was wrong on the freedom of association angle.
If is not freedom of association to only give protections to union members.
Instead the fair thing would be for it to be illegal to fire either union members or non union members for their choice of whether they join the union or not.
Also, laws that merely make union or non only shops disallowed would be the fair and equal freedom of association way to do things.
Danmark and Finland topping the list have 70% membership.
Unemployment insurance plans seem underrated in general by FTEs, both in the US and elsewhere. Without it, your ability to exercise both halves of "voice or exit" in the corporate world are severely curtailed. Like life insurance, it's relatively hard to game as a policy - it's usually pretty clear when you lose your salaried job, just like it's usually pretty clear when you die. I see few downsides, especially if you live cheap enough to pay all of your bills on that X% of your income anyway.
In Britain we've had, and still have, some quite powerful unions that formed from smaller groups in the 1970s, notably the Transport and General Workers' Union [0].
Also, unions naturally cooperate and support each other forming a formidable power bloc. My 1980s memories are of Flying Pickets and Solidarity. Indeed, in Poland, Lech Walesa's Solidarity [1] was arguably a key domino in the events leading to the overthrow of communism in East Europe.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_and_General_Workers%...
To me, unions are a lot like democracies. They can function very well, but need constant oversight by their constituents to ensure that they are working towards the interests of all members.
Not coincidentally, the strongest democracies are the ones with many laws regarding transparency to eliminate corruption.
Yeah, that's a common anti-union tactic. Another one is passing on any better terms negotiated with a union to non-union workers to make it look like union membership gains you nothing.
Of course, when the union is gone, the largesse tends to end.
There are many places where the hardest worker and the laziest worker make the same. There are places where what you make is solely based on how long you've had the job and it's not negotiable.
Unions work differently in different places.
A union that does right by its members means you have leadership who does that. I’ve seen numerous cases where that didn’t happen across several industries. The leadership ended up making bad decisions for the members.
Makes you think, maybe it's you who confused the cause and effect?
The goal is to improve wages and conditions for workers in a sustainable way so that the improvements are guaranteed to persist over time and not be a one time thing.
Basically it's important to not lose the war by winning one battle.
No one at my store liked the union, and I have to admit that it turned me off of unions for a while. The UFCW was weak and had little bargaining power over a company that was losing money and, as we later learned, was being embezzled dry by its president.
Several unions have gone through democratic reforms in the last few years to make their leadership directly elected and accountable to the rank and file members. The Teamsters and UAW being to examples, and it turned them from weak company unions into powerful advocates for their members.
Unions are groups of people, just like all other organizations.
> I was recently talking with someone where the Union negotiated pay/benefits they got was less (before and after union dues) than the surrounding non-union competition.
As far as I know this wouldn't happen in the Netherlands - unions have the legal backing to negotiate on behalf of all employees, member or not.
I already loved using Fastmail but this makes me the #1 fanboy.