Bandcamp's Entire Union Bargaining Team Was Laid Off(404media.co) |
Bandcamp's Entire Union Bargaining Team Was Laid Off(404media.co) |
This has been building for some time. The Epic sale set it in motion. The formation of the union was a signal to supporters that the staff distrusted the new owners and were taking steps to protect the company’s mission. The Songtradr sale escalated it. The perception of targeting union members is being interpreted as confirmation of all fears.
So while the tech industry has dealt with high-profile layoffs for the past year, I don’t think most if any of those companies have the cultural significance of Bandcamp or have a for-the-people ethos baked into their DNA. This is much more significant than layoffs after an acquisition. The perception of targeting union members could do irreparable harm to a brand built on honesty, support, and integrity.
[0] - https://ampwall.com
You are correct in that most people do not know anything about what's happening. But Bandcamp is largely a platform that courts super-fans and a sizable portion of this people are keyed into independent music, with all its happenings and drama. This is especially true for the successful bands, labels, and journalists who use their platform. So while 99% of their users might have no idea, the 1% that does contains many people who are heavily involved in making and influencing independent music. We see visible evidence of this in the number of music news sites that are posting updates on the situation. And I see evidence through the volume and intensity of feedback I'm receiving.
If trust and goodwill are eroded, then the platform loses its value.
Glad to see an independent initiative in this space.
That's exactly what makes developing a replacement difficult. It's not the software. I'm sure that a very large majority of people here could write that in a reasonable amount of time.
But the software isn't really the main value that Bandcamp provides. For a service to replace Bandcamp, it needs to be trustworthy and have a track record of doing right by both artists (and mostly small indie artists) and audiences. That takes time.
While the core technology may not be as 'complicated' as quantum computing, the unique challenges in execution, user engagement, and market fit should not be underestimated, simple is hard ya'll... The real value and are far from trivial to replicate and come from the people.... no offense just sayin' this is a funny pattern around here.
In before the true scotsman of software lifecycles.
When everyone knows hosting costs equate to a fraction of a penny per sale, you'll need to strongly justify that 5% fee. You'll need to pay ~3.5% in PRO fees just to have public playback on the site -- even if there's not a single cover song among the uploaded albums -- so let both the artist and fan know where that money is going and why.
A huge problem with the "pay what you want" model is that the host and PRO still get to middleman what is fundamentally a tip from the fan. Find a way to implement a secondary form for tips that go straight to an account the artist owns, without making the purchase form more complicated, and you'll have an attractive and unique feature.
However, Fourthwall already has a polished version of your product roadmap and charges less for it, albeit without the music-specific theming, and even Patreon recently implemented direct digital sales. You're facing an uphill battle against entrenched and VC-backed products.
That is why I'm wondering if the new owner doesn't care about what makes basecamp work and just wants to use all of basecamp data for its "AI" business. Otherwise you're left with another owner who doesn't understand what they bought.
https://www.songtradr.com/blog/posts/ai-metadata-better-sear...
Which data specifically? The music itself belongs to the artists and labels, which leaves us with the user activity data, but that must be acquirable much cheaper with larger amount of data elsewhere. Also the data would be tailored to indie/electronic music, rather than applicable to pop music, so the usefulness of even user activity data seems kind of low.
I couldn't imagine who you might be referring to! /snark
What is the difference of your service with eg. Deezer? Someone in another thread mentioned it offers lossless DRM-free downloads these days.
Cory Doctorow talks about using Ulysses pacts like this to protect against future bad behavior, but I’m wondering, what is the strength of the pact?
That's a long way of saying what you said: I want it to protect against future enshittification. I want it to work.
Over here in Germany the "trick" of doing an asset deal to get rid of employees (and any benefits they may have earned over time) is very risky, and can fire back massively.
It's not a black-and-white thing, but the labor courts have check-lists:
- Are people at the new company work on the same tasks as they did in the old one? - Are people at the new company still using the old office space, and are seated where they were before? - Are salaries or work contracts near-identical? - ... and then some.
If you get a couple of "yes" here, you now are in a world of pain: In this case the whole transaction is regarded as a (not sure if that is a good translation of the German word "verdeckter Betriebsübergang") "hidden transfer of business", and you would suddenly automatically get ALL employees and benefits back, with no easy option to fire anyone afterwards. If someone had been at the previous company for 10 years, it legally would now be also have been employed for 10 years with the new company.
This is why the asset deal trick to get rid of employees is only done by very uneducated managers over here :)
Following that, why did Epic choose to get rid of a successful, profitable, independent sub-company that would have helped keep Epic profitable?
It sure looks like Bandcamp was already failing and unprofitable, and selling out to Epic was a desperate attempt to keep the company alive. Songtradr seems to agree with Epic that bandcamp is not solvent and cannot continue operating as it was.
This sucks because Bandcamp is great, but it's not hard to see the writing on the wall. All Epic did here is inject cash into bandcamp's corpse to keep it alive for an extra year or two, before it had to cut the IV drip.
Epic basically bought Bandcamp, hung out with it for a bit, then sold it to Songtradr who promptly shot it in the head as soon as Epic turned around.
We are a bootstrapped team of musicians, loyal to independent music so we want out platform to stay that way.
We're also hiring: https://formaviva.com/jobs
PS: I'm one of the team members
From the "Terms of Service":
> Unless otherwise stated, Samorastnik d.o.o. and/or its licensors own the intellectual property rights for all material on Formaviva.
Where's the "otherwise" for people that post music on your platform?
I was actually searching for your legal status (which kind of legal persona you are and in which jurisdiction). I couldn't find a thing on your website.
Any potential ambiguity in the TOS will related to your concern will be thoroughly assessed.
The company information has been added to the TOS page as well.
Perhaps you haven't had a chance to arrive there yet, but we will take your comment as a recommendation for the improvement, which will be implemented in the coming days so that also "law-oriented music lovers" will be pleased with the law-confirming evolution.
> "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."
I can't be bothered to work out the odds on that happening randomly but by intuition is that it's not super unlikely. Especially when you consider that the kinds of people who have time to lead a union are likely to be the kinds of people without important jobs.
Also can't they just elect new leaders?
The meeting does sound suss though.
... Wow. That's something you'd never hear in Europe (outside of a golf course, at least).
For the record, leading a union is an important job, and all that's required to want the job is a sense of fairness.
In reality, many people balance multiple responsibilities, including leadership roles in unions alongside demanding jobs.
The statement undermines the significance and complexity of leading a union. Union leadership often requires strategic thinking, negotiation skills, and a strong understanding of labor laws, which many would consider important skills.
People with high-responsibility jobs may still prioritize union involvement because they see it as a vital activity that aligns with their career or personal values.
Stereotyping people who are involved in union leadership as having anunimportant job is a damn near uniquely American notion. It's the result of decades of mind-warping propaganda.
Well I am in Europe and don't play golf.
> The statement undermines the significance and complexity of leading a union. Union leadership often requires strategic thinking, negotiation skills, and a strong understanding of labor laws, which many would consider important skills.
I think you misunderstood. I didn't say that leading a union isn't important. If anything I said the opposite! Leading a union is a lot of work. People who have a high profile or very busy job just aren't going to have time for it.
> is a damn near uniquely American notion. It's the result of decades of mind-warping propaganda.
I am not American.
Divide first, by implying that some class of workers are not worthy of collective bargaining agreements.
Then conquer, because unions aren't powerful.
For instance, blue-collar professions do not have much of these, so being out of any agreement would be a huge disadvantage for the worker; for technology in general (talking here about software engineers specifically, I do not know other workers in tech) an union would be beneficial but not critical since this professional has some of the attributes described above.
Come to Italy some time.
Germany appears to have by far the strongest economy in the EU but with higher unemployment than the USA. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the balance there vs the USA? I can imagine compelling arguments for each approach.
Whereas in a stronger economy with employment laws protecting employees it'd be much more possible for a family to live comfortably off a single income, making for a lot more "unemployed" adults.
As with many labor protection laws, it is a mixed bag. Basically the regulation I have mentioned tries to separate the cases of "true asset deal" vs. "fake asset deal". That works most of the times, but sometimes an asset deal that was supposed to serve a genuinely good cause (one business trying to sell off a technology to another) to later got flagged as a transfer of business by courts, causing companies to go bankrupt, with ALL jobs being lost.
Being an employer myself, I once got bitten with wrongly getting flagged when trying to rescue the technology my shareholders had financially run into the ground, but a higher court later corrected that and decided that the motivation of the asset deal had been proper.
Does you "free market" allow for individuals to "organize" as a "corporation" and does the "corporation" provide legal immunities for civil liabilities and personal debts (that "personal property" concept).
If so does your "free market" allow for other individuals to "organize" as a "union" - and does that "union" provide various legal guarantees and immunities etc.
"Free market" people love the corporation but hate the union. One is a legal fiction for rich people and one is a legal fiction for poor people.
In Europe sectoral unions and sectoral bargaining is the norm. In the US federal law does not allow that. Each firm must unionize individually.
In the US unions and enterprices play zero sum game against each other. If the firm unionizes, the firm loses relative to non-unionized competition.
Example: the current UAW (United Auto Workers) dispute in the US. If UAW wins, unionized enterprises lose to Tesla.
In Sweden (and many other european countries) unions work with government and companies to make the business succeed and that success be spread to the employees, this means the bad times are also amortised by the workers as well.
It is not perfect but it is not a zero-sum game which keeps both sides more aligned. I wish I could have had a 10% raise to match inflation, but I have been getting ~1% raises above inflation for the past several years so it kinda makes up for it.
If I understand correctly, this isn't true. There are laws that make this effectively true, but that's not quite the same thing.
For example, secondary boycotts are banned. This limits the rights of workers and unions to freely associate and mobilize for their interests. That little doozy was rationalized by the excuse of protecting the economy (read: the status quo).
Ianal, and idk if this is a distinction without a difference; but it seems worth pointing out.
AFAIR Tesla follows the typical US corporation stance of "kill it with fire" against unions. A sick version of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend"
If companies were less abusive and not ran by sociopaths in the US we wouldn't see the acceleration of unionization like we are.
how does that work?
There are some unions for IT personnel, but they aren't very popular or well-known.
There's also the mandatory employee representation (called the Ondernemingsraad in Dutch); every company over 50 employees is required to have one of those. But again, this is rare in IT companies. In part because a few companies I've worked for, IT providers / consultancies, use the 'cell division' tactic (https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celfilosofie), where a company is divided up into smaller cells of at most 50 people, either by geographic location or specialism, each operating as their own company (on paper).
On the surface this is clever because it means the colleagues will be able to know everyone, or a department is specialized, or a company's finances is more secure. But underneath, it means no cell will ever become large enough to require employee representation. On the surface there is no need because everyone is paid and treated well, but at the same time, another one of these was sold to investors and has shifted course, buying up companies across europe now. I think employees would like to have a say in that, but that's not good for the owners / shareholders.
What happens during lay-off is they just present the OR with multiple plans.
Plans which include more people laid off but leaving departments where the OR members are in out of it versus plans which effect less people but which included departments which included the OR members themselves. Good chance people will choose self preservation over the greater good. I've seen it happen at companies.
It sounds exactly like America then.
Honestly I feel like it just must be egotistical powerful men who don’t want to lose control over those they see as beneath them, to the point that they’re willing to do the wrong thing from a business point of view.
[0]: https://www.cwu.org/
There's also IWGB Game Workers for relevant workers https://www.gameworkers.co.uk/
If the corporation refuses to cooperate (and this seems to be the norm), the union's only option is to fight.
But yeah, unions, hate what you gotta hate. I personally hate long hours for bullshit pay.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-sector_trade_unions_in_... for background.
> Moe points out that Roosevelt, "an ardent supporter of collective bargaining in the private sector, was opposed to it in the public sector."[11] Roosevelt in 1937 told the nation what the position of his government was:
>> All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service. It has its distinct and insurmountable limitations when applied to public personnel management. The very nature and purposes of government make it impossible for administrative officials to represent fully or to bind the employer in mutual discussions with government employee organizations. The employer is the whole people, who speak by means of laws enacted by their representatives in Congress. Accordingly, administrative officials and employees alike are governed and guided, and in many instances restricted, by laws which establish policies, procedures, or rules in personnel matters. Particularly, I want to emphasize my conviction that militant tactics have no place in the functions of any organization of government employees. Upon employees in the Federal service rests the obligation to serve the whole people, whose interests and welfare require orderliness and continuity in the conduct of government activities. This obligation is paramount. Since their own services have to do with the functioning of the Government, a strike of public employees manifests nothing less than an intent on their part to prevent or obstruct the operations of Government until their demands are satisfied. Such action, looking toward the paralysis of Government by those who have sworn to support it, is unthinkable and intolerable.[12]
This does not seem compatible with all the stories I've heard about underpaid teachers having to buy material for their students out of their own pocket. I'm sure it somehow ends up both being true in a twisted way, but it still sounds strange.
I cannot even imagine what sort of lens you'd have to be looking through to identify teachers as "one of the most powerful political forces" in the United States.
Certainly the awesome political power they wield hasn't helped to increase salaries (compare them to any other credentialed profession requiring a college degree), or prevent charter schools from eating away at public school funding, or to restore some of the pension benefits that were taken away in the eighties. [0]
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32542324 (I am delighted to report that the "Nobody wants to teach anymore" comments are up to 666 points exactly at this moment in time)
Saying bandcamp isn't complicated isn't the same as saying it's easy to replace. I'm just saying it's feasible to try with a small team and small amount of capital.
I'm also reminded of the old saying that "nothing is impossible for the person who doesn't have to do it."
In case anyone else was curious about Public Benefit Corporations, or PBCs, I found this comparing them with a B Corp: https://socapglobal.com/2021/04/whats-the-difference-between...
I don't know that I really understand what you mean. Not sure why those, even were they true, would mean people should get fired if they try to unionize. Maintaining high income and "monopoly of work" is one of the points of unions.
The executive class exploit the labour of the working class to benefit themselves. CEOs are in general opposed to collective action among the workers beneath them as any shift of power to the workers necessarily represents a loss of power for the executive.
Is it more common in the US to have company-specific unions? Are the large “independent” unions present at all?
I would assume that being larger and independent of an employer would make them more useful to their members.
Watching, casually, the news of Bandcamp’s and Moog’s unions over the last year, I couldn’t shake the feeling they wouldn’t work out as they’d be too small and likely their leadership inexperienced.
I don't know if their leadership was good or not but American trades unionism is pretty different to ours. Employees typically don't have a huge amount of legal rights and so getting your workplace unionised is much more of a battle than here. On the other hand, America has de facto closed shops which are illegal pretty much everywhere in Europe.
It's not mandatory and not all companies have it. I once joked, at my first job: "We should create a Betriebsrat!", my boss took me to his office and explained to me for an hour how horrible those are for a company. Companies are absolutely not allowed to prevent employees from forming one and he was incredibly afraid of having one in his company...
I would really like to see something like Castopod [0], but for artists! Spinning up a website where you showcase and sell your music should (and could!) be as easy as using Wordpress, either via a subscription or self-hosted – on your own domain.
Being plugged into the Fediverse makes it much easier to interact with fans and build a connection with your audience. It also makes it easy for people to share and talk about a track or and album. None of this requires that you tie yourself to yet another VC-funded startup and a closed garden.
Maybe someone is building something like this already, that I am not aware of?
I can imagine a 1-click solution that would set up everything. But bandcamp also has this functionality where labels can list their artists etc so I think it wouldn't work that well.
Wordpress has already integrated with the Fediverse, btw!
While I am a fan of federated social, it does not solve the problem for artists of replacing Bandcamp in any way, shape, or form. Bandcamp provided a storefront, payment handling, a distribution mechanism[1], and a potential audience + editorial that kept people coming back.
A Castopod for Musicians does none of this.
[1] Distribution of digital media, anyway. Distributing physical media was still an exercise left to the artist.
I know this won't be a popular thing to say, but I'd like to take a moment to thank Songtradr for consulting their lawyers and full-considering all legal requirements.
I believe them when they say they didn't legally acquire the union's documentation on membership. But they "carried out a comprehensive, full company evaluation that involved a detailed examination of each role" and seem pretty anal about their legal requirements. It's become expected that a prospective employee's social media accounts will be "evaluated" as part of the hiring process, so I imagine that was the case here, too. (Do you think any of the union members, the union-curious or even the anti-union weirdos ever mentioned the union on twitter?)
It goes on to explain that the "evaluation considered several factors such as product groups, job functions, employee tenure, performance evaluations[0]," and amusingly "the importance of roles for smooth business operations".
[0] performance evaluations were just one of several factors evaluated (comprehensively) in the detailed examination during the full company evaluation
These are not the union bargainers though but rather the people who represent workers' interest in the company (they need to sign off on contract changes etc.). The bargainers are usually working for the union and not a company.
[1] https://www.nlrb.gov/about-nlrb/rights-we-protect/the-law/di...
There are also a bunch of GUI tools that claim to download libraries (search for "bandcamp downloader") but I haven't used any of them.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/04/epic-games-drags-ban...
08/2020 Epic files suit against Apple and Google https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_Games_v._Apple
09/2020 Discussion of Epic vs. Bandcamp and app store fees: https://www.shacknews.com/article/120550/tim-sweeney-on-why-...
05/2021 "The trial ran from May 3 to May 24, 2021" from the same wikipedia link.
03/2022 Epic acquires bandcamp, a year after their trial. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/02/arts/music/epic-games-ban...
Why would Epic acquire bandcamp as a "pawn" to use a year after their trial concluded? It's far more reasonable to assume Epic had a legitimate business interest in Bandcamp, and if anything, the execs of the companies had started talking due to the (concluded) lawsuit and shared interest in not losing 30% of their revenue.
Bandcamp is heading for the dead pool, and it fucking sucks because it's my go to online music store. God damnit Epic.
The problem then becomes bargaining—companies (see Starbucks) can drag out negotiations indefinitely. This part of labor law probably can’t be changed without congress unfortunately. The PRO Act included rules which forced companies to negotiate within a certain time window but it didn’t pass.
You can't call yourself "the most pro-union person you'll ever meet" if your opinion is equivalent to "unions are only appropriate for those who already have structural power".
And why hire people in silicon Valley where they cost double what they would pretty much anywhere else?
But, hey songtradr, here some ideas for Bandcamp's new name!
* Banned Camp
* Boot Camp
* Sudden Death Camp
* Union Busting Camp
* Camp Greed
etc.
https://bandcamp.com/api/mobile/24/serverinfo?platform=andro...
You don't sell a company to break up a union and lay off half the staff. Bandcamp wasn't a good fit any more, and it was over-staffed. Unions worked during their heyday because there was a labor shortage, so they had leverage. Bandcamp employees didn't have that leverage.
Besides, unemployment is low, so I'm not sure why you're talking about there not being a labour shortage.
Is it low in tech? There have been a lot of layoffs over the past year.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/04/epic-games-drags-ban...
I suspect Epic had plans for bandcamp, for various reasons they had a change of heart... and re-sold partially out of a combination of frustration and the shifting economy. This wouldn't be the first time a somewhat purpose-driven company had a post-acquisition fallout, and it won't be the last.
the only 'business' left for people in that 'industry' is to charge rent which is taxes
In Europe, we have laws that encourage it. For example, Finland has generally applicable collective agreements. If a large representative majority of workers achieve agreement with enterprise representatives in an industry sector, the agreement can become generally applicable. Every employer must observe at least the minimum provisions of a wide national collective agreement once it's considered representative in the relevant sector.
(Finland does not have laws about minimum wage. There is very little need for them because generally applicable agreements set the minimums.)
That's just the bare minimum they have to do to not get sued, is that really thankworthy?
this is extremely shady, and I don't know why people are trusting the source directly lol. they wouldn't say they did anything untoward, ever
There's nothing here to be thankful for, not a damn thing.
Well, I did say I knew that wouldn't go down well here...
No, nobody should be thanking them for this.
We should be mocking them for making such a ridiculous, offensive and typical statement. As if anyone would expect them to not have the forethought to check where the line would be. As if a company protecting itself in the usual way is a reason for why no actual people should think ill of them. As if we should be thanking them.
Note that all they are saying is they weren't given access to membership information. The only way they could have had access is if it were given to them. When I say "legally acquire" I'm not ruling out other means of accessing that information directly, but the trick being performed here is mentioning this when it's irrelevant. They don't need access to membership information to know who is "on their side".
It's disgusting
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.
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.
> “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.
At the very least, for the sake of optics, they shouldn't have fired the union reps. Not all of them anyway.
The company is being acquired and then they are choosing not to issue a bunch of people contracts.
a) Epic makes Unreal Engine and runs an asset store that includes sounds and music. Why not include bandcamp and their huge catalog in that store?
b) Epic makes Fortnite, which has tons of music industry tie-ins through purchasable emotes, song tracks, and free in-game concerts. Bandcamp sounds like a great avenue to expand existing agreements to sell music through Fortnite.
c) Epic also acquired Harmonix, which is the original developer of Guitar Hero and various music game spinoffs. Who knows wtf they're doing with Harmonix, but Harmonix+Bandcamp seems like an easy business strategy. "Buy this album on bandcamp and get it in the new Harmonix game too", and vice versa.
Epic has their hands in an awful lot of pies these days, and their layoff statement seemed to be a straightforward admission that their eyes were bigger than their stomach.
Some court cases in the US have said contractors with no autonomy get the same rights as employees, has anyone made that argument in France?
This is because it turned out that punishing people for not having a job might motivate some to take on jobs that are below their qualification, but that it does not solve the actual underlying issue - having people qualified for the jobs there are, in the regions those jobs are in.
Due to this, even under the rule of the conservative christian-democratic party, things then moved into the opposite direction again, with the organization that is supposed to bring people into jobs getting reformed massively. We now have lots of excellent programs that are focused on re-training people and help fix the causes of them having lost their jobs.
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.
What I was taught in macroeconomics in this topic (excuse me if I get something wrong, it’s been a few years)
In general it’s very expected unemployment to „generally“ be higher in Germany.
Because it’s harder to fire people here, people also get hired somewhat slower. However in the flip side it’s also expected that during harsh economic times people will be fired less because of how „hard“ it is to hire people.
So it’s a trade-off.
Where you get 60%-85% of your salary (after tax) without work or with way less ours, if the employer has no work/less work (like covid period). It’s payed mostly by the state. Up to 12 month. Regulations are strict.
Prevents layoffs and helps starting the upturn of production like automobile industry, where it takes months or half a year to start ramping up production.
If you become unemployed, depending on your age, and how long you have worked etc, you get between 12 and 24 months about 60% of your previous salary before dropping into social security.
There are various programs to get people back into jobs depending on what caused their unemployment - help on re-settling in case the loss of job being caused by your profession no longer being asked for in the region you live in, training to move to a different profession, help if your job loss is related to health issues (for example burn-out).
The system is optimized into trying to find out the cause of job losses, and work to counter that.
The 5% unemployed are mostly cases which are impossible to solve due to someone being too old to be re-trained and/or not willing or being able to move to where the jobs are.
Right now the job market in Germany is mostly defined by a shortage of labor in various areas, which is why there is a strong desire to make sure that immigrants are allowed to enter the work-force quicker. For example trains no longer run in any way reliably in Germany due to a massive shortage on workers in that industry.
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
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.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/199995/rates-of-jobless-...
How do you know they aren't? They wouldn't exactly run out to the press and yell "HEY EVERYONE WHO ISN'T WORKING FOR US JOIN THE UAW".
I'm not saying they are; I'm asking, how do you know they aren't?
I've seen arguments saying they are still against it, because in the long run, if UAW workers get way better salaries/benefits than Tesla workers, they'll unionize or leave for a union job regardless.
In other words: they want to keep exploiting their workers as much as possible for as long as possible.
That's not "just" what is being said. Unions are generally good in the US, but the tactics have aligned across industries. Notably, the teacher's unions, police unions, and often utility unions are horribly corrupt.
That said, I live in North Carolina, where public sector unions are illegal (no state, county, or local agency is allowed to engage in collective bargaining with its employees). Sure, there are things like the NCAE, but in practice they're all completely powerless - aside from creating proposals which the NCGOP will subsequently ignore in favor of diverting more public funds to under-performing for-profit charter schools under the guise of "school choice," the only thing the NCAE really provides to teachers are benefits that the state doesn't. To quote a comment I wrote last January (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29885392):
> There's also another factor at play: in many states, the power of unions is quite weak. E.g. public-sector employees in NC cannot collectively bargain, which is why they're able to get away with paying teachers horrendous wages. Want to strike? Go on ahead, pay your sub for the day (or your contract will not be renewed) and go down to Raleigh, where the legislature will recess and most of them will literally just go home and ignore all the people with picket signs.
As if not owning the data has stopped AI companies in the past.
Otherwise the new owner doesn't get bandcamp and why so many of its customers like it.
The only degregation here is the layoffs from the torch passing, but I believe Bandcamp still has more employees now than they did before being acquired.
And it was 118 at the time of layoffs, as you'd see in pretty much every article (and Wikipedia) talking about the topic. I can't exactly pinpoint how much they had when Epic swooped in, but even Bandcamp had a modest growth over the pandemic.
And my condolences for the editorial. I didn't even know Bandcamp had articles before reading this comment.
They acquired it to use as a tool in their antitrust lawsuit against Google.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/04/epic-games-drags-ban...
my view of the power distributions and their results
* company town, one company enslaving all workers <=== bad
* town with many companies, competing for workers. incentivizes all to good behavior <=== good
* town with many companies, each with a union that locks down behavior and can't be attacked <=== somewhat bad, blocks change, can be taken over by corrupt unions, but can also give benefits. as in your comment, though, people become extremely dogmatic about this and it becomes rational to be "union forever right or wrong" rather than actually thinking about the best way to organize things. i.e. police unions being insanely defensive and stubborn, and not enforcing any quality controls on cops.
* one/zero companies, one national union - i.e. CCP. When put into place, doesn't work, and when not well-controlled devolves to basically worker enslavement. Most of the history of modern China, and lots of historical USSR were like this. At other times they simulated stage 2 where there was competition on both worker and employer sides, and they had good results (80s-90s)
I’m not sure I understand what you mean by “local monopolies”, so this comment may be a bit off base: My Norwegian employer (<1000 employees) deals with four different unions and a bunch of un-unionized people. (All with no problem)
I'd like to see a comparative analysis of how the legal and social infrastructure for unions differs in outcomes between all the different ways it has been done across countries, industries, and time.
Either the economy is truly free, or it is "well-run" aka state managed.
Pick one. It can only be truly free without any state intervention.
Neither should have special legal privileges beyond those guaranteed to individuals.
This would go a long way to resolving the issues with both.
I remember well that we once had a booth at a trade show in Las Vegas. It was strictly forbidden for us to take our exhibits to our booths ourselves, because the process of "take something onto the exhibition floors" was union-protected. So we had to wait half an hour to get a task done that would have taken myself 30 seconds.
I believe that unions are needed, and am strictly pro-Union.
I believe that Unions serve the goal of being a counter-weight when a huge employer has lots of negotiation power.
But what I have seen in the US - and to a certain extend in Germany, too - is that certain UNIONS have grown to big, powerful and bureaucratic, and have become a huge force of power themselves, no longer serving the workers, but being self-serving mostly, and bringing employers to the brink of collapse.
In Germany we have two competing unions for rail workers. One is huge, corrupt and self-serving, and no where connected to the actual pain points rail workers have. But luckily there is second, much smaller rail Union, where the Union boss used to be a train driver and still is very much in touch of the base, and therefore does not pick fights with employers "because they can", but to actually work on pain points the workers have. Which is really important because Germany has a huge shortage on rail workers, and urgently needs to attract new labor in that sector. It's a bit weird that the rail companies are not working on fixing the shortages in labor, and the government isn't either, but that it's a union that is fighting for making life of the customers bearable again.
Back to the US: I believe the whole discussion of being pro-Union or pro-free-market is a red herring. The unions themselves need to be reformed and strengthened, but in a way that they serve society. In general I believe unions should be smaller and leaner organizations.
You plan to, but have not yet, implement unspecified changes, not for musicians but 'law-oriented music lovers'?
I am just about speechless. May your 'sacred child' not come to term.
edit: I can't find any sign that anybody else anywhere is even aware of this… if what you mean is that the project is JUST you, and there won't be anybody else signed to your project, then apologies, carry on :) however, that's super not anything like Bandcamp.
Could you share your perspective on what would be the most productive terms for the independent musicians and what all would you expect them to entail?
I don't even think it's necessarily profit vs. non-profit, I think it's private vs. shareholder ownership. Once the shareholder brain-worms take root, a company will set itself on fire to maintain the illusion of quarterly growth, because anything else is failure. Even if you somehow managed to dominate a market to complete exclusion of meaningful competitors, if you fail to grow, you are failing. That is fucking absurd. A company reaching a natural plateau of steady customers generating excellent profits is, by Wall Street's definition, a failed business. I'm reminded of Greta Thunberg's notion of "the fantasy of infinite growth."
For-profit entities certainly can do some sketchy things to ensure profitability, and that warrants skepticism. But you really only see the truly brain dead nonsense decisions from publicly traded corporations. Shit like laying off 2/3 of your staff because you had a less profitable period (not not-profitable, _less_ profitable!).
This is a trope in Silicon Valley, but it's simply not true. Most companies in a developed economy aim for a stable state, i.e. close to zero real growth with payments made to investors via sole proprietorship pay-outs, dividends and/or debt.
Now a growth company is worth more than a stable-state one, ceteris paribus, so there are incentives to promise it. If your promise growth and fail to grow, you are failing. That doesn't mean the company is failing. It's just mismanaged and likely misrepresented by its capital structure.
Wait, when was Google a non-profit?
It is difficult to prevent enshittification when it requires people to refuse to get rich. Most aren't willing to stick to their principles in the face of that.
Union membership fell to an all-time low in 2022 [1]. Given Yellow's bankruptcy and the writer lay-offs, I'd expect that to have continued this year.
Since the 1980s the trend has been that unions, unionized workplaces, and union memberships have all been on a steep decline (along with pay, worker rights, etc.). It is not surprising that union memberships will continue to decline given the previous trend, but also the confounding variables of union member being more likely to be close to retirement age, rate of unemployment, gig workers, contractors, etc.
However, this trend is starting to reverse. There have been several high profile workplaces unionizing, several high profile unionizing efforts, and a general positive reaction among the working public. Notable also—and very much a part of this wave—are several high profile strikes, near strikes and other direct action. UPS narrowly avoided a strike, UAW are striking, screenwrites had one of their longest strikes, actors are in one of their longest strikes. Amazon has seen walkouts, etc.
This is very much a wave, even though one particular line does not reflect it.
Public opinions is high and rising [1] and election petitions are up [2]. But job growth is accelerating towards non-union sectors with no sign of the unions following [3].
It's a plateau, not a wave. Unions are diminishing. But where they exist, they're expressing themselves more forcefully. The conditions for a wave exist. But a combination of labor law restrictions on unions and disinterest among nonunion workers fundamentally limits reversal.
[1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/398303/approval-labor-unions-hi...
[2] https://www.nlrb.gov/news-outreach/news-story/election-petit...
[3] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2023/02/28/1159663461/you...
Their costs are higher. (So far, I haven't seen evidence of higher productivity among unionized auto workers sufficient to make up for the cost gap.)
maybe the owning class should take less profit so the consumer doesn't have to take on that extra cost, but unfortunately the incentive structure of capitalist enterprise doesn't work like that.
Given perfect mobility, yes. But the labor market Tesla and foreign manufacturers in the United States compete in are separate from those of the UAW's. The evidence for this is in their present labor cost differential: $45 and 55/hour for Tesla and Toyota, respectively, vs $65/hour for UAW factories, en route to $100+ [1].
Keep in mind, too, that union jobs are supply constrained. The UAW represents about 200,000 automotive workers [2]. That's a fifth of all motor vehicles and parts manufacturing workers [3].
> maybe the owning class should take less profit so the consumer doesn't have to take on that extra cost
It's going the other way. Tesla can cut prices to below where Detroit can turn a profit. That matters when the latter are asking for capital to fund their investments.
One solution would be to tax non-union produced cars such as to equalize the gap. But again, that would require a state to trade their consumers' welfare for another's employees'. A better one is to pass into law worker protections for all Americans.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_United_Auto_Workers_strik...
[2] https://www.npr.org/2023/10/19/1206209107/united-auto-worker...
They were told if they didn't sign a worse deal they would be fired, causing a fight with the union.
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.
It’s a massive conflict of interest.
Meanwhile the companies are losing 30k+ per EV sold and are only about 10% of Tesla's size, and Tesla has something like an 18% profit margin even after price reductions.
The unions might win locally but put the companies out of business in five or ten years by slowing them down. So, this structure of a single union led by a guy who's already independently wealthy and old and for whom the long term survival of the union doesn't matter monetarily, and the fact that the companies simply have to deal with him, and for electoral reasons both Biden and Trump showed up on the picket lines... I would quit if I were an exec there. Feels like they'll be driven out of business and bailed out either publicly or secretly within ten years. Market tracking this: https://manifold.markets/Ernie/will-ford-gm-or-stellantis-be...
I'm very pro-union btw but my understanding is that IR35 doesn't apply to FTEs, so no need for full union rights - at least in the case of short-term contractors (who choose money and flexibility over security). Agency temps (on equivalent or lower pay than FTEs) are a different matter and may need protection. Long term contractors are disguised FTEs so their choice again, probably not normally an issue.
But perhaps I'm misunderstanding the law or the point?
Whether to hire someone as an employee, on FTE or in-scope IR35 is a business decision. If businesses wanted everyone could be hired as a "contractor" without employment rights from tomorrow. It's not like workers have a choice now, apart from looking for a job elsewhere.
As someone who's outside IR35 I can't see the point in being inside rather than just taking a full time role with a company, sure there's some flexibility but the disadvantages outweigh the advantages in my view
The challenge in regulating umbrella companies lies in the similarity of their business structures to those of large consultancies. They operate nearly identically, and differentiating between the two would require an additional, layer of regulation that could potentially face legal objections.
IR35 itself is more about preventing professionals from departing large consultancies, establishing direct client engagements, and consequently, fostering competition. Ultimately, many small enterprises begin with the business owners personally providing services until they expand sufficiently to employ additional staff. However, IR35 essentially nips that in the bud and ensures the talent stays in the employment pool, corporations can exploit.
IR35 is about making up the loss in revenue of employers National Insurance, as PSC shareholders can avoid NI by paying themselves mainly in dividends rather than a salary. The dividend tax makes up for the lack of employees NI on dividends but there’s no employers equivalent.
Large companies use umbrella’s because they don’t want to take on the burden of employing contractors but depending on how the relationship is setup is the umbrella becomes the contractor’s employers (assuming engaged direct rather than through their PSC) and that means the contractor has a whole set of employment rights — sick, holiday, pension that the umbrella is now responsible for
But there is still little hope (I hope)
FFS, Amazon promises growth. Amazon! A company so formidable that even it announcing it's thinking about entering a market causes a small stock blip to any major companies in that market, because it's presumed they will fucking obliterate them.
The entire E&P sector comes to mind. For example, Marathon Oil "expects to deliver maintenance-level total Company oil production" this year [1].
Note that "publicly traded companies constitute less than 1 percent of all U.S. firms and about one-third of U.S. employment in the non-farm business sector" [2]. Most small businesses aim to stay small.
[1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/101778/0000101778230...
[2] https://www.nber.org/digest/apr07/changing-business-volatili...
Honestly, the non-profit engine was not nearly as good as the one the subsequent for profit business created.
Is there anything else in particular that you would find important to address?
I guess teachers are supposed to take solace in the fact they are very powerful.
It's not like the whole system is a magical black box that just does what it does and there is no way of knowing what is going on.
#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.
Unemployment stats explicitly only count those looking for work, so this actually misrepresents the other way; it doesn't include those people who have given up but given a choice would be working.
We shouldn't rush to judgement of what this policy represents or misrepresents based on just-so stories informed by a different society.
to understand my POV better, my usecase is: - band that i like and follow (mostly newsletter, some social media, rarely friends that mention it drecty) sends an update "hey new stuff, click here" - i click the link, listen a bit, buy and download
Only a handful of teachers have been fired in the last 20 years in California
It doesn't mean teachers are "one of the most powerful political forces" in the United States. It's like a tangent within a tangent so I guess there's not much more I'd say about that claim, other than... it's a really weird, obviously wrong thing to assert.
I cant speak for the nation at large, but this doesnt track with my experience in california.
Public school funding has massively increased. It has gone from somewhere around 9K/student in 2012 to $24k/student in 2023. With an average class size of 29, that is $700k per class per year.[1] They are rightly scared of charter schools and private school vouchers.
California teaching is a decent profession on average, but compensation is extremely seniority based, with senior teachers payed 2X new hires, while doing essentially the same job (~$50k vs $100k) .[2] this is an internal struggle that most US unions have. Based on US union law, there is one union while in Europe employees can shop between multiple. As a result, US unions suffer from a tyranny of the majority which will sacrifice minority member interests for that of the majority.
I have a friend in a public utility union where the union fought against WFH for IT workers, simply because the field workers were jealous.
https://edsource.org/2023/california-leaders-should-focus-on...
But yes your point is right on in that the unions are useless. In large part because they are a corrupt themselves and their grift is taking a vig on employment.
If something is weak (like the unions), will it ever be useful?
"Unions of type T are weak, therefore all Unions are without purpose" is not logical.
A poor implementation of a system is not a case against the system, particularly when other countries have proper implementations of the system.
(BTW I'm discussing things with the opinions given by others. I certainly don't think unions, even in the US, are particularly weak or useless. The president had to take action to prevent a particularly useful and impactful railworkers' strike last year. Teachers in Virginia got good pay raises after a strike several years ago. Writers and actors are fighting for their long-term survival against large studios.)
That's incredible, I can't believe they were all were so stupid! /s
Of course, no matter what budget is promised, it can be misspent, and the tendency for administrators of all sorts of organizations to only spend on splashy new things they can brag about and not cover boring operations and maintenance of existing equipment is well known.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In a race to the bottom, concern for others is a liability. Ugh.
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
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%.
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.
Modelling any of these assumptions yields an arbitrary probability of your own choosing.
>> 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?"
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.
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.)
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.
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.
The reason is often racism. This time it could legitimately be illegal union busting.
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.
But was any of that state 'power'? Or state weakness?
You mean like firing the union bargaining team or laying off half your workforce?
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.
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.
118 (ironically, not 120) per https://finance.yahoo.com/news/half-bandcamps-120-person-sta...
Why should people just have to leave the industry they have trained for because of the pigheadedness of their wannabe employers?
There just too many people who want to make games and budgets are limited while competition is high. There is very few companies that are highly profitable, but majority of people wouldn't want to work for them.
Is it still shitty offer? Yes, but it's people's choice to work there.
This is true for any and all wage based labour.
Somebody wasting it by fucking up the project by mismanagement or misappropriation is a loss for us all.
Individualism sure is cancer.
How about when I buy eggs from the grocery and value them more than they cost me, so that there is consumer surplus. Is that exploitation?
Having people produce something and not paying them what it is worth so someone else can profit - is exploitation.
Remove the prejudice from the word. Just like if you “exploit a coal seam” or “exploit sunlight to generate electricity”. You are deriving value from something where the benefit is more than the cost. When the exploitation crosses a human, it (rightly) takes on a negative connotation.
If I am paid to dig holes, then a hole is not worth anything to me except for what someone will pay for it.
I'm not going to stay at home and dig all these holes in my back yard and glimmer with glee at all this surplus value that I've kept to myself.
Code is the exact same. Me writing a python module to process a CSV file is not at all valuable to me, but the wage I'm paid for making it, is.
It's not exploitation. It's a very easy trade.
True you possibly couldn’t get that y on your own. But someone got it, and it wasn’t you.
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?
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.
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.
I pay 9% of my income in Poland for the public healthcare I couldn't use due to enormous queues. Therefore I pay subscription to the private medical provider, pay for dentistry, for all the medicine prescribed by any doctor(public as well).
What percentage of income typical software spends for medical insurance and bills?
Going to the hospital would bankrupt me even as a relatively well off software engineer and even with my decent (work-tied) healthcare I still have months of wait time. In order to get into a doctor I made an appointment in February for a visit in September.
i mean, i live in the netherlands, and i pay (and it's not that cheap) for my family's healthcare. and it's obligatory.
I have absolutely no idea what you are on about, this is not as common as you seem to think. Who is expecting this of you?
adjusting for cost of Living, healthcare, insurance, childrearing costs (free education) and taxes i betcha that statement is factually wrong
The list below represents a national accounts derived indicator for a country or territory's gross household disposable income per capita (including social transfers in kind). According to the OECD, 'household disposable income is income available to households such as wages and salaries, income from self-employment and unincorporated enterprises, income from pensions and other social benefits, and income from financial investments (less any payments of tax, social insurance contributions and interest on financial liabilities)…
This indicator also takes account of social transfers in kind 'such as health or education provided for free or at reduced prices by governments and not-for-profit organisations.'
The USA wallops even tiny, rich Luxembourg. There are some not-insignificant Covid-related distortions here, will be interesting to see the 2022 numbers.
(I'm not American, it's just something that I keep observing recently. Europeans have a much harder time reflecting on issues Europe has. It reminds me of Americans back in the early 2000s.)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_househo...
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.)
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.
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.
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.
Also platforms like consoles and Steam take their 30% cut, then publisher / investor take their 30-60% cut and you also have to pay taxes on every step. Usual game studio that working using publisher or investor money only get 20-30% of gross sales.
Large companies are able to make conditions better and they actually have higher salaries and better work life balance whithin the market, but since for everyone else it's run to the bottom they have countless number of potential new employees.
PS: I am CTO of small game development company and to make games I have to be okay that I'll earn 3x less than I would as middle software engineer in fintech. Game dev is tough industry to work in, but it's always by choice.
Literally everyone who works in game dev are able to find better paid job elsewhere: gambling, marketing, fintech, etc. People just love making games and dont want to move elsewhere.
If my neighbor wants a new fence (the Y), offers me $50 to dig a hole (the X-Y) to put a fence pole in.
I dig a hole, i get $50. He gets closer to a fence. we have both profited, who is exploited?
Or if you want to go even more basic:
he wants a fence, he pays me $500 to build a fence, i build the fence and get $500. who is exploited?
Note these are real examples from real life that i deal with.
The value of the fence is X and you got X.
For me it's $500, for my neighbour it's $5000 - because it stops rabbits from eating his garden and stray dogs or whatever.
If it's $5000 value to my neighbour, should I have charged more even though I would've accepted $500? Who would have been exploiting who then?
This is directly analogous to my employer as well, except replace "neighbour" with boss, and "fence" with code. It's still a voluntary trade.
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.
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.
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.
which you seem to eat up and want to spit right back at people
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.
So yes, if it’s worth more and someone pays more then you get more. That’s not at all the point.
But if you are paid per hour and you produce many more fences than is required to pay your wage, you are being exploited.
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?