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Fastmail Employees Form a Union

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Re: Fastmail Employees Form a Union

#111

Post by ath3nd »

codemac wrote: post #80
ath3nd wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You actually can! If the government doesn't protect your wages, you are left at the mercy and greed of capital. I can guarantee you that means you will be thrown under the bus the first opportunity they see fit, as soon as it makes a financial sense. Look at the avalanche of layoffs that started with Twitter. Now the market is flooded with engineers, which makes our individual bargaining position worse. Employers not…

Is fastmail in your mind a megacorp? Most things you said do not seem to relate to a small company with ~400 people according to linkedin.

The megacorps created a situation in which thousands of people are jobless and with stagnating wages, while they hit record profits.

What is stopping Fastmail to employ the playbook of the megacorps and do a couple of rounds of layoffs? Or to simply stagnate the wages of their employees, citing "bad economic headwinds"? Or to fire some high earners and replace them with cheaper ones from the huge pool of the qualified jobless? That's right, nothing stops Fastmail, unless its employees are protected either by law, regulation, or belonging to a union.

In Australia labor protections, while not as woefully inadequate as in the US, are still not enough to give workers a good guarantee of safety and bargaining power. Hence, they formed a union. It's as simple as that.

Re: Fastmail Employees Form a Union

#112

Post by r2_pilot »

barbazoo wrote: post #100
shortrounddev2 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You know a company is morally bankrupt if they fight their employees unionizing Any company would oppose their employees unionizing; they have a fiduciary duty to do so

> fiduciary duty to do so Is that actually so?

I would argue they have a fiduciary duty to NOT do so, as "unfair labor practices" are illegal per the National Labor Relations Act.

Re: Fastmail Employees Form a Union

#113

Post by mrguyorama »

pc86 wrote: post #71
BoiledCabbage wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a free market. Corporations perform collective bargaining. 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 o…

Companies coordinating pay and benefits, anti-poaching agreements, etc. are all anti-competitive and illegal. So I'm not sure "corporations perform collective bargaining" is accurate.

And yet all of FAANG has done exactly that like three times

Re: Fastmail Employees Form a Union

#114

Post by buzzert »

Does anybody know what motivated the unionization effort? This is relevant to me as a Fastmail customer, because if the employees aren't being treated well that's a very poor reflection of the company.

Re: Fastmail Employees Form a Union

#115

Post by JumpCrisscross »

givemeethekeys wrote: post #110
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> kind of coordination that requires less representation does not have your interests in mind 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.

That's quite small. Having worked at a few companies in the 30-50 employee mark, while it is true that I could speak to management almost any time, it was also obvious that they were very busy.

> companies in the 30-50 employee mark, while it is true that I could speak to management almost any time, it was also obvious that they were very busy

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].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nature_of_the_Firm

Re: Fastmail Employees Form a Union

#116

Post by bee_rider »

dagw wrote: post #97

Slightly off topic, but could someone explain why employees in the US keep having to form their own union at each company, rather than the employees just joining an existing union? If I wanted to join a union where live, I'd just pick a relevant union, go to their home page, and click 'join'.

If you are the only member of a particular union in your company, what additional leverage does that give you? You don’t gain any ability to do collective actions, right?

Re: Fastmail Employees Form a Union

#117

Post by righthand »

codemac wrote: post #80
ath3nd wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You actually can! If the government doesn't protect your wages, you are left at the mercy and greed of capital. I can guarantee you that means you will be thrown under the bus the first opportunity they see fit, as soon as it makes a financial sense. Look at the avalanche of layoffs that started with Twitter. Now the market is flooded with engineers, which makes our individual bargaining position worse. Employers not…

Is fastmail in your mind a megacorp? Most things you said do not seem to relate to a small company with ~400 people according to linkedin.

While unionizing to fight mega corps is one stratagem, the industry benefits as a whole when unionizing is the standard regardless of company size.

Re: Fastmail Employees Form a Union

#119

Post by fodkodrasz »

jmcphers wrote: post #20
elektor wrote: post #9

Congrats to the team! This might be the reminder I needed to finally subscribe. Gmail’s spam filter has been nonexistent for the past month (300+ clearly spammy email reaching my inbox).

I'm a happy Fastmail customer, but I would not recommend them on the basis of their spam filter. It's competent but makes at least a few mistakes a week. Google's was better for me.

for me both are far better than o365, which even marked legit business mail (o365 invoices :)) from microsoft itsef as spam!

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)

Re: Fastmail Employees Form a Union

#120

Post by bee_rider »

buzzert wrote: post #114

Does anybody know what motivated the unionization effort? This is relevant to me as a Fastmail customer, because if the employees aren't being treated well that's a very poor reflection of the company.

I don’t know anything special about it, but I wouldn’t interpret it necessarily as saying anything negative about Fastmail. For example, lots of perfectly nice companies get bough by giant behemoths. For all we know, Fastmail might have perfectly nice management that understands that future owners, rather than them, are the enemy.
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