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Fastmail Employees Form a Union

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Re: Fastmail Employees Form a Union

#291

Post by [deleted] »

ath3nd wrote: post #287
stale2002 wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can claim they all acted in unison, because they all faced the same macroeconomic environment so they were bound to make the same decisions. And I agree Ok part 1 solved! People did layoffs exactly as econ 101 predicts, because of interest rates increase. Glad I got you there. Now on to part 2! > Who made them overhire? If interest rates being high, causes companies to do layoffs, well then we should also be ab…

Exactly my point! When Econ 101 enters the room, humanity and morality are gone. reduced to mere numbers on a spreadsheet. The fact that you try to explain away some of the worst examples of human greed as the companies simply following the market shows that in your head following the market trends absolves one of any moral wrongdoings. While in reality, the companies you so staunchly defend suffer from the problem t…

[deleted]

Re: Fastmail Employees Form a Union

#292

Post by stale2002 »

jkestner wrote: post #283
stale2002 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How is that not collective bargaining against tech talent? 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.

That doesn't jibe with reality. Tech companies are making record profits at the same time they're laying off workers by the thousands. 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 em…

> Tech companies are making record profits

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phillips_curve

Re: Fastmail Employees Form a Union

#293

Post by ath3nd »

stale2002 wrote: post #292
jkestner wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't jibe with reality. Tech companies are making record profits at the same time they're laying off workers by the thousands. 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 em…

> Tech companies are making record profits 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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phillips_curve

Are you saying that when interest rates are high, a company making record profits HAS to engage in price increases, wage freezing and layoffs, to satisfy a made up instrument explaining basic economy?

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.

Re: Fastmail Employees Form a Union

#294

Post by ath3nd »

stale2002 wrote: post #243
ath3nd wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know who caused raised the raised interest rates? 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…

> You know who caused raised the raised interest rates? 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 fi…

You know what also raises inflation and interest rates? Price gouging.

https://twitter.com/RBReich/status/1736461510627467533

Re: Fastmail Employees Form a Union

#295

Post by shortrounddev2 »

ska wrote: post #286
shortrounddev2 wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fiduciary duty is the requirement that the managers of a company act only in the best interest of that company and its owners. It would be clearly against the interests of the company and the shareholders to allow the employees to unionize

No, fiduciary duty is broader and more subtle than that. 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…

You would have to be collosally incompetent or disingenuous if, as a CEO, you believe that it is in the shareholders best interest to allow your employees to unionize. Any competent board would fire such a CEO

Re: Fastmail Employees Form a Union

#296

Post by ska »

shortrounddev2 wrote: post #295
ska wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, fiduciary duty is broader and more subtle than that. 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…

You would have to be collosally incompetent or disingenuous if, as a CEO, you believe that it is in the shareholders best interest to allow your employees to unionize. Any competent board would fire such a CEO

This lacks imagination, the world is a more complex place than that. At any rate, a) this is not fiduciary duty and b) we hit diminishing returns a while ago.

Re: Fastmail Employees Form a Union

#297

Post by zbyte64 »

brightball wrote: post #231
zbyte64 wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without unions, the logic of supply and demand favors larger businesses because they have greater purchasing power - they are already operating as a collective!

How do you figure? 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.

> They have to compete against other businesses to hire skilled positions.

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%.

Re: Fastmail Employees Form a Union

#298

Post by coldpie »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #276
coldpie wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But there is very obviously a point below which unionization is a sign of dysfunction. 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.

> Even a small group of happy employees could form a union to set the current policies everyone is happy with in stone 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.)

Sure, but now you've changed your point from "very obviously" to "it's a cost-benefit analysis." It's not hard to imagine how someone else's analysis might end up different from yours (say, based on their previous experience, or experience of others in their industry).

Re: Fastmail Employees Form a Union

#299

Post by Zanneth »

UtopiaPunk wrote: post #202
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.

It is not necessary for a company to be especially bad for a union to be desirable. Some workers simply like a fair bargaining arrangement and having more say in their workplace. 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…

Why would workers accept someone else negotiating on their behalf unless things are running very poorly?

Re: Fastmail Employees Form a Union

#300

Post by elicash »

bluGill wrote: post #187
elicash wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The decision to unionize isn't about a "third party." It's a decision to negotiate collectively versus individually. Collectively you have more bargaining power, it's a pretty straightforward and obvious calculation.

That is also why you might not want to join a union. If you can show you are better than someone else (or at least think you can show), the union is likely to force you to get the same pay anyway. Unions often have promotion rules that harm anyone seeking to move up. Of course if you are content this doesn't matter. Which is why unions work well for assembly line workers: the line moves at the speed of the slowest pe…

You might in fact be as incredible as you think you are.

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.

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