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Bandcamp's Entire Union Bargaining Team Was Laid Off

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Re: Bandcamp's Entire Union Bargaining Team Was Laid Off

#161

Post by fransje26 »

hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #149
derrida wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And in the EU it is probably why they have free healthcare, high minimum wage, work weeks of 34-38 hrs, welfare, 8 hour work days, overtime after, high proportion of part time workers, and highest productivity per hour in Germany. But yeah, unions, hate what you gotta hate. I personally hate long hours for bullshit pay.

Well, it's not really free healthcare, at least not here in Finland. You're expected to spend at least an hour every day exercising with all the time we have off here to make sure you don't get super sick in the first place. In practice then we actually work 45 hours a week every week.

Getting paid to exercise.. Nice!

Re: Bandcamp's Entire Union Bargaining Team Was Laid Off

#162

Post by Draiken »

nabla9 wrote: post #97
ivolimmen wrote: post #49

I find it so weird to read these stories on how Americans cope with unionizing. In the Netherlands where I live it is very common and normal to be member of a union. Most branches have a union, IT sector is a "free sector" and does not have a union. My wife works as a teacher and she is member of a union.

American unions are not like European unions. 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, un…

Wouldn't Tesla be supporting UAW if that was 100% accurate?

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"

Re: Bandcamp's Entire Union Bargaining Team Was Laid Off

#163

Post by eru »

wjholden wrote: post #116
eru wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Isn't this a statistical catch-22? If being in a union increases the odds of getting fired… well, then there's nothing to discuss because that's illegal. 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 t…

You've given a really clear example of confusing probabilities! Would this be an instance of Simpson's Paradox?

I'm not sure. Simpson's Paradox is even more confusing, if I remember right.

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.

Re: Bandcamp's Entire Union Bargaining Team Was Laid Off

#164

Post by darkwater »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #60
ivolimmen wrote: post #49

I find it so weird to read these stories on how Americans cope with unionizing. In the Netherlands where I live it is very common and normal to be member of a union. Most branches have a union, IT sector is a "free sector" and does not have a union. My wife works as a teacher and she is member of a union.

IT here is also a priviledged sector, in that it's in most cases an employee's market - few people in IT have their job or the wages at risk, layoffs are rare, etc. 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, thi…

Good analysis. My view on these topics is: always cover your (collective) ass as much as possible, with papers and laws holding your back. Because NOW the company/managers can be really smart and in good faith people, but in the future they might change their mind or being replaced.

Re: Bandcamp's Entire Union Bargaining Team Was Laid Off

#165

Post by Draiken »

siva7 wrote: post #18

Seems more like the layoffs were about laying off the union members. Some CEOs perceive unions as cancer that has to be stopped from metastasis. In countries with stronger union protection laws this move would have been illegal

It's probably illegal even in this case, as the US does have some union protection laws. But AFAICT enforcement is very lacking. The typical theory versus practice scenario where in practice they are not really effective.

Re: Bandcamp's Entire Union Bargaining Team Was Laid Off

#166

Post by vitus »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #28
extraduder_ire wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seeing the headline, and remembering that 50% of employees were laid off, my first thought was: "what're the odds?" 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.

You want the binomial distribution. ( https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/office/binom-dist-functi... , https://help.libreoffice.org/6.2/en-US/text/scalc/01/0406018... if you want to use Excel; https://help.libreoffice.org/6.2/en-US/text/scalc/01/0406018... ("B") for LibreOffice Calc.) 1/2^40 doesn't come into it. There are 67 relevant employees. Given that 50% of all employees were laid off, what were the odds of at…

You've computed the odds that at least 40 of the 67 union members get laid off, bargaining team member or not.

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.

Re: Bandcamp's Entire Union Bargaining Team Was Laid Off

#167

Post by RHSeeger »

0xpgm wrote: post #92
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think anyone is too worried about the layoffs, but these look like targeted layoffs, reinforcing the notion that union members / representatives are troublesome. At the very least, for the sake of optics, they shouldn't have fired the union reps. Not all of them anyway.

> At the very least, for the sake of optics, they shouldn't have fired the union reps. Not all of them anyway. We're all making assumptions here, but let's assume they had legitimate business reasons for the layoffs. What you suggest is that they make less optimal decisions for the sake of optics. In a free-market economy, the companies that make less optimal decisions will have their lunch eaten by those that don't.

> In a free-market economy, the companies that make less optimal decisions will have their lunch eaten by those that don't.

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.

Re: Bandcamp's Entire Union Bargaining Team Was Laid Off

#168

Post by [deleted] »

nabla9 wrote: post #97
ivolimmen wrote: post #49

I find it so weird to read these stories on how Americans cope with unionizing. In the Netherlands where I live it is very common and normal to be member of a union. Most branches have a union, IT sector is a "free sector" and does not have a union. My wife works as a teacher and she is member of a union.

American unions are not like European unions. 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, un…

[deleted]

Re: Bandcamp's Entire Union Bargaining Team Was Laid Off

#169

Post by cto_of_antifa »

SXX wrote: post #88
vore wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why can't they also want to make conditions better? Why do people have to accept that conditions are bad, tough tits, deal with it? We would probably have not half the safety regulations we have today and people would be dying a lot more on the job.

Because game development is what's called "successful product industry" which means sometimes you have to make 10 failed games to finally release 1 successful. Majority of game studios don't make it and competition is very high which means game budgets is race to the bottom. 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 eve…

[dead]

Re: Bandcamp's Entire Union Bargaining Team Was Laid Off

#170

Post by nemo44x »

sonzohan wrote: post #91
nemo44x wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IT doesn’t traditionally gafe unions in the USA. Teachers are unionized here and are one of the most powerful political forces. They are also a likely reason why so many people here don’t like unions.

IT Teacher (professor) part of a union here. Unions in the U.S. are incredibly weak. U.S. unions can barely represent, much less collectively bargain. That's why software engineers keep failing to unionize. My union wants to pay tenured CS/IT folks less than non-tenured English Professors. English profs here had the biggest raise in decades, going from 62k to 80k. They want to pay IT/CS profs 69k. Where I am (Seattle…

Software engineers fail to unionize because most of them know it’s a bad deal. Tenure in and of itself has 0 to do with your value as a software engineer.

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.

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