181–190 of 507 posts
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
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Thanks to updated IR35 employers can bypass unions altogether. As IT deemed employees don't get any employment rights.
What's the issue if it only applies to contractors? 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…
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.
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Not every employee is a good negotiator. And poor negotiators get underpaid in a market system even when they are great at their job. Unions fix this market inefficiency by having good negotiators act on their behalf.
The company doesn’t pay for the increased cost though. I pay as a consumer. What do I get in return, especially since I’m not in nor have any interest in joining one?
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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 f…
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.
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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.
As an HR would say, those people are "a bad cultural fit", which legitimately raises the probability of them being laid off to 100%. Simple.
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Of course, how typical of FDR to regurgitate a bunch of mumbo jumbo. Good for thee but not for me. In the end the federal government is just like any other employer.
No it’s not. The reason being the public sector Union gets large enough to pick winners. The winner is the person who approves their contract and budget and is likewise incentivized to grow the Union more to secure more votes. It’s a massive conflict of interest.
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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. And if it should decrease it because of fear of legal retaliation, wouldn't that make it less likely that this happened randomly. This feels like the wrong conclusion to draw (especially the second part), but I suck at statistics so someone please explain where I'm…
> 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…
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As an HR would say, those people are "a bad cultural fit", which legitimately raises the probability of them being laid off to 100%. Simple.
There's probably a performance component as well. If you're high performing, can pick whatever job they want, and therefore get paid well above your peers, why would want to join a union?
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.
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.
It's illegal.See "Discriminating against employees because of their union activities or sympathies" [1] Enforcement is weak, but it's illegal. [1] https://www.nlrb.gov/about-nlrb/rights-we-protect/the-law/di...
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.