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Well that's one negotiation tactic. Bandcamp is heading for the dead pool, and it fucking sucks because it's my go to online music store. God damnit Epic.
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...
Unions have existed by various names for all of time but I have a hard time sympathizing except in the case of blue collar/low income workers.
Divide first, by implying that some class of workers are not worthy of collective bargaining agreements.
Then conquer, because unions aren't powerful.
Well that's one negotiation tactic. Bandcamp is heading for the dead pool, and it fucking sucks because it's my go to online music store. God damnit Epic.
And Bandcamp CEO Ethan Diamond, who agreed to the original acquisition. Looking back 2 years ago he was making the usual promises that nothing would happen to it, after all his parachute depended on saying so.
Anyone willing to speculate if there is any legal recourse?
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.
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...
They just acquired the company two weeks prior and layoffs are extremely common after one.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I understand the statement below right, 27 of the union members received offers > “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.”
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.
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%.
> "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.