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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

#371

Post by WorldMaker »

jacobr1 wrote: post #297
rahoulb wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about elsewhere, but under UK law this would be illegal - precisely to stop this sort of thing happening. The new company has to offer employees a "transfer of previous employment" - so even though you're working for someone else, your history at the previous company is moved over with you. So if they wanted to get rid of you, they would then have to go through a redundancy process - which involves expla…

But in this case apparently they didn't actually sell the company, so no employees moved. The employees were still employed at Epic, until laid off by Epic. So presuming there was a violation of labor law (in the US or hypothetically in the UK) wouldn't all liability rest with Epic? Unless the argument is that it really _was_ a sale of the company, which probably rests on very technical arguments specific to the juri…

> wouldn't all liability rest with Epic?

I think how it gets prosecuted also depends on if there is a way to prove collusion between the two companies in this. It is absolutely fishy that Epic laid everyone off just before the sale/transfer concluded to Songtradr and both companies can currently pretend they did nothing wrong and hurting the union was an accident of bad timing and Songtradr especially looking "clean" hiring back in "waves" based on BS metrics and "goodwill" since it could have just not offered jobs back to people already laid off by the previous owner. It can be hard not to imagine that there wasn't some "golf course handshake" on the whole thing, but proving that existed may be tough to do, especially if the collusion was literal golf course handshakes with no paper trail.

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

#372

Post by gruez »

ludston wrote: post #278
gruez wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Not every talented person is motivated by greed for personal wealth and status. Actually most aren't.

>Not every talented person is motivated by greed for personal wealth and status.

What I said doesn't require everyone to be "motivated by greed for personal wealth and status". The effect will still be present even if only a fraction of people behave that way.

>Actually most aren't.

Source?

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

#373

Post by IBCNU »

sspiff wrote: post #320
sickcodebruh wrote: post #209

For some context, it’s important to understand the degree to which Bandcamp’s success and ubiquity with independent music is built on a people-first, anti-corporate culture. Bandcamp is an obsession for a very large and engaged segment of the independent music world. A good friend, a professional musician, told me “I feel like I’m watching my childhood home burn to the ground.” This is far from a unique sentiment. Pe…

I was wondering why noone had started a bandcamp alternative as I read this article. Bandcamp isn't a complicated product. It's the people and content that define its value. If trust and goodwill are eroded, then the platform loses its value. Glad to see an independent initiative in this space.

As someone who has been lucky to work on some large-scale apps that are household names with very very small teams, I find it fascinating/hilarious that comments from the Y Combinator peanut gallery often reduce acquired companies to 'isn't a complicated product, let's just rebuild over a weekend.'

While the core technology may not be as 'complicated' as quantum computing, the unique challenges in execution, user engagement, and market fit should not be underestimated, simple is hard ya'll... The real value and are far from trivial to replicate and come from the people.... no offense just sayin' this is a funny pattern around here.

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

#374

Post by milesvp »

gruez wrote: post #229
SamoyedFurFluff wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Unions are for protecting employees against abusive employers. Your highest performing state is temporary. There will be times where you’ll have off days. You will deal with death in the family. You will be eventually injured. If you aren’t already disabled, you will eventually be (this is just old age). You may become a parent. You might immigrate and come under restrictive visa. You’re a human being with fluctu…

Is it "abusive" for employers to fire/not pay you if you're away for weeks, or underperforming for months? The terms of the exchange is your time for money. The company isn't a charity. Even if you think there should be a social safety net for these types of circumstances, it makes little sense for employers to provide it. For one, it has the usual problems of tying important services to employment, similar to how he…

My experience with underperforming workers is that often it is directly the result of poor management. I’ve seen entire teams underperform because of some arbitrary decision from a director. Changing priorities at times when it was guaranteed to remove momentum, or worse, destroy moral. I’ve seen individuals underperform as their manager interrupts them at a concentration destroying cadence. Hell, just 2 well placed meetings can completely ruin a developer’s productivity for an entire day. And then there’s environmental problems. I sat in a cube where the accoustics were such that one particular cube far away sounded like the person was in my cube. I tell you that was hard to ignore. I also once sat somewhere where sales constantly was walking past me. That led to many frustrated hours, and if they didn’t work 2 hours earlier than me, so I could start getting things done at 3pm I don’t know I could have done anything in that job.

So maybe firing someone for underperforming is abusive?

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

#375

Post by mindslight »

plussed_reader wrote: post #328
yoyohello13 wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone makes something awesome that people love, it gets bought by a giant company, the giant company extracts as much value as possible and discards the corpse, someone makes an awesome new version. This is the software lifecycle.

So why am I still using and recommending VLC? Because it doesn't have to be that way. In before the true scotsman of software lifecycles.

Because OP isn't actually describing the software lifecycle, but rather the business or services lifecycle. Our society is so steeped in the business imperative of creating ongoing reliance on services, often with such relationships being marketed as "software", that the two are commonly conflated.

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

#376

Post by dehrmann »

I get the impression there's an attitude from the newer generation of tech workers--the ones that are more progressive and less libertarian--about their right to unionize. They were so interested in union politics and the reading about the glory days of unions that they overlooked their current situation.

You don't sell a company to break up a union and lay off half the staff. Bandcamp wasn't a good fit any more, and it was over-staffed. Unions worked during their heyday because there was a labor shortage, so they had leverage. Bandcamp employees didn't have that leverage.

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

#377

Post by chefandy »

filoleg wrote: post #194
paulcole wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because one day you won’t be high performing and you’d like to have some protection for your job? Among many other reasons…

Is this a direct admission that unions are for protecting low-performers? Because if yes, that’s not a good look for them at all and is kind of a perfect ammo for the anti-union side.

Admission? Like the commenter is some kind of representative?

And while unions aren't homogenous, they generally don't protect incompetence. I've known people in unions that got fired for poor performance, generally. But if I was a cook and cut off a finger while making some company profitable, my performance would certainly suffer while it was healing, and lots of companies world very much rather stop paying me. So in that case yes, I very much hope that a union would protect people from that performance-related loss of employment.

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

#378

Post by HelloMcFly »

bananaquant wrote: post #32
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.

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.

Competent HR professionals would not do this to current employees because their documented performance record will render this "soft judgment" more than dubious in any litigation.

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

#379

Post by hatsix »

extraduder_ire wrote: post #20
0xpgm wrote: post #14

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.

It clearly wasn't random, in fact, they said as much. It's a cost-cutting effort, and US salaries are generally much higher than non-US salaries.

If you want to know the odds, you'd have to know their criteria. You can't assume that it was random, because it definitely wasn't. (Though, I've seen the aftermath of a random layoff, I'd take criteria'd layoff every day, even if I'm the one with the pink slip.)

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

#380

Post by sickcodebruh »

basisword wrote: post #361
sickcodebruh wrote: post #209

For some context, it’s important to understand the degree to which Bandcamp’s success and ubiquity with independent music is built on a people-first, anti-corporate culture. Bandcamp is an obsession for a very large and engaged segment of the independent music world. A good friend, a professional musician, told me “I feel like I’m watching my childhood home burn to the ground.” This is far from a unique sentiment. Pe…

This just feels like an ad. Bandcamp hasn't changed one bit since the sale to Epic. 99% of users don't know anything about Bandcamp's operations let alone that the staff planned to unionise. Bandcamp has been around for a long time. People have libraries. Artists have their entire discogs on it. Niether of those camps are moving unless something fundamentally changes to force their hand - which hasn't happened yet.

I most definitely do not intend for it to feel like an ad so I apologize if that's how it comes off. I chimed in with my perspective because a lot of the replies were looking at this news from the lens of "layoffs in tech" and I want to offer context as someone tangentially connected. I mentioned my involvement as a way of demonstrating my relationship to the situation and, sure, as a disclaimer in case someone wants to write me off.

You are correct in that most people do not know anything about what's happening. But Bandcamp is largely a platform that courts super-fans and a sizable portion of this people are keyed into independent music, with all its happenings and drama. This is especially true for the successful bands, labels, and journalists who use their platform. So while 99% of their users might have no idea, the 1% that does contains many people who are heavily involved in making and influencing independent music. We see visible evidence of this in the number of music news sites that are posting updates on the situation. And I see evidence through the volume and intensity of feedback I'm receiving.

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