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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

#491

Post by Fischgericht »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #348
tomcam wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Super informative. I must reveal my bias toward a free market here, but I also remember keenly what it was like to be a powerless employee. Germany appears to have by far the strongest economy in the EU but with higher unemployment than the USA. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the balance there vs the USA? I can imagine compelling arguments for each approach.

Are unemployment benefits better in germany? If they are you’d expect it to be higher than the US, as in the US workers might run out of the social support network sooner and be forced to take any job just to eat and shelter.

I guess unemployment benefits are better in pretty much every other western country compared to the US, so: Yes.

If you become unemployed, depending on your age, and how long you have worked etc, you get between 12 and 24 months about 60% of your previous salary before dropping into social security.

There are various programs to get people back into jobs depending on what caused their unemployment - help on re-settling in case the loss of job being caused by your profession no longer being asked for in the region you live in, training to move to a different profession, help if your job loss is related to health issues (for example burn-out).

The system is optimized into trying to find out the cause of job losses, and work to counter that.

The 5% unemployed are mostly cases which are impossible to solve due to someone being too old to be re-trained and/or not willing or being able to move to where the jobs are.

Right now the job market in Germany is mostly defined by a shortage of labor in various areas, which is why there is a strong desire to make sure that immigrants are allowed to enter the work-force quicker. For example trains no longer run in any way reliably in Germany due to a massive shortage on workers in that industry.

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

#492

Post by Fischgericht »

dilyevsky wrote: post #401
tomcam wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Super informative. I must reveal my bias toward a free market here, but I also remember keenly what it was like to be a powerless employee. Germany appears to have by far the strongest economy in the EU but with higher unemployment than the USA. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the balance there vs the USA? I can imagine compelling arguments for each approach.

You should read about Germany’s ridiculously high unemployment numbers of the early 2000s and how Schroeder got rid of it by basically getting rid of bunch of labor protections. All to say there are two sides to this coin

However, the party he was affiliated with, the social-democratic party, these days believes that this was the biggest mistake they have ever made.

This is because it turned out that punishing people for not having a job might motivate some to take on jobs that are below their qualification, but that it does not solve the actual underlying issue - having people qualified for the jobs there are, in the regions those jobs are in.

Due to this, even under the rule of the conservative christian-democratic party, things then moved into the opposite direction again, with the organization that is supposed to bring people into jobs getting reformed massively. We now have lots of excellent programs that are focused on re-training people and help fix the causes of them having lost their jobs.

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

#493

Post by Fischgericht »

lowbloodsugar wrote: post #407
tomcam wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Super informative. I must reveal my bias toward a free market here, but I also remember keenly what it was like to be a powerless employee. Germany appears to have by far the strongest economy in the EU but with higher unemployment than the USA. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the balance there vs the USA? I can imagine compelling arguments for each approach.

What is this "free market" you describe? Am I free to occupy any building I like, or does your "free" market include a concept of a "property" and entire government bureaucracies and men with guns to enforce such concepts? Does your "free market" make a distinction between "I expect this property to still be mine tomorrow" and "I expect this job to still be mine tomorrow"? Does you "free market" allow for individuals…

A believe people in the US are so Anti-Union because the way Unions are designed by law is completely broken.

I remember well that we once had a booth at a trade show in Las Vegas. It was strictly forbidden for us to take our exhibits to our booths ourselves, because the process of "take something onto the exhibition floors" was union-protected. So we had to wait half an hour to get a task done that would have taken myself 30 seconds.

I believe that unions are needed, and am strictly pro-Union.

I believe that Unions serve the goal of being a counter-weight when a huge employer has lots of negotiation power.

But what I have seen in the US - and to a certain extend in Germany, too - is that certain UNIONS have grown to big, powerful and bureaucratic, and have become a huge force of power themselves, no longer serving the workers, but being self-serving mostly, and bringing employers to the brink of collapse.

In Germany we have two competing unions for rail workers. One is huge, corrupt and self-serving, and no where connected to the actual pain points rail workers have. But luckily there is second, much smaller rail Union, where the Union boss used to be a train driver and still is very much in touch of the base, and therefore does not pick fights with employers "because they can", but to actually work on pain points the workers have. Which is really important because Germany has a huge shortage on rail workers, and urgently needs to attract new labor in that sector. It's a bit weird that the rail companies are not working on fixing the shortages in labor, and the government isn't either, but that it's a union that is fighting for making life of the customers bearable again.

Back to the US: I believe the whole discussion of being pro-Union or pro-free-market is a red herring. The unions themselves need to be reformed and strengthened, but in a way that they serve society. In general I believe unions should be smaller and leaner organizations.

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

#494

Post by rendall »

SeanLuke wrote: post #282
rendall wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is how unions weaken. Divide first, by implying that some class of workers are not worthy of collective bargaining agreements. Then conquer, because unions aren't powerful.

> Then conquer, because unions aren't powerful. Come to Italy some time.

I live in Finland! Unions are so powerful here they are practically a branch of government.

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

#495

Post by ak217 »

vwoolf wrote: post #268
nabla9 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Perhaps union infestations help explain Europe's sclerotic economic performance, relative to the U.S.'s: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/at-least-five-interesting-thin...

Can't downvote this due to comment age but please don't use unnecessarily inflammatory language. You and I both have issues with unions but they are not "infestations"

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

#496

Post by ponector »

weberer wrote: post #484
ponector wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In US if you are a software engineer, what percentage of your salary would you spend for health insurance, medicine, copay etc?

If you're a software engineer, your employer would provide you with a plan that covers most, or even all of the cost.

Then it is actual free healthcare for US developer but expensive and useless "free" for me. What a joke!

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

#497

Post by lost_tourist »

axus wrote: post #181
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

I wonder if a compromise between "French-style" and "American-style" would be the government taking over the layoff business. Need to cut headcount? Send the Department of Labor your payroll, and they'll tell you who to lay-off.

I guess that's a great thought experiment and would be interesting, but given the current stranglehold that corporate special interests have in washington I have my doubts about anything like that ever happening in our life times.

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

#498

Post by cbsmith »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #358
cbsmith wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I mean Google started as a non-profit and basically defined the search engine and it's tools. Then it went private, continued briefly, and has slid more and more into yet another corporate rent-seeker ever since. Wait, when was Google a non-profit?

Started as a research grant-based program at Stanford in 1995. Three years later it became a company after building the basic product to a launch-ready state.

Ah, you mean before it was called Google.

Honestly, the non-profit engine was not nearly as good as the one the subsequent for profit business created.

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

#499

Post by dilyevsky »

Fischgericht wrote: post #492
dilyevsky wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should read about Germany’s ridiculously high unemployment numbers of the early 2000s and how Schroeder got rid of it by basically getting rid of bunch of labor protections. All to say there are two sides to this coin

However, the party he was affiliated with, the social-democratic party, these days believes that this was the biggest mistake they have ever made. This is because it turned out that punishing people for not having a job might motivate some to take on jobs that are below their qualification, but that it does not solve the actual underlying issue - having people qualified for the jobs there are, in the regions those jo…

Now back to Agenda 2030

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

#500

Post by sspiff »

JohnFen wrote: post #354
sspiff wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> It's the people and content that define its value. That's exactly what makes developing a replacement difficult. It's not the software. I'm sure that a very large majority of people here could write that in a reasonable amount of time. But the software isn't really the main value that Bandcamp provides. For a service to replace Bandcamp, it needs to be trustworthy and have a track record of doing right by both arti…

That's my point though, bandcamp is alienating the people that give it its place in the music business, and creating an opening for competitors.

Saying bandcamp isn't complicated isn't the same as saying it's easy to replace. I'm just saying it's feasible to try with a small team and small amount of capital.

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