Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Bandcamp's Entire Union Bargaining Team Was Laid Off

404media.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 507 posts

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

#61

Post by derrida »

nemo44x wrote: post #57
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 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.

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.

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

#62

Post by dsign »

kundi wrote: post #46

We've been developing a curated alternative to Bandcamp for electronic music, which also replaces Soundclound and Mixcloud. It's called Formaviva ( https://formaviva.com ) We are a bootstrapped team of musicians, loyal to independent music so we want out platform to stay that way. We're also hiring: https://formaviva.com/jobs PS: I'm one of the team members

I had a quick look at your site.

From the "Terms of Service":

> Unless otherwise stated, Samorastnik d.o.o. and/or its licensors own the intellectual property rights for all material on Formaviva.

Where's the "otherwise" for people that post music on your platform?

I was actually searching for your legal status (which kind of legal persona you are and in which jurisdiction). I couldn't find a thing on your website.

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

#63

Post by smcl »

fsckboy wrote: post #43
mandmandam wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the kinds of people who have time to lead a union are likely to be the kinds of people without important jobs ... Wow. That's something you'd never hear in Europe (outside of a golf course, at least). For the record, leading a union is an important job, and all that's required to want the job is a sense of fairness. In reality, many people balance multiple responsibilities, including leadership roles in unions alon…

[flagged]

Applying stereotypes to a person is not the same as saying a phenomenon exists (in this case they said nearly-exclusively) in country. By way of examples:

"Americans are fat" is a (negative) sterotype.

"Americans get poor value for money in healthcare" isn't.

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

#64

Post by darthrupert »

Animats wrote: post #10

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...

How does that work in court if the employer shows all of them being low performers or problematic in other non-union related ways?

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

#65

Post by eru »

vanderZwan wrote: post #56
freeAgent wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s an implicit assumption that the layoffs were evenly distributed and that the union bargaining team was also evenly distributed within the organization. If those aren’t true, this analysis is going to give deceiving results (could be either direction).

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 the company decides for business reasons entirely unrelated to unions, that thanks to GPT they don't need so many people in the widgets department. So they fire 8 people from widgets. Assume further that they went out of their way to protect the union bargainers: of those 8 people fired, only 2 are in the union bargaining team. (That means that the remaining 2 widgets people are both union bargainers.)

Even though the company went out of their way to protect the union bargainers, statistically they only laid off 8% of the company, but 50% of union bargainers. Would that be illegal or even unfair?

(In the real world, I am fairly sure that union bargainers are concentrated in some departments. Mostly because it attracts certain kinds of people, and different departments also attract certain kinds of people.

But, of course, I have no clue what the reality inside of Bandcamp was like. I'm just speculating about hypothetical examples.)

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

#66

Post by viknesh »

vanderZwan wrote: post #56
freeAgent wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s an implicit assumption that the layoffs were evenly distributed and that the union bargaining team was also evenly distributed within the organization. If those aren’t true, this analysis is going to give deceiving results (could be either direction).

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…

One thing you might not have considered is that some notion of "dissatisfaction w/ job" would increase both the likelihood of you wanting to join a union and your employer wanting to fire you or lay you off.

Edit: also, another confounding factor that hasn't been discussed is job role/department. Layoffs and union membership are definitely not evenly distributed across role/department, but there is not enough info in the article to know if the layoffs were targeting specific roles or uniform across the company.

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

#67

Post by [deleted] »

the_other wrote: post #50

In the UK we have large unions that represent the individuals regardless where they work. I’ve not heard of company-specific unions here, although I’ve not looked for them either. Presumably companies must still recognise the unions. Is it more common in the US to have company-specific unions? Are the large “independent” unions present at all? I would assume that being larger and independent of an employer would make…

[deleted]

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

#68

Post by einpoklum »

The US has an ultra-employer-slanted legal system, where a workplace changing hands can have the new owner firing all employees then deciding whom to re-hire, rather than needing cause for any termination, and being required to act with minimal good faith, to hold a session hearing with candidates for termination to allow them to make their case for keeping them in employ etc.

But, hey songtradr, here some ideas for Bandcamp's new name!

* Banned Camp

* Boot Camp

* Sudden Death Camp

* Union Busting Camp

* Camp Greed

etc.

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

#70

Post by rwmj »

the_other wrote: post #55
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.

In the UK, many IT roles can join the Communication Workers Union[0] [0]: https://www.cwu.org/

Or Prospect https://prospect.org.uk/, a non-aligned (they don't give money to political parties) union of "scientists, engineers, tech experts and in other specialist roles".
Post reply on HN