Software Engineers Fired for Attempt to Unionize
jacobinmag.com
jacobinmag.com
That said, the biggest issue for per-company monopolies is having everyone agree on a wage structure. They work easiest for similarly paid groups of people.
Second, there's a lot of reasons a company can fire its labor. E.g.: Labor is cheaper offshore, say. And yes, a company can fire all of its union labor and replace them with overseas workers if they so chose. (MAGA? Anyone?)
Third, in the US, we ask that companies give us certain benefits, such as health/dental insurance and so leaving a company is really more painful than it needs to be. Granted, his account is going to be painful, probably because for someone like him, it really is painful.
Do you think the company owners consider unionized employees to be a punishment? Or is that your personal view of unionization coming through?
The article quotes one of the organizers as saying "We asked the company to 1) recognize our right to organize and 2) do right by Jane."
The word 'threat' is used three times in the text, as in:
> But it was the threat to outsource our jobs that pushed the majority into supporting unionization. To be clear, we didn’t think it was a credible threat. The codebase was exponentially the most complicated I’ve ever worked on — it wouldn’t have been easy to outsource the coding labor.
You write "a company can fire all of its union labor and replace them with overseas workers if they so chose", but that's not 100% true. The National Labor Relations Act prohibits a company from engaging in certain 'unfair labor practices'. That is, section 7 of the NLRA is:
> Employees shall have the right to self-organization, to form, join, or assist labor organizations, to bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing, and to engage in other concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection,
and section 8(1) says it is an unfair labor practice:
> to interfere with, restrain, or coerce employees in the exercise of the rights guaranteed in section 7
That's why the article says "NewsGuild-CWA has since filed a complaint with the NLRB, claiming that the mass firing was illegal retaliation for trying to unionize."
Personally, I'm all for unionization.
And then you quote some documents:
> Employees shall have the right to self-organization, to form, join, or assist labor organizations, to bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing, and to engage in other concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection,
> to interfere with, restrain, or coerce employees in the exercise of the rights guaranteed in section 7
I agree with this. But proving that happened is hard. All the company needs is a reason to fire someone. That can be pretty much any valid reason other than the employees were forming a union.
How does a company get around this:
1. Company sees lawyers. Lawyers offer advice to control the messaging and emails and open up a software development house off shore.
2. Company lays a paper trail showing the cost/benefit analysis of moving labor overseas and meetings about the effect, as well as a decision outlining the decision as one of cost.
3. Company fires people, knowing that the labor dispute won't come into play, ending the issue for everyone involved as a side effect.
I agree that it can be hard. However, it is not impossible.
My comment was to point out that there are limits to the statement "a company can fire all of its union labor and replace them with overseas workers if they so chose". In some cases this is illegal, and the company may face penalties.
I don't know much about labor law. I know more about civil rights law, and it seems the two are structured similarly.
Under Title VII, retaliatory behavior is not permitted, and a suspiciously close timing like this is one of the factors which support a claim that there was retaliatory behavior.
Mass firing of everyone who tried to unionize is another.
I agree that it's possible for a company to fire a unionized staff en mass and outsource the work. Based on the description in this essay there seems more than enough evidence of possible illegal behavior to justify discovery, and management doesn't seem subtle enough to carry it off properly.
1) Labor and ownership have fundamentally opposing interests.
2) Ownership is utterly dependent upon labor.
3) Merging labor and ownership of an enterprise by removing nonproducing stockholders from the equation is the only sustainable way to eliminate the fundamental conflict of interest.
It must become better understood that nonproducing stockholders' presumption of entitlement to the value created by labor is merely a choice that is temporarily indulged by labor. It is not a law of nature.
but then i think about the plight of game studio folks.