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Comment by buzzert | Hacker News Reader

Does anybody know what motivated the unionization effort? This is relevant to me as a Fastmail customer, because if the employees aren't being treated well that's a very poor reflection of the company.

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Fastmail is, IIRC, employee owned. A lot of works on employee-ownership (coop or otherwise) suggest using union structure as a mechanism for procedurally protecting workers (both for things like negotiation and for due process purpose for adverse action, etc.) preemptively as a check against problems happening in the top-down the employees-as-owners -> top management -> line management -> employees-as-workers chain, rather than in reaction to problems.

Fastmail's podcast seems to be pro union, at least for actors:

https://www.fastmail.com/digitalcitizen/the-future-of-ai-wit...

I wouldn't read too much into it. Unions are just a counterweight to corporate interests in the best case. The places that union bust out in the open are usually the worst offenders, and Fastmail doesn't seem to be that.

It is not necessary for a company to be especially bad for a union to be desirable. Some workers simply like a fair bargaining arrangement and having more say in their workplace.

I don't have any insider knowledge at Fastmail, but the fact that a labor union could get organized and come into being without any drama from the company probably indicates that the upper levels of the company respect their employees enough to not fight its creation. Seems good, imo

Why would workers accept someone else negotiating on their behalf unless things are running very poorly?

It might be that employees were asked to deliver fast mails on week nights and weekends without extra compensation/ overtime.

I don’t know anything special about it, but I wouldn’t interpret it necessarily as saying anything negative about Fastmail. For example, lots of perfectly nice companies get bough by giant behemoths. For all we know, Fastmail might have perfectly nice management that understands that future owners, rather than them, are the enemy.

Top-level management doesn't even have to be "the enemy" for a union to be very nice to have—companies of more than like 30 people are gonna have a shitty, abusive middle-manager somewhere and a union gives employees cover to resist their bullshit at far lower personal risk.

"No, I won't be (coming in on Sunday/'just doing this one extra thing before leaving after hours'/breaking company policy and legal requirements for safety or waste disposal or whatever), please see [section of union agreement], if you'd like to continue this discussion I can bring in my rep and, as required by policy laid out in [other section of union agreement], your boss, and we can all have a chat about this" will get a lot of abusive pricks to tuck tail and STFU in a hurry, with low risk of effective retaliation.

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