Hmm...

I know a handful of people at Kickstarter, including some of the union backers. A fair number of employees have concerns about how the folks trying to organize the union have acted. Seems they deliberately have gone to the press as leverage against the company rather than work to get employees to back their cause.

It's a 140 person company and they only have the public support of 20% of the staff.

Of course they would go to the press, if retaliation is imminent that is one of the last ways in which an employee might defend themselves. It wouldn't be the first time that the press served to right a wrong, and it certainly won't be the last.

If 20% of the company supported unionization that makes it 150/5 = 30 people at most, 3 of which have been fired in a very short window of time. That's going to help a lot in the inevitable court case.

All I said was that 28 people in the company publicly stated their support for a union (there's 42 needed to establish one).

15 of those 28 people were eligible for a promotion or raise. 14 of those 15 received their promotion or raise.

Doesn't look like union busting at all to me, but thanks for putting words in my mouth.

My comment about the press was because the pro-union group is having a hard time getting those 14 additional people they needed to support them and in the meantime have created a ton of bad press for the company, which does impact the assets of the very employees they're supposed to be supporting the interests of.

This is how power operates, you can see exactly the same dynamics at work in countries that have been through a military coup.

It is not unreasonable to suspect that if 28 people are openly in support that there are 42 in total.

> Doesn't look like union busting at all to me, but thanks for putting words in my mouth.

You'd have to show that in the 'control' group of 120 other employees 12 or more got fired; not that 14 of the people in the group that supported unionization got a raise. They are - presumably - not the organizers, which is what matters here.

> My comment about the press was because the pro-union group is having a hard time getting those 14 additional people they needed to support them and in the meantime have created a ton of bad press for the company, which does impact the assets of the very employees they're supposed to be supporting the interests of.

And my point is that if you fire the organizers and get away with it that there won't be any union regardless of how many people would have supported it. If they took a vote and lost then that's that and business as usual, no need to fire anybody.

The union organizers don't want a vote, they want Kickstarter to voluntarily recognize them.

This is in the articles, man...

Note the subject of the post: "Kickstarter employees fired for trying to unionize". That's either true or it is not and so far you have not brought anything to the table that suggests it isn't retaliation for exactly that, and in fact substantiated numerically that the chances that it is not retaliation are vanishingly small.

Is that what happened? I don't know, but I'm not going to trust two tweets from two parties whose interests are against one another.

Besides, there may be many people who think having a union is always a good idea, so they would sign without thinking about it much.

Why do you, what's the reasoning behind that kind of law? And to whom do they petition - does the company have to agree, or rather, does the employer have the right to forbid employees from forming agreements between themselves? It sounds counterintuitive when you only need 1 person to start a company, or 2 people to have a contract, and when employers have no other control over who employees meet with and little control over how employees spend money (e.g. 'work dress code').

source: https://www.nlrb.gov/rights-we-protect/whats-law/employees/i...

In this case, the employees coming out with this knowledge have everything to lose because they could easily be blacklisted from further jobs. Kickstarter has no reason to not deny their accusations and has everything to gain from it.

If someone is risking a their livelihood to say something like that, then perhaps we should take what they're saying with a larger grain of truth. Otherwise we'd be saying that whistleblowers and the PR arm of a company have exactly the same weight.

If a few months from now, I read an article about what just happened now and it turns out that the company ends up being fined or something because the motivations behind firing him are actually what he claims, then it's the moment we can start being outraged, not before.

Sounds to me like they saw the writing on the wall.

I think some people will always be in favor of a union, no matter what. It's also an ideological thing.

The odds can't be calculated but I see no need for that, on a company the size of Kickstarter the chances of the three people who just happen to be busy trying to get a union organized after many years of otherwise uneventful employment are nil.

In theory pigs can fly, in practice, if you see a pig flying it is usually good practice to check which airborne vehicle they were tossed out of.

There is absolutely zero chance that 'all the information' will ever come out. The people directly affected will have nothing to lose, the remainder will be afraid for their jobs and will not talk or will only talk off the record. The company will claim it was nothing of the sort. And yet, magically, no union will ever be formed.

I don't know. What are the chances? Did anyone verify their stories?

I’m saying thus not theoretically, but a buddy just the other day was joking-not-joking about doing that at his job.

So who knows?

And then there is that other article linked in this thread which provides a ton more circumstantial evidence.

With that perspective I think its highly probable of such firings happening in a short time span

Are the numbers here 'Kickstarter fired 435 people and 3 of them claimed they were trying to unionize'?

Pretty good. The type of person looking to form a union in software dev where there isn't one is usually someone very unhappy at the company which as a very high correlation with not performing well (at least in the eyes of their manager).

I think you are crossing a sea of assumptions to get to "pretty good".