How do you even read that as that?

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.

Not critiquing you in particular, but it's not strategically unusual to fire one group of people, buy another off, and tell the rest that it's proof unions are nothing but trouble and if they play nice they might get a raise at the right time.

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

Aka plata o plomo. Not that the company would literally have anybody murdered but the prospect of 'promotion or termination' has much the same effect. It splits the camp.

> 28 people in the company publicly stated their support for a union (there's 42 needed to establish one).

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 company wants the union organizers to vote. It has said as much.

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

This is in the articles, man...

That still does not give the company the right to fire them, which is the law man... And the company could recognize the union if it wanted. So a vote is not mandatory.

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.

They aren’t independent samples though. They could all have gone on a downward spiral of disgruntlement at around the same time (on the order of months), and then once management finally got around to doing something about it, they started the termination processes at the same time (on the order of days).

I think pressuring for a vote early is of benefit because another vote can’t take place for some time period afterwards. The organizers want to stall a vote for as long as possible to work up support before this happens. While it’s illegal to fire a worker for trying to organize, it’s entirely legal to fire that same employee if they are violating company policies to further that organizing effort. I don’t know that this is what happened but is often the case I’ve seen. Misuse of company resources, disruptive behavior, not completing tasks, using paid time to do union work, bad for morale of other employees, creating hostile environment for other employees, etc.