7 ms·

Is Kickstarter in a right-to-work state? Because if not, 46 people are forcing 37 to support a union that they might not agree with, which is distasteful in the

Is Kickstarter in a right-to-work state? Because if not, 46 people are forcing 37 to support a union that they might not agree with, which is distasteful in the extreme.

ughitsaaron 7y ago
Thankfully, New York is not a right-to-work state.
- zchrykng 7y ago
  So you are fine with the majority forcing the minority to support something they don't want to support? Never going to get behind that notion myself.
  - throwanem 7y ago
    The short name for that notion is "democracy".
    - chillacy 7y ago
      Tyranny of the majority is considered a pitfall of democracy, or consider how to enforce "the will of the majority while protecting the rights of the minority"
      - throwanem 7y ago
        Until law mandates that all labor unionize - and as closed shops, at that - the rights of the minority are hardly impaired when any one shop does so. Open shops exist, as do shops with no union of any sort, and employees need not remain employees at all, of anyone, if they no longer so choose; they are free to start their own businesses, of whatever sort best suits them. Those who decline to join a union, even at a newly closed shop, are constrained only in that they no longer meet the requirements of the job at hand - and the "right to work", so called, does not extend so far as to establish, regarding any given company with a union or without one, a right to work there. The plea to "tyranny of the majority" thus seems here to conceal a plea for the tyranny of the minority, in that they be allowed to frustrate their colleagues' strongly held and constructively expressed desire to obtain a more equitable balance of power in their workplace by recognizing their shared interest and forming a united bloc to match that which management and ownership present in support of their own shared interest. One wonders on what basis this sort of tyranny merits more favorable consideration than any other.
  - brosinante 7y ago
    "forcing" != "we voted on something"
    - oh_sigh 7y ago
      I'd imagine the 37 people who voted nay didn't even want to take a vote on the matter. If me and a friend come up to you and say "let's all take a vote to see if I can take your wallet", and you vote "no", it doesn't mean you aren't getting your wallet taken anyway.
      - brosinante 7y ago
        Depends. Did you, your friend and I willingly joined a group of "wallet carriers"? Are we all affected by wallet-carrying management? Do our choices in wallet-carrying communally affect this wallet-carrying enterprise? Is corporate wallet-carrying management trying to convince us to carry wallets for longer than the usual 8 hours or wallet-carrying?
  - Willson50 7y ago
    This is literally how democracies work.
    - oh_sigh 7y ago
      And yet you rarely hear about businesses being described as a democracy, except for many coops.
    - michaelt 7y ago
      Most democracies include, at the very least, a bunch of hand-wringing about oppression of minorities, though. It would be unusual in the extreme for a modern western democracy that was 75% christian to force the 25% minority to convert.
      - Jweb_Guru 7y ago
        Being in a union that protects your rights as a worker is more like insurance (which the majority indeed mandates the minority to get) than religion.
        zchrykng 7y ago
        That comparison only holds up if you assume all unions are politically neutral. And I would be shocked if you could find any union that was politically neutral on anything.
        pathseeker 7y ago
        It's not insurance. It actively changes how you can be compensated and takes very hands-on interference with the operations of the company (in US unions at least).
        Jweb_Guru 7y ago
        As opposed to insurance, which has a huge influence on who you can go to and what your options are if you get sick, to the point that your choice of insurance may end up becoming a turning point in your life? I don't think I ever heard of someone's life turning on joining the wrong union. So no, I don't really see the distinction. But my point was more that sometimes we are "forced" to do things for the benefit of the people around us, even if we don't really want to and don't personally think we need it. Unionizing is one of those things.
  - crankylinuxuser 7y ago
    There are some glaring problems with federal law behind unions. 1. A union is required to represent all employees. They should t have to. 2. Companies will still have the money, and the employees will just have "work". A better view is worker owned co-ops. That way the manager is the employee. The stresses of union vs company dissipate. Some others do take hold, but are much less so.
  - kick 7y ago
    By your anti-union tone, one can assume you're American. As we all know, in America, the norm is that the minority forces the majority to support something they don't want to support. Lucky you, not having to deal with horrible things like "democracy"! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_elections_in_which_the_winner_lost_the_popular_vote https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_ele...
    - username90 7y ago
      In the parts of Europe I am familiar with unions aren't allowed to force you to to join them, so "right to work" is alive and well there.
  - heavyset_go 7y ago
    No one is forcing them to work a job they don't want to. They're free to work literally anywhere else that will hire them.
  - frockington1 7y ago
    Its the same state that brought Stop and Frisk laws to the main stream. New York government isn't known for caring about minority views
- big_chungus 7y ago
  Why thankfully? Don't workers' rights mean they ought to make their own choices about joining a union or not?
  - iandanforth 7y ago
    Comments like the above fascinate me. The emotional appeal of "choice" seems to have no end. You can employ it to fight unions, health care, public schools anything you want. Similarly if you can successfully attach "right" (as in "a right") to your rhetoric you can draw out pride, anger, indignation, all sorts of powerful emotions. I recently learned that Frank Luntz (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Luntz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Luntz) is one of the masters of this and came up with "Death Tax", using "choice" to fight universal healthcare, and "climate change" to soften the more frightening "global warming." We seem to be highly susceptible to emotional language triggers that just bypass our rational minds.
    - karatestomp 7y ago
      Weirdly, this kind of "freedom" is often freedom that's of zero or negative value to me. Take the "freedom" lost by switching to single payer healthcare or similar: oh, no, I don't get to rely on private insurance and deal directly with private medical provider billing departments anymore, and spend tens of hours fixing their mistakes and attempts to screw me every time I use medical care, plus all the time trying to understand their deliberately-complicated policies to make any kind of mostly-useless attempt at comparison shopping, all while paying a premium for it, and instead I just pay taxes and get medical care when I need it. Like, OK, I'm losing some "freedom" of choice from a certain point of view, but damned if that wouldn't feel one hell of a lot more free.
      - booboolayla 7y ago
        Do left-leaning Americans truly feel this way about single payer healthcare? Do you really not understand that SPH fixes only one problem - poor people getting substandard healthcare for free, at the taxpayer's expense? Do you really think you won't have to "spend tens of hours fixing their mistakes and attempts to screw me" when dealing with poorly paid doctors and staff that can't get laid off due to insane rules of SPH? Do you really not know about the dirty secret of places with SPH, which is that whoever has the means still goes to a private healthcare because the service is 1000x better?
freepor 7y ago
60 million people are forcing 63 million people to support (pay taxes to) a government they don’t agree with. This is just how governance works.
ilikehurdles 7y ago
You led me to find a map of US anti-union "right-to-work" states on wikipedia[1]. I previously figured pretty much all of the US is under RTW legislation, but it seems like, outside of the folks in Texas, almost the entire tech industry is in non-RTW states. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-to-work_law#U.S._states_with_right-to-work_laws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-to-work_law#U.S._states_...
- zchrykng 7y ago
  Looks like a nice list of places where I'm willing to live and where I'm not. If my co-workers want to unionize, more power to them, but I'm not going to give the union a single cent. Even if they are officially responsible for representing me to my employer, that wasn't my choice and they don't represent my interests.
Joeri 7y ago
Why does it work that way in the U.S.? In my country everyone can freely join a union, all union employees can go on strike if the union allows it, and they’re not allowed to prevent others from working. At no point to my knowledge do all workers in a company have to decide to unionize. Why the collective decision?
- jcims 7y ago
  This is the problem with the conversation around unions. The way they operate traditionally in the US seems to be very different than how they operate in Europe, and many of the negative externalities from how they operate in the US are just pissed away as anecdotal rather than a possible threat to their success. If this union shits the bed, and there's no evidence that it will but plenty of evidence that it's possible, it's going to be catastrophic to the overall case for tech unions in the US. Unfortunately the signal from the actual discussion is going to be lost in the noise from vested interests in both sides, so we're probably not going to learn anything.

Is Kickstarter in a right-to-work state? Because if not, 46 people are forcing 37 to support a union that they might not agree with, which is distasteful in the extreme.

ughitsaaron 7y ago

Thankfully, New York is not a right-to-work state.

zchrykng 7y ago
So you are fine with the majority forcing the minority to support something they don't want to support? Never going to get behind that notion myself.
- throwanem 7y ago
  The short name for that notion is "democracy".
  - chillacy 7y ago
    Tyranny of the majority is considered a pitfall of democracy, or consider how to enforce "the will of the majority while protecting the rights of the minority"
    - throwanem 7y ago
      Until law mandates that all labor unionize - and as closed shops, at that - the rights of the minority are hardly impaired when any one shop does so. Open shops exist, as do shops with no union of any sort, and employees need not remain employees at all, of anyone, if they no longer so choose; they are free to start their own businesses, of whatever sort best suits them. Those who decline to join a union, even at a newly closed shop, are constrained only in that they no longer meet the requirements of the job at hand - and the "right to work", so called, does not extend so far as to establish, regarding any given company with a union or without one, a right to work there. The plea to "tyranny of the majority" thus seems here to conceal a plea for the tyranny of the minority, in that they be allowed to frustrate their colleagues' strongly held and constructively expressed desire to obtain a more equitable balance of power in their workplace by recognizing their shared interest and forming a united bloc to match that which management and ownership present in support of their own shared interest. One wonders on what basis this sort of tyranny merits more favorable consideration than any other.
- brosinante 7y ago
  "forcing" != "we voted on something"
  - oh_sigh 7y ago
    I'd imagine the 37 people who voted nay didn't even want to take a vote on the matter. If me and a friend come up to you and say "let's all take a vote to see if I can take your wallet", and you vote "no", it doesn't mean you aren't getting your wallet taken anyway.
    - brosinante 7y ago
      Depends. Did you, your friend and I willingly joined a group of "wallet carriers"? Are we all affected by wallet-carrying management? Do our choices in wallet-carrying communally affect this wallet-carrying enterprise? Is corporate wallet-carrying management trying to convince us to carry wallets for longer than the usual 8 hours or wallet-carrying?
- Willson50 7y ago
  This is literally how democracies work.
  - oh_sigh 7y ago
    And yet you rarely hear about businesses being described as a democracy, except for many coops.
  - michaelt 7y ago
    Most democracies include, at the very least, a bunch of hand-wringing about oppression of minorities, though. It would be unusual in the extreme for a modern western democracy that was 75% christian to force the 25% minority to convert.
    - Jweb_Guru 7y ago
      Being in a union that protects your rights as a worker is more like insurance (which the majority indeed mandates the minority to get) than religion.
      - zchrykng 7y ago
        That comparison only holds up if you assume all unions are politically neutral. And I would be shocked if you could find any union that was politically neutral on anything.
      - pathseeker 7y ago
        It's not insurance. It actively changes how you can be compensated and takes very hands-on interference with the operations of the company (in US unions at least).
        Jweb_Guru 7y ago
        As opposed to insurance, which has a huge influence on who you can go to and what your options are if you get sick, to the point that your choice of insurance may end up becoming a turning point in your life? I don't think I ever heard of someone's life turning on joining the wrong union. So no, I don't really see the distinction. But my point was more that sometimes we are "forced" to do things for the benefit of the people around us, even if we don't really want to and don't personally think we need it. Unionizing is one of those things.
- crankylinuxuser 7y ago
  There are some glaring problems with federal law behind unions. 1. A union is required to represent all employees. They should t have to. 2. Companies will still have the money, and the employees will just have "work". A better view is worker owned co-ops. That way the manager is the employee. The stresses of union vs company dissipate. Some others do take hold, but are much less so.
- kick 7y ago
  By your anti-union tone, one can assume you're American. As we all know, in America, the norm is that the minority forces the majority to support something they don't want to support. Lucky you, not having to deal with horrible things like "democracy"! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_elections_in_which_the_winner_lost_the_popular_vote https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_ele...
  - username90 7y ago
    In the parts of Europe I am familiar with unions aren't allowed to force you to to join them, so "right to work" is alive and well there.
- heavyset_go 7y ago
  No one is forcing them to work a job they don't want to. They're free to work literally anywhere else that will hire them.
- frockington1 7y ago
  Its the same state that brought Stop and Frisk laws to the main stream. New York government isn't known for caring about minority views
big_chungus 7y ago
Why thankfully? Don't workers' rights mean they ought to make their own choices about joining a union or not?
- iandanforth 7y ago
  Comments like the above fascinate me. The emotional appeal of "choice" seems to have no end. You can employ it to fight unions, health care, public schools anything you want. Similarly if you can successfully attach "right" (as in "a right") to your rhetoric you can draw out pride, anger, indignation, all sorts of powerful emotions. I recently learned that Frank Luntz (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Luntz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Luntz) is one of the masters of this and came up with "Death Tax", using "choice" to fight universal healthcare, and "climate change" to soften the more frightening "global warming." We seem to be highly susceptible to emotional language triggers that just bypass our rational minds.
  - karatestomp 7y ago
    Weirdly, this kind of "freedom" is often freedom that's of zero or negative value to me. Take the "freedom" lost by switching to single payer healthcare or similar: oh, no, I don't get to rely on private insurance and deal directly with private medical provider billing departments anymore, and spend tens of hours fixing their mistakes and attempts to screw me every time I use medical care, plus all the time trying to understand their deliberately-complicated policies to make any kind of mostly-useless attempt at comparison shopping, all while paying a premium for it, and instead I just pay taxes and get medical care when I need it. Like, OK, I'm losing some "freedom" of choice from a certain point of view, but damned if that wouldn't feel one hell of a lot more free.
    - booboolayla 7y ago
      Do left-leaning Americans truly feel this way about single payer healthcare? Do you really not understand that SPH fixes only one problem - poor people getting substandard healthcare for free, at the taxpayer's expense? Do you really think you won't have to "spend tens of hours fixing their mistakes and attempts to screw me" when dealing with poorly paid doctors and staff that can't get laid off due to insane rules of SPH? Do you really not know about the dirty secret of places with SPH, which is that whoever has the means still goes to a private healthcare because the service is 1000x better?

freepor 7y ago

60 million people are forcing 63 million people to support (pay taxes to) a government they don’t agree with. This is just how governance works.

ilikehurdles 7y ago

You led me to find a map of US anti-union "right-to-work" states on wikipedia[1]. I previously figured pretty much all of the US is under RTW legislation, but it seems like, outside of the folks in Texas, almost the entire tech industry is in non-RTW states. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-to-work_law#U.S._states_with_right-to-work_laws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-to-work_law#U.S._states_...

zchrykng 7y ago
Looks like a nice list of places where I'm willing to live and where I'm not. If my co-workers want to unionize, more power to them, but I'm not going to give the union a single cent. Even if they are officially responsible for representing me to my employer, that wasn't my choice and they don't represent my interests.

Joeri 7y ago

Why does it work that way in the U.S.? In my country everyone can freely join a union, all union employees can go on strike if the union allows it, and they’re not allowed to prevent others from working. At no point to my knowledge do all workers in a company have to decide to unionize. Why the collective decision?

jcims 7y ago
This is the problem with the conversation around unions. The way they operate traditionally in the US seems to be very different than how they operate in Europe, and many of the negative externalities from how they operate in the US are just pissed away as anecdotal rather than a possible threat to their success. If this union shits the bed, and there's no evidence that it will but plenty of evidence that it's possible, it's going to be catastrophic to the overall case for tech unions in the US. Unfortunately the signal from the actual discussion is going to be lost in the noise from vested interests in both sides, so we're probably not going to learn anything.