The calculation you provided is probably more closely represented as "what is the likelihood that the outcomes affecting the union were random happenstance, ver

The calculation you provided is probably more closely represented as "what is the likelihood that the outcomes affecting the union were random happenstance, versus the union members being singled out". I incorrectly conflated the number of laid off union members with the total number of "special" individuals, while only 8 of them were actually "special" (i.e. democratically elected bargaining team members). It'd be more accurate to describe that probability of the impact to the bargaining team as (110 choose 52) / (118 choose 60) which comes out to about 0.35%, not too far off from the 2^-8 estimate (0.4%) that your approach of using the binomial distribution on this same set would result in. Both approaches would yield similar results, and the result is still somewhat in the realm of plausible deniability. > All specific outcomes are rare, so that question will never tell you anything informative. I'm not describing any specific outcomes in this case, though. You could throw up your hands and say "oh, we laid off these specific 60 people, there's only a 10^-34 chance of picking exactly those 60 people out of 118". That would absolutely be useless. I'm describing the event that "all of this one group got laid off" as a subset of the space of possible outcomes given what we observed, and ascribing a probability to that event. I will admit I used the wrong inputs, but I stand by my approach.