You don’t have the whole picture unless you know what conditions were like at the company. Could be that their salary and benefits were already so bad that they were already prepared to walk. Could be that they decided that if they left, they’d make a statement. Could be this is a helpful warning sign to other writers to avoid this company like the plague.
So no, your resolution is not resolved, I’m afraid.
That’s certainly not going to be an issue anymore.
Please take discussions about moderation to ATMB if you or anyone are so inclined - No more here please.
[/moderating]
It’s not quite that simple, as was discussed to some extend in the GD thread on this subject.
If they guy did not have any other, similar subsidiaries, then he’s legally in the right. I assume if he had other subsidiaries that he kept operational, then he’d have some legal issues.
But perhaps Richard Parker and Bricker could weigh in on that and offer their legal expertise on the subject.
Part of the picture appears to be that when the new boss, billionaire Trump supporter (and father of Trump adminstration nominee, following his original opposition to Trump’s candidacy) Joe Ricketts, bought Gothamist to merge with his company DNAInfo back in the spring of 2017, Gothamist employees were concerned about DNAInfo’s workforce cutting policies and potential erosion of editorial independence.
Unionization is supposed to be one of the safeguards that workers can employ against a predatory or dictatorial boss who isn’t concerned about the employees’ interests. And we do know at least that Ricketts was pretty dictatorial, telling his new employees, “As long as it’s my money that’s paying for everything, I intend to be the one making the decisions about the direction of the business.”
(Interestingly, Ricketts’ helmsmanship record is not all that confidence-inspiring, as his company DNAInfo has never turned a profit since it was founded back in 2009.)
So it appears that a more accurate description of the events would be that once again, a media organization (Gothamist) was taken over by a conservative billionaire with a money-losing business model and media-empire ambitions. And when it turned out that his new workers were collectively standing up for the right to participate in decisions about their workplace, the butthurt billionaire took his marbles and went home.
A shame for the writers to lose their jobs, but it seems to be just another casualty of the general revenue shrinkage in the journalism business, where consumers in general are no longer willing to pay for news. IMO, this won’t get better until journalism as a whole develops a new business model that is more robust than requiring hardworking reporters to keep cravenly kissing the asses of autocratic billionaires in the hopes that it will convince them to continue putting money into a news organization that doesn’t turn a profit.
That’s a pretty harsh analysis based on a single sentence. “The direction of the business” is quite different from the day-to-day operations of the company, btw. I wouldn’t call someone dictatorial unless they tried to micromanage aspects of the operations that aren’t really related to the strategic plans or goals of the company (like what employees must wear to work, how they must keep their desks, or how many bathroom breaks exempt employees can take during the day).
Depends on what their interests are.
Every time I read some article in a lib-leaning magazine that poses the question “Why do red state voters continually vote against their interests?” I laugh, because the premise is that those voters’ interests are primarily economic, which is obviously incorrect.
So your recommendation would be … what? That they would be supporting their interests by not joining the Writers Guild? Or is it more realistic to see this as a long tradition of union-busting that goes back to the robber barons and the union-busting thugs of Henry Ford?
Over here I cited Caterpillar as a typical example of a corporation throwing its weight around in just this way. A state floats the idea of raising taxes to meet budget deficits? Caterpillar threatens to pack up and move their world headquarters and manufacturing operations out of state. Elsewhere, as noted at the link, they demanded that workers at one of their plants agree to a 50% wage cut and the termination of their pensions. Yeah, the workers said no. Caterpillar shut down the plant.
You’ve been misinformed. What employs people isn’t random excess money that corporations are presumed to want to give away for no reason, which is what profits and tax cuts amount to. What employs people is demand for their labor, which is a different thing altogether, and results in large measure from the general populace having disposable income. Billionaires and corporations that get extra money in profits and tax cuts are happy to put the money in their pockets and their shareholders’ pockets, and if they’re feeling especially benevolent, they might say “thank you”, though they rarely do:
Boeing got a record tax break from Washington state and cut jobs anyway
Despite $7 million tax break from Trump, Carrier is still laying off more than 600 workers
Big profits, big layoffs: eBay, AmEx to cut jobs:
Big layoffs are coming for some big companies. eBay (EBAY) announced that it will layoff 2,400 people, about 7% of its workforce before April. This, after reporting a 10% increase in profits last quarter. American Express (AXP) also says it will cut 4,000 jobs, or 6% of its work force, despite an 11% rise in fourth quarter profits.
You know what makes me laugh? Whenever I see an interview with one of these yokels and they’re asked to explain their understanding of the issues that they voted on.
…Wait. How does eBay employ tens of thousands of people?
You know what makes it really hard for a business to be financially successful? Closing it. Especially under terms that leave you paying all of your employees for three months.
This sentence right here seems to put the limits of the workers’ “right to participate in decisions about their workplace” in pretty stark relief.
Those are the very best business models ! If only there was a poster child for money-losing business models…
You must not be familiar with the modus operandi of the British Press.
Tax and other government policy has consequences. The decisions of a labor force has consequences. Individuals have zero obligation to continue a business.
I don’t think that it is resolved. Can you prove this was against their interests in the long term? Is it always against a worker’s interest to join a union, or just this case? If an employer refuses to cave to a union and they strike, are you going to make a thread with the conclusion: “resolved, employer acts against own self interest by not acquiescing to union demands?”
While I do support the owner in this case in shutting down the company, I also strongly support the journalists in attempting to protect their interests in trying to unionize. We all have our own choices to make. For workers, the progress the world has made in the last few decades with computers and automation has (clearly) led to a commoditization of labor and I support the workers trying to oppose the trend even though I think it is ultimately futile. I can also see it from the billionaire owner’s point of view, though it may be that he is being a bit short sighted with this decision. Time will tell.
I get the sense that you, Bricker, do not support unionization of labor under any circumstance. I think this is too bad; unions are one of the innovations that made America great and added to the prosperity and freedom of the world.
Sorry, I should have clarified that Ricketts’ shutting down of the entire DNAinfo/Gothamist enterprise after the unionization decision (as well as his initial refusal to recognize the union) also factors into the analysis of his management style as “dictatorial”. (Also, he seems to have been known for that even before his media-dabbling days.)
Unions began in the first decades of 19th century Britain: after that we went through all the same crap of union-busting, hiring of replacements, gate-barring, firings etc., until unions became forces in the land. All these things are replicated today, showing the fight never dies. But the Union made them Strong, and is a necessary countervail to the overweening power of management.
Absent communist influence — which the socialist unionists crushed ( not least because in soviet countries the strike power was illegal — the ideal must be to develop further the fine German system of the Mitbestimmungsgesetz where there is equal representation between stockholders and workers electing management on firms employing more than a certain amount of employees.
Which IMO is exactly the problem. The issue is not that it was somehow illegal for the butthurt billionaire to take his marbles and go home, leaving a string of shuttered newssites and a crowd of ex-employees behind him: as far as I can tell, it wasn’t illegal in any way (though IANAL).
The issue is that the business model of modern journalism is so rickety that the fundamental supply of information for the public interest, and the careers of large numbers of talented journalists, are so dependent on the whims of butthurt billionaires.
Nitpick: I am not Bricker and cannot speak for him, but AFAICT his OP is using the term “Resolved:” in its typical formal-debate sense of “Here is the topic we are going to talk about”, rather than along the lines of “The disagreement has been definitively resolved and here is the conclusion”.
Especially when the business is already losing money and has been ever since the individual founded it in 2009. My point is that the fundamental problem here is that journalism these days is so cripplingly dependent on the willingness of wealthy individuals to keep losing money in what are essentially vanity enterprises.
If quality news journalism were an economically healthy field, Butthurt Billionaire Boss would probably have been making money from his news-organizations venture instead of spending 8 years losing money on it. And he would consequently have had a stronger incentive either to pay more attention to employee concerns in the first place or else to accept their eventual decision to unionize.
It’s the fundamental economic fragility of quality journalism in our current setup that creates attitudes like the OP’s that journalists ought to be slavishly docile towards their bosses. There’s no particular reason that unionization intrinsically has to be or ought to be regarded as an insolent and foolhardy act of self-destruction.
But when markets are so ineffective at supporting a public good like quality journalism, it’s not surprising that the industry becomes the province of wealthy wannabe media barons who have no financial incentive to refrain from throwing away the whole enterprise in a tantrum when anybody dares to cross them. And in a classic blame-the-victim reaction, people look at the workers who dared to cross the boss and say “Well what did you expect, stupid? Why did you think that being good at your job and serving the public entitled you to have any say in your work situation, when there was nothing supporting your money-losing workplace in the first place except the ego and whims of your dictatorial billionaire boss?”
Screw those workers for working together to try and better their circumstances!
I understand that sometimes unionizing can make running a business more difficult, but I don’t understand the glee anyone would take in folks getting fired/businesses shuttering for organizing. Without organizing, they might not have much of a voice to get treated better than dirt… and working as a journalist can be hard enough as it is. I certainly don’t blame any workers for trying to organize if they think they’re not being treated well.
Well heck, if you have the temerity to cross the wealthy boss in any way, then you obviously deserve to be axed. (Unless you expressed racist or sexist sentiments in a public forum, that is: if your wealthy boss doesn’t like that and decides to axe you for it, that is obviously a tyrannical and completely unwarranted abuse of power.)
Or a mistress secretly tapes you and leaks it.