A Group of Workers at Bandcamp Just Voted to Unionize - Slashdot
source link: https://it.slashdot.org/story/23/05/20/0212233/a-group-of-workers-at-bandcamp-just-voted-to-unionize
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A Group of Workers at Bandcamp Just Voted to Unionize
A Group of Workers at Bandcamp Just Voted to Unionize (bandcampunited.org) 18
Posted by EditorDavid
on Saturday May 20, 2023 @11:34AM from the making-music-together dept.Bandcamp is music streaming platform helping fans support independent musicians. And Bandcamp United describes itself as "a union of workers at Bandcamp — we are project managers, we are engineers, we are designers, we are vinyl campaign managers, we are support staff, we are editors and writers..."
Friday Bandcamp United issued this statement: Today, a majority of eligible Bandcamp workers voted 31-7 in favor of forming Bandcamp United, a union represented by the Office and Professional Employees International Union (OPEIU). The vote results now await certification by the National Labor Relations Board, with a collective bargaining process to follow. Below is a joint statement from Bandcamp co-founder Ethan Diamond and Bandcamp United: â "Bandcamp United and Bandcamp management are committed to working together to continue to advance fair economic conditions for our workers and the artists who rely on us. We look forward to negotiating with an open mind and working in good faith to promote the best interests of all of our staff and the artist and label community we serve."
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The goal of any large business is always to divide and conquer. You need to keep your workers separate so that they're not using collective bargaining power to get higher wages. You control all the capital but that's basically worthless without somebody to run it all. The way you get people to do that for slave labor wages is by keeping them separate as individual units. That way you can leverage your money and everything that you own to make them do as you say.
Basically you can't go toe to toe with somebody that's got over a billion dollars to their name when you're lucky to have 30k in your bank account. They can just fire you and wait your savings out for a few months. You'll be bankrupt long before them.
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The problem with the modern push for unions is that workers are too spread out now. You don't have 30,000 guys at one factory anymore. That's by design. Early on when the unions were forming in America one of the major things the corporations won was that unionization would be done on a per work site basis.
Nothing prevents those unions to be coordinated nationwide; in fact communication technology makes it easier than ever. What prevented unions to be effective in the US was the mentality, maintained by capitalism propaganda, that you could make it big by playing by the rules and being a ruthless isolated individual. Now that this propaganda is no longer credible, workers are rediscovering the need for unions.
Basically you can't go toe to toe with somebody that's got over a billion dollars to their name when you're lucky to have 30k in your bank account. They can just fire you and wait your savings out for a few months. You'll be bankrupt long before them.
Aaaand, that's precisely why unions were created to begin with, when workers couldn't save and could not afford to go without a month's salary. Thanks to the union's fees, they had a remnant to support them for the duration of the strike; possibly sustained by the solidarity of other unions.
It seems that the US is due to figure out again how workers can organise to fight for better conditions when the rules governing industry do not provide enough to sustain them.
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Exactly. What happened is that during the pandemic, workers realized the truth. It's why "quiet quitting" became a thing - instead of workers willingly "giving it their all" and working crazy overtime, suddenly people realized the truth.
Working really hard gets you nowhere. Your boss appreciates that you put in 40 hours of unpaid overtime last week. But that appreciation only goes towards "can you do it again this week?" It makes him look good and gets him the bonus, while you get scraps.
There less willingn
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I'm afraid your still thinking within the frame of capitalism propaganda. My point was that, even if you are the one who gets the promotion, overall that's still a bad deal for you.
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Legally votes for unionization have to happen on a per site basis. The individual sites can theoretically coordinate but without the ability to do a national vote across an entire businesses sites it becomes child's play for Union busters and nepo baby billionaires to break up the unions using basic divide and conquer tactics.
The trouble you're having is you're thinking is very two-dimensional and straightforward. That's because you haven't spent decades perfecting the art of union busting and you don't
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What US needs is collective agreements like we have in Finland. You don't setup an union at some company. Instead, once some union has more than 50% of workers as members in some business type, like steel manufacturing, they can collectively bargain and the agreement they sign affects everybody, companies that were part of the bargaining, companies that didn't take part but are doing business at the sector, and all employees, both union and non-union members. And in this system the companies themselves have
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