[bananaquant]

As an HR would say, those people are "a bad cultural fit", which legitimately raises the probability of them being laid off to 100%. Simple.

[dathinab]

still not legitimate, because then any laying of on union members/leaders could be legitimized that way

in any country which properly enforces labor protection law laying of any union leaders without the agreement of the union is extremely hard and requires missteps of the members like e.g. stealing. Or really unusual situations like you lay of half of the members and over half of the members have young children (or e.g. are disabled, project leaders etc.) but non of the union members have any of that. The likelihood of which is basically 0 in practice.

[seanhunter]

If that went to an arbitration, the HR would have some difficulty unless they could show a paper trail (eg emails in which people expressed concern about the cultural fit of these individuals) ahead of time. They could of course have paved the way by preparing such a trail ahead of time…

But that would lead the way to the question of why this was a redundancy rather than dismissal for cause.

Im not any sort of lawyer let alone an employment lawyer, but I’m sure there are some employment lawyers getting in touch with these folks now to test their interest in pushing a case.

[skeeter2020]

if these employees were focused on the organization efforts it seems reasonable that it would be pretty easy to show them as subpar performers against the corporate-oriented performance expectations, compared to others who were focused only on their work tasks. Stacked Ranking is reprehensible but not illegal.

[chmod775]

Bad culture fit is hard to argue when those 8 people were literally elected by their peers to represent them. One might say they're as perfect a representation of company culture as you could find.

[pydry]

That sounds plausible as a rationale. In my experience "bad culture fit" has been used as a stand in for "I don't want this person working here and I don't want to explain why" about 80% of the time.

The reason is often racism. This time it could legitimately be illegal union busting.

[HelloMcFly]

Competent HR professionals would not do this to current employees because their documented performance record will render this "soft judgment" more than dubious in any litigation.

[hkt]

"legitimately"? I'd be surprised..

[banannaise]

That's the argument HR would make, as a means of laundering the actual reason.

[pastacacioepepe]

You might need an /s, this is a perfectly plausible comment on HN.

[taejavu]

I believe it’s a sincere comment actually.

[gruez]

There's probably a performance component as well. If you're high performing, can pick whatever job they want, and therefore get paid well above your peers, why would want to join a union?

[sickcodebruh]

This was so much more than a job to many of them, just like Bandcamp is more than an e-commerce platform. Bandcamp employed a lot of people who had been there for 5+ years and contributed heavily to its role as cornerstone and defender of independent music. To them, it was as much an extension of their identities as it was a job, and they saw protecting Bandcamp as being equal to protecting independent music. The union came about after they were sold to Epic in an effort to protect not only themselves but also the company and everything it did and represented. Clearly, they were right to be distrustful.

[banannaise]

Because unions protect everyone in ways that don't directly relate to pay scale. They help defend against abusive time-off, on-call, or surveillance practices, advocate for pro-worker policies like parental, bereavement, and sick leave, help prevent employees from being fired for using these benefits...

[noelherrick]

Why do some of the most highly-paid people (actors) join a union and join the picket line? Even if you are high performing, joining up with other workers increases your bargaining position. Why did Steve Jobs join up with Adobe to stop poaching when they were highly sought after work places? Because even if you're a behemoth, you can be stronger in a union.

[watwut]

I have to say, this claim goes against what I have seen in real life. As in, people active in unions or other activism are not lesser performers.

[ludston]

Not every talented person is motivated by greed for personal wealth and status. Actually most aren't.

[milesvp]

I will share an anecdote. A friend of mine, his dad owned a construction company. I was talking to him at a party and made a comment that was fairly anti union thinking he’d agree with the sentiment. His response was he loved unions because they gave him access to the best workers. He had 2 unions represented in his company, and his experience was that union workers were objectively better than non union workers. This surprised me because I couldn’t fathom a world where a capitalist would prefer to have unions in his company.

As to why a talented free agent would want to join a union. It seems to me that in an industry with strong union presence then union is obvious to join. It provides so many protections and adds leverage to intangibles that even high earning individuals can’t negotiate for.

[paulcole]

Because one day you won’t be high performing and you’d like to have some protection for your job? Among many other reasons…

[JohnFen]

Because union representation isn't just about pay?