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September 29, 2019 10:57 pm

Kickstarter Defends Firings As Not Anti-Union, But Strong Criticism Continues

"Kickstarter's CEO Aziz Hasan sent an email to staff Friday, explaining why the company fired two staff members and laid off another who played an instrumental role in organizing a union at the company..." reports Motherboard:Hasan insisted that the firings were related specifically to job performance issues, not union organizing. "We understood how these firings could be perceived, but it would be unfair to not hold these two employees to the same standards as the rest of our staff," he wrote. "It's worth noting that since March we've given raises to 14 people who have been public about their support for a union, and promoted three of them...." In his letter, Hasan asserts that management believes a union would hurt the company and that union organizers have not made their complaints clear to the company. "The union framework is inherently adversarial," he writes. "That dynamic doesn't reflect who we are as a company, how we interact, how we make decisions, or where we need to go. We believe that in many ways it would set us back, and that the us vs. them binary already has." If Kickstarter unionizes, it would be one of the first white collar tech unions in the United States. The magazine Current Affairs has a different perspective:When the union organizers were fired, Current Affairs happened to be in the middle of a Kickstarter campaign. As a left publication, we were appalled, and didn't want to publicly support an anti-union company. So we got together with our colleagues at Protean Magazine, Pinko Magazine, the Nib, and the Baffler (all of whom had done Kickstarter campaigns in the past) and released a statement condemning the firings and expressing solidarity with the union. We invited other Kickstarter project creators to join us on the statement, which hundreds did, including well-known creators like Neil Gaiman, Anita Sarkeesian, Molly Crabapple, and Richard Herring. Collectively, the creators on our statement have raised millions of dollars on the platform (my estimate is $10 million, but I stopped counting around 5). We were united in (1) appreciating Kickstarter's staff and the great platform they have created and (2) being firmly opposed to the company's anti-union activities and supportive of the workers' rights... As our campaign took off and started to attract press attention, I received a message from Kickstarter's chief communications officer. He asked me if I would like to talk on the phone so that he could address our concerns.... We did not resolve anything on the conversation, but he said the company was thinking through how to respond and he would be in touch. Saturday, Kickstarter offered its response. The communications officer emailed me, and said he would like to share a statement from the CEO with the project creators. The statement said that Kickstarter: 1. Stood by its decision to fire the organizers, and would be dispatching its lawyers to fight their claims. 2. Would not voluntarily recognize a union even if the vast majority of workers signed in support of one. 3. Would not pledge to remain neutral on unionization, and would continue to actively oppose the effort. The statement was the most blatant slap in the face imaginable to both the workers and the project creators. It says, in essence: drop dead... For Current Affairs, it means that we now have to cease using Kickstarter for our fundraising efforts. Who can possibly partner with a company that is actively and proudly trying to union-bust? Why should we give 5 percent of our supporters' money to a corporation that will use it to hire lawyers and P.R. professionals to keep its workers from exercising their rights?

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