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> Honestly surprised that there is anything to unionise. I assumed Kickstarter was a couple of founders, half a dozen web developers, and a few undergraduate interns writing copy. What else do they do?
Yeah, that. Here in the US, unions are conventionally blue-collar organizations, in such things as car assembly. Unions are also in the public sector, “city employees, government workers, teachers and police”. I also don’t see KS as any other small white-collar company. I can’t really imagine how a union at KS will look compared to conventional ones in the US. If KS is a small company, the founders could just fire everyone and hire new people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_unions_in_the_United_States
https://www.quora.com/Why-dont-tech-companies-have-unions
https://www.inc.com/guides/2010/12/what-small-businesses-should-know-about-unions.html
> Do you have a link to that empirical evidence?
If you want a chart, go look at General Motor’s stock performance or Hostess over the last decade.
That’s not to say that in the US, tech companies have attempted to get cheaper workers, such as through contractors (avoids the cost of employee benefits) and HB-1 visas (overseas tech workers who will work for lower salary in return for a visa). Most tech companies I worked for had benefits like employee stock options, profit-sharing, etc. In other words, these companies provided benefits that a union would advocate for, anyway. This attempt to unionize may just be an attempt for higher salaries, better employee benefits, etc., which a small company would want to provide to stay competitive. If a web developer at KS was head-hunted by another company for higher pay, said web developer certainly wouldn’t need to be part of a union at KS.
