"We wolves are happy to provide operational support in the sheep pen."

August 14, 2022 12:47 PM

Venture capitalists invest in union organizing

A startup backed by Silicon Valley venture capitalists, Unit of Work is an unlikely candidate for the role of labor movement champion. Its outside investors have made fortunes backing technologies such as artificial intelligence, cryptocurrencies and video games. One is among California's foremost critics of public-sector labor unions.

But these people used to multibillion-dollar sales and IPOs see a big opportunity in the atomized, restive condition of America's workforce and the possibility of transforming it through a new era of unionization. "We only invest in areas where we think we can get a return," said Roy Bahat, head of Bloomberg Beta, the venture arm of billionaire Mike Bloomberg's media empire.

Unit's business model works like this: The startup's organizers provide free consulting to groups of workers organizing unions within their own workplaces — helping them build support to win elections, advising them on strategy in contract-bargaining sessions, guiding them through paperwork filings and around legal obstacles. Once a contract is in place, members of the new union can decide to pay Unit a monthly fee — similar to traditional union dues — to keep providing support.

posted by clawsoon (36 comments total)

No red flags here!

Very puzzling. Money for labor organizing is great, but this is weird.
posted by col_pogo at 12:57 PM on August 14, 2022 [14 favorites]

Embrace, extend, extinguish...

You know who else can provide free consulting to groups of workers organizing unions within their own workplaces? Other groups of workers organizing unions within their own workplaces.
posted by flabdablet at 12:59 PM on August 14, 2022 [54 favorites]

The revolution will not be televised but it will be financialized.
posted by thatwhichfalls at 12:59 PM on August 14, 2022 [24 favorites]

So, the professional management company of the community where I live (paid by the members of the community via the HOA to manage our common interests) is definitely more organized than people feel motivated to do themselves, especially when they can outsource it. Why spend unnecessary time dealing with your rights and responsibilities vis-a-vis the people around you?

On the other hand, one of the professional managers of the community embezzled a whole TON of money from the community. Why not steal from people who should be taking care of themselves instead of paying you not nearly enough of a salary to put up with all their pettiness?
posted by amtho at 1:00 PM on August 14, 2022 [2 favorites]

im sorry but this is pure evil.
posted by clavdivs at 1:10 PM on August 14, 2022 [10 favorites]

Hopefully they reap the returns they so richly deserve.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 1:12 PM on August 14, 2022 [4 favorites]

So we're all going to see this startup lead by example with unionized workers of their own?
posted by Selena777 at 1:17 PM on August 14, 2022 [26 favorites]

It's a data collection exercise. They'll do a few high profile operations, go bust and the company (and especially it's records) will be sold off for pennies to Pinkerton.
Engage with them at all and a few years later you'll be unemployable.
posted by thatwhichfalls at 1:17 PM on August 14, 2022 [39 favorites]

“Unit of [W]ork is making unions decentralized," Draper wrote in an email explaining his investment. "That will be awesome. Centralized unions tend to restrain trade, and government unions create bloated bureaucracy and poor government service on the whole. Government unions are the antithesis of a free country. The US is supposed to be run by the people. California is run by union bosses.“

Direct pro-union energy into forming small units that won't be able to push for systemic change. I guess they're telling us up front what the goal is?
posted by clawsoon at 1:30 PM on August 14, 2022 [43 favorites]

I read this last night and experienced a particular kind of dread and horror I'd never encountered before. Everything about this seems designed to sell out workers. I'm curious to see how that PEN union works out; hopefully they get wise and affiliate with someone legit.

To add to flabdablet's suggestions about how workers can organize without taking on a new corporate overlord in the process, there's the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee. They're solid folks.
posted by heteronym at 1:35 PM on August 14, 2022 [13 favorites]

Making unions decentralized? I'm shocked they haven't squeezed blockchain in somewhere
posted by BungaDunga at 1:41 PM on August 14, 2022 [14 favorites]

The revolution will not be televised but it will be financialized.

You will not be able to bank from home, sister
You will not pay $9.95 per online or mobile trade
You will not watch the line go up
You will not watch the line go down, because
The revolution will not be financialized.

The revolution will not be financialized.
The revolution will not be brought to you
By four streaming services without commercial interruptions.
The revolution will not show you pictures of Warren Buffett blowing a bugle
And leading a charge by Bill Ackman, Cathie Wood, and Peter Lynch
To eat lunches stolen from elementary schoolchildren.
The revolution will not be financialized.

There will be no pictures of you with Fannie Mae
When the dice are rolled on your securitized mortgage
Or when a for profit hospital estimates the value of your organs
Or when a for profit prison rents you out to a debt collection call center
Aided and abetted by a for profit legislature.
The revolution will not be financialized.

The revolution will not be brought to you by bitcoin and ethereum
And will not star a digitized Charles Ponzi
The revolution will not be traded as an ape NFT
The revolution will not promise a 20% annual rate of return
The revolution will not go to the moon
The revolution will not be financialized, sister.

The revolution will not be financialized.
will not be financialized.
will not be financialized.
will not be financialized.
The revolution will not turn a profit, folks.
The revolution will be free.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 2:34 PM on August 14, 2022 [58 favorites]

If these people are looking for a sweetheart deal and some easy rolling dues, they have not met the actual sharks of union organising and industrial bargaining in practice, who have many hundreds of years of experience dealing with naifs who come in saying ‘I’ve got a great idea’! I’m just picturing these people sitting down with the absolute hard cases of the nurses or transport workers unions here…
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 3:11 PM on August 14, 2022 [9 favorites]

I'm a member of United Campus Workers of Georgia, part of CWA. CWA helped us get started until we had enough dues money to pay our own staffers. I'm glad that some of my dues go back to CWA to support them supporting other unions.

I really think the bullshit venture capital model only works because so many workers have lived lives so far from any union or unionized person that they literally don't realize that existing unions will help them unionize and they don't have to go it alone or let these bullshit people take their money.
posted by hydropsyche at 3:20 PM on August 14, 2022 [18 favorites]

I feel like we saw this years ago under a different name?

“Invest” in unions but insist that they be small, bespoke operations that aren’t sharing any infrastructure or knowledge with any other entities. Utterly adrift but, they’re a “union”.
posted by Slackermagee at 3:56 PM on August 14, 2022 [9 favorites]

it was inevitable that techbros would eventually reinvent the mafia.
posted by condour75 at 4:08 PM on August 14, 2022 [25 favorites]

The Draper quote clawsoon posted above is chilling and says everything that needs to be said about the motivations behind this effort.

Their goal is to destroy unions. They are saying it out loud.
posted by splitpeasoup at 4:49 PM on August 14, 2022 [5 favorites]

Government unions are the antithesis of a free country.

Government unions keep fascists from clearing out bureaucracies and replacing government workers with their inexperienced cousins and toadies who get to decide who “deserves” government services and benefits.

(not to mention the number of nonwhite people who work in those bureaucracies)
posted by Etrigan at 5:15 PM on August 14, 2022 [44 favorites]

An important part of unions' work is how they upskill and educate workers into organising, political awareness, etc, over and above representing their interests. That has spillover effects in society generally. A paid agency corrals that skillset for profit, means those skills and knowledge don't propagate out and keeping workers dependent on others. Bad bad bad.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 5:40 PM on August 14, 2022 [13 favorites]

Yes joe's_spleen if this were effective it could be cancerous for labor organizing. Bloomberg and this anti-union guy could even run their own anti-union political awareness campaign for their workers, to further their agenda and fend off potential raids from "competitor" unions.

I don't see how it would ever catch on though. Workers can get a better deal with Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee mentioned above or just a normal union.

Here's what this startup has managed to do so far:

(1) Won at Piedmont in March in a 43 worker unit
(2) Immediate voluntary recognition at PEN

Workers can get results like this on their own, just looking up stuff on the internet, doesn't seem like there's any value added or innovation in their process either. Unions already have their own "sign up here" systems that put interested workers in touch with experienced organizers, advisors, legal staff, etc. Maybe the goal is to spend a ton of cash to build a brand, then coast on that?? Can't see us falling for that.
posted by Hume at 5:58 PM on August 14, 2022 [2 favorites]

Very telling they call it "government unions" instead of "unionized government workers" "unions for government workers" etc. They want people to imagine a union created & controlled by Gavin Newsom or something.
posted by Emmy Rae at 6:36 PM on August 14, 2022 [16 favorites]

Aaaaah, Tim Draper. The poster child for the movement that sucked the soul out of Silicon Valley. The guy who got rich by being born rich. The one who became a successful investor because he grew up around investors. A guy who's never had a job where he was at risk of losing any financial or bodily security whatsoever if that job was lost. A guy who looooves talking about competition yet has he really ever need to stand on his own and compete?

Yet somehow he thinks he's got the knowledge, insight and experience to weigh in on unionization. How governments should be run and states be structured. This guy is afflicted by something that makes the sufferers of Engineer's Disease looks less dimwitted and self-absorbed than they are. I think Draper's suffering from something akin to whatever it is that poor Jared Kushner's been fighting off his entire life.

"union bosses have taken California schools from the top to the bottom, they have made it so that there are fewer jobs, more homeless, and people are fleeing the state to work,"

Really, Tim? A guy as supposedly smart as you is saying that the cause of complex, intractable, and decades-in-the-making problems like homelessness are due to 'union bosses' ? Yeah those problems couldn't have anything to do with the exploitive parasitic existence of those like you who make it more costly and more difficult for anyone not like you, to survive, let alone prosper. Because you have to take your cut of everything. Everybody's life is simple a collection of transactions that if you can just monetize & get a cut of, everyone will be better off!

I can imagine...."Oh, fuck! Those unionizing assholes are starting to get traction at Amazon and elsewhere? Shit. We might be stuck with this for a bit. Ok... guys.... guys, we gotta figure out a way to get a cut of this while we're at it, try to slowly cut their legs out from under them."

Always, forever, he's talked a big game, spewed his grand visions of how to make things better for everyone, for values of 'everyone' contained in the field of vision of the confines of his own rectum.

I almost deleted that and apologized for being crude, but I'm not. This man and his ilk and their singluar way of moving through the world and interfacing with the larger society around them are a cancer.
posted by armoir from antproof case at 8:07 PM on August 14, 2022 [25 favorites]

In this model, unions are the disease that companies are terrified they’ll catch, and Unit of Work is the vaccine.
posted by jamjam at 10:08 PM on August 14, 2022 [8 favorites]

How many cities in California make more money than the average red state?
posted by Jacen at 11:24 PM on August 14, 2022

Bet they make a tidy profit on the side selling their members' data.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 5:54 AM on August 15, 2022 [3 favorites]

I know it is easy to say these people have nefarious purposes such as selling data, or like Mr. Burns recycling center that's used to factory fish, but I think it is probably a simpler explanation than that knowing the tech-bro culture of VCs:

They saw a lot of press being generated by unions and probably thought "how can we help them as coastal elites," ... which go through their team page it'll make you barf, and basically through connections and publicity are charging unions to do things they could do themselves. They're much more like the mob extracting union dues than they are Amazon. That's it, that simple. And I bet they truly believe they're helping unions.

VC has now lost any meaning and is a catch all term for consulting group at this point.
posted by geoff. at 7:14 AM on August 15, 2022

> go through their team page it'll make you barf

It is important, they feel, for you to know where they went to college.
posted by The corpse in the library at 7:44 AM on August 15, 2022 [1 favorite]

geoff. , i’d be quite inclined to agree fully with all of what you say if not for the fact that Tim Draper has gone on record dozens of times to spout his belief that unions are the worst thing since Satan set up shop.

I wish it were as simple as you’ve described. For a few of the players involved, perhaps in their mind it is (because for the investor class, so many things are simply “a slam dunk”). But Draper’s involvement can’t be overlooked. The guys’s dangerous because he actually believes the bullshit he’s been peddling, and as a result of that and his stature and cash, so many other people will as well.
posted by armoir from antproof case at 7:48 AM on August 15, 2022 [5 favorites]

VC has now lost any meaning and is a catch all term for consulting group at this point.

They did say that they went with VCs to get money faster to start up faster. My impression is that that's exactly the role of VCs as traditionally defined.
posted by clawsoon at 8:21 AM on August 15, 2022

Ever since MoviePass, I’ve just defaulted to “Sell the user data!” as the hand-wave that techbros use to fill in the “???” before “Profit!”

I’ve been right more often than not.
posted by Etrigan at 8:23 AM on August 15, 2022 [5 favorites]

VC has now lost any meaning and is a catch all term for consulting group at this point.

...not to mention that they're not just doing fee-for-service consulting, they're putting in money and calculating the exit strategy required to get their money (plus some so-far-unspecified profit) out.
posted by clawsoon at 8:24 AM on August 15, 2022

If you want returns well ahead of inflation and serious long-term growth potential, you have to be in guillotines right now!
posted by Naberius at 10:56 AM on August 15, 2022 [3 favorites]

→ Once a contract is in place, members of the new union can decide to pay Unit a monthly fee —
— or see all their personal details get ratted out to management and/or placed on a do-not-hire list.
posted by scruss at 12:31 PM on August 15, 2022 [3 favorites]

Obviously never trust any of these goons.

The optimistic projection is, they want to be like Salesforce for workplace organizing. Every bargaining unit has overhead and logistical and hell strategic problems and that means there's a big market for services catering to those problems, bigger if the current apparent wave of labor organizing is real and continues.

Apart from everything else, I think it's (in a small way) a good sign that the goon class wants to make a bet that labor militancy is trending up. Obviously the bet is small and hedged but still if I heard this 10 years ago I'd've thought it was science fiction.

In practice though, the product competes with the entities that already offer the same kinds of support, which are the big unions. That's why Draper likes it, I think. Individual bargaining units will (he hopes) get services from the paid service provider instead of from the big solidaristic organization, and that means the bonds of collective action that big unions can support will be undercut. What about strike funds? Will Unit insure you against losing all your wages when you come into open conflict with management? We still live in the Taft-Hartley world where sympathy strikes are illegal, but this too is a kind of action that is supported by larger-scale organizing and presumably would be undermined by the Unit consultancy model.

It might also function as a brain drain, luring experienced organizers out of lower-paying union roles. One of the great polymorphic strengths of the current system is its ability to devise new ways of coopting effective discontents.
posted by grobstein at 12:54 PM on August 15, 2022 [11 favorites]

This is bad in so, so many ways. I'm not sure if the worst aspect of this is that the knowledge of how to set up and run a union will become the IP of a company, so individuals will neither be able to run it once it's established or go on to assist others to get started (so perpetuating their business model of being the experts in unions), or that it will encourage unions of the smallest possible size, meaning the strength that workers gain from being part of a larger union that has real bargaining power is lost.

Also, all the fees that unions collect from their members will now go into the pockets of scumbags instead of being used to provide support to workers. You know, the actual job of a union. Unions set up in this way will ultimately fail because they can't afford to provide anything to their members. No doubt the plan is that they are expected to last at least until the investors sell their shares and then who cares:
Once the company starts earning income, it plans to buy out its investors and give their equity to the unions it helped organize. I'm not sure they are using the word 'give' there in the same way I understand it.

There are so many ways that people can suck and now these arseholes have created another one.
posted by dg at 8:02 PM on August 15, 2022 [2 favorites]

They look like nice kids. Rich kids, yeah, but nice kids. I hope this works out for them.

And… before you assume criminal intent here, remember that we are talking about unions. You know, as in Jimmy Hoffa. Unions are corruptable, and often corrupt.

A product that decentralises unions is potentially less corruptable.

Said corruption either sells out union members, or leverages them for the profit of others.

I live somewhere where union membership is always high. Always been in one.

Being rosy-eyed towards entrenched powers and hostile towards usurpers isn’t very smart. Gigantic political block unions are… not great. They should be able to band together. But they shouldn’t be forced to. Small unions vassals of larger ones, because of low resources. That’s being indebted.

We’re having a shitshow here in Iceland because a union leader fired the entire staff of the union. So no representation or help for the union members while that’s being sorted out. And the union staffers that were union members were doubly screwed. In that situation, Union-as-a-service would be great. If a union can have less staff, double-great. As long as there is competition. As long as such a company doesn’t own the market. Because that entrenches the power. And then you can start seeing the conspiracy theories some above are peddling.
posted by svenni at 1:34 PM on August 16, 2022