In the final episode of the Kickstarter United Oral History, the union works through the COVID-19 pandemic as organizers reflect on their experiences forming the union.
Welcome back to the oral history of Kickstarter’s Union. We’re picking back up just weeks after the union vote was won in mid February of 2020. Shortly after workers voted for a union, after they celebrated, and danced, and sang... they got right back to work. Kickstarter United’s first meeting including both the Yes votes and No votes, the company’s full bargaining unit, was held in a small church in Greenpoint Brooklyn, and... it was tense. In the pews of this church, sitting together for the first time as a recognized union, staff struggled to find common ground as organizers walked through how the union had been operating prior to the vote. Side by side with workers who had voted against the union, organizers looked around the room, uncertain of how this tension could be diffused in time for workers to come together and fight again for a strong contract, their number one priority for the foreseeable future. As organizers packed up after the meeting and bundled up for the cold February night, they walked to their subway stops, some grabbing drinks together to shake off this difficult night. One thing was on their minds: just how much the union was about to change. But at this moment they had no idea that something else was coming. Something that would change everything.
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By mid March, just after that first meeting with the full bargaining unit, Brooklyn, along with the rest of the world, grinds to a halt as governments, communities, and workplaces across the globe respond to the spread of a new highly contagious disease, the coronavirus. The little church in Greenpoint where the union had expected to hold weekly meetings shuts down. As word spreads about the severe effects of COVID-19 and the possibility of this deadly disease reaching Brooklyn, if it wasn’t present already, the union immediately begins to organize for something they’d never expected, safe working conditions in a pandemic. What they didn’t realize is just how damaging this global catastrophe would be to the union’s immediate goal… winning a contract.
Almost as soon as the union was recognized by the National Labor Relations Board - the NLRB - Kickstarter United’s union meetings were transformed into a decentralized hodgepodge of Zoom calls, slack discussions, emails, and texts. Kickstarter staff moved to working from home and the block in Greenpoint that was once the center of the union drive became an eerie ghost town.
I got my bike from the office and that was it it was shut down and I was like, wow, ok, things are accelerating. - AnonT
All through Brooklyn, the subways closed down, stores went dark, parks were empty, and the only people on the streets were usually standing in grocery store lines that wrapped around the block. On March 17th, sirens drift in and out of the background as workers join Zoom to share updates about their new lives under lockdown and talk through what’s next. Management was starting to adjust working conditions to comply with new covid-19 regulations.
At first management was being incredibly kind. They were offering a lot of like support and like they were being really generous with employees. - Oriana
Management institutes safe work from home policies, starts to address lockdown-related stress and fatigue, and they offer to adjust worker health insurance.
Because they had to like float these decisions by us. We wanted to make sure there were like representatives to have those conversations. - Oriana
The union decided to elect a few people to represent workers and facilitate negotiation over COVID-related adjustments.
This was like our first elected body. - Corey
Bargaining a full contract and electing a Collective Bargaining Committee, a CBC, is put on hold.
This was a different committee altogether and I was on it. - Dannel
The Covid Bargaining Committee starts keeping track of changes to working conditions proposed by management, feeding information back to the larger group and bringing counter proposals to management that addressed work from home procedures.
I remember talking to my parents and being like, oh ya, work is really normal. It’s actually pretty great, I get to work from home, everything’s fine, the company seems fine. - Janel
But soon... workers begin to hear murmurs from management about more significant changes in response to the pandemic. By early April, Kickstarter’s leadership begins to foreshadow more drastic action and lays the groundwork by subtly introducing concern over potential financial hardship from the global crisis.
It all felt very like we're concerned, we're paying attention. We all just need to be on alert, but like none of it felt like that big of a deal. - Oriana
Just after New York’s lockdown, as many states across the country institute regulations in an attempt to flatten the curve, staff starts to see the number of projects from smaller independent creators rapidly drop.
We surveyed creators. They don't seem to be confident that they could launch or even be creative. At this time, understandably so. It fucking sucks to try to force creativity out of despair. - Dannel
One day, Kickstarter’s VP of Insights posts a slack stating that Kickstarter saw fewer campaign launches than expected for the month of March, positioning this two week stretch of fewer projects launched on Kickstarter as cause for more concern. This caught the attention of quite a few workers because, even though the number of projects from smaller creators had dropped, workers knew that wasn’t the only driver of platform health.
If you, if you know the business of Kickstarter. You know that project launches being down is a bad signal yes but you know that is not the entirety of the signal. Kickstarter is seasonal like many businesses, um, and sometimes the product launches down. We had, and continue to have so many large games projects that are sustaining the business and our revenue stayed pretty even. - Dannel
Over the company’s 10 year lifespan, Kickstarter has seen moments where external factors affect activity on the platform. In the months surrounding the 2016 presidential election, raising funding became significantly harder for creators and there was a noticeable dip in engagement. And, Kickstarter sees more projects launch in certain months of the year, sometimes there is a surprisingly large project that raises more funding than expected, sometimes projects the team expected to raise a lot of funding… don’t - and the business is somewhat structured to accommodate these fluctuations. Regardless, management continued to focus on the number of projects launched as the core metric driving concern. On April 7th, workers get an email from senior leadership again connecting management’s financial concerns to the downturn in projects launched, a consequence of COVID 19. A week later, on Tuesday April 14th, staff gets a similar email highlighting financial concerns from management.
The next day, on Wednesday April 15th, staff gathers at a company wide AllHands on Zoom. This meeting is a concert of prepared statements from leadership about the health of the company. It’s a live performance of what had been shared in emails over the last two weeks - that Kickstarter was impacted by the pandemic, the future was uncertain, and management was considering action to right the ship. When management opens the floor to questions from staff, a worker bluntly asks if there will be layoffs. In response, Kickstarter’s CEO, Aziz tells staff:
All options were on the table, including furloughs, layoffs and many other things. - Oriana
Even though layoffs were mentioned, that’s not where the emphasis was in this meeting. Aziz and senior leadership stressed that they would be pursuing cost cutting measures. And as staff logged off of this Zoom call, the impression was that there would be strategic budget cuts that might escalate to furloughs and layoffs if the number of launched projects continued to drop.
I just assumed that there were a lot of things that would need to be tried before we got to anything like layoffs. - Oriana
As soon as this AllHands ended, union members called up OPEIU.
They were like, we need to start talking to them right away. None of this can happen without negotiating with the Union, so we need to get in the room and start these conversations immediately. - Oriana
The next day on Thursday April 16th, Kickstarter United sends an email to Kickstarter’s Senior Leadership team requesting additional information about the state of the company and to schedule a meeting.
We had the security of a union, even if we didn’t have our agreement at that point, we had the protection of the fact that we had to be brought to the table. We had to be talked to, and we could participate in the negotiation for what was going to happen. - Kilian
After the union sent this request, there was silence from management for the rest of Thursday, and then through Friday. While the union waited over the weekend for management to respond... activity on Kickstarter began to tick up. The community was finding new ways to bring creative projects to life.
People would find ways to Release albums from their bedroom that they would find ways to make theatre happen digitally, but they would find ways to finish films, you know, like, and I knew all of these things would happen and It's so strange that the only metric that they started pointing to more and more was these project launches being down. - Dannel
From mid April activity on Kickstarter had recovered from the downturn just weeks earlier at the start of the lockdown, creating a stark V shape on graphs charting the health of the company. And as management talked about cost cutting measures and potential layoffs, the number of projects launching on Kickstarter and the amount of money flowing into the platform continued to rise.
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That Monday, April 20th, just five days after the all hands where management stated they would be looking into cost cutting measures, Aziz, Kickstarter’s CEO, sent an email to staff announcing that, in addition to taking other action, management planned to start laying people off immediately. Minutes later, an article is published in the Verge with the internal layoff announcement printed in full and a carefully crafted narrative that continued to position these layoffs as an unfortunate response to the economic effects of COVID19.
Ya, that Verge story was how a lot of people found out that layoffs were coming. - John
The piece, written by one of the company’s close press contacts, didn’t include any quotes from workers, only senior management. The fully printed internal memo included in the article emphasized how new projects launching on the site had dropped by 35% in the weeks following lockdown. It mentioned senior leadership taking pay cuts, that management instituted a hiring cap, and that the company had been rolling out cost cutting measures.
The cost cutting measures thing really came like a week before the layoffs and before that, you know, there'd been very vague, things like, oh, maybe we'll have a fight hiring freeze and then they were like, well, we're gonna have a hiring cap which at like seven people which like you know given the size of the organization. It's like you really thought you were going to hire seven people in the next month. Anyway, like, I don't. This is not a this is nothing, you know. - Amy
This article spreads across the company’s slack channels and DMs. Shortly after the article had dropped, workers joined a company wide meeting for senior leadership to address this news. By the end of this meeting, staff still had very few answers. They know there will be layoffs, but have no idea how severe these cuts will be or how management planned to support workers from this point forward.
Other companies were doing temporary paid furlows. And salary decreases. And there were other strategies for like how to temporarily like lower Business operating expenses. So it's like okay maybe look for that. You know, and so I kind of had my hopes up a little bit there. Like there's other people doing non layoffs things. So maybe our management will do the same. And even if there were layoffs. I was like okay this is maybe just going to be like a very small, isolated like I know very, very, very few people. - Corey
A few hours later, management holds a meeting with representatives from OPEIU and the small band of union members who’d been elected to represent staff in pandemic related changes to working conditions, the Covid Bargaining Committee. At this point, this group was the only representative body the union had. And on this call, management drops that they are planning to lay off 40% of the company.
IT WAS LIKE, JAW DROPPING, to say the least. - Corey
Holy shit you want to do what? You want to layoff 40% of the company? Get out of town - I was like in shock I could not believe it. - AnonT
Immediately, immediately, all of the all of us on the cover 19 committee go that's so many people without health care... that’s so many people without health care in a pandemic. - Dannel
A layoff of this magnitude was not something workers expected. So they ask management.. why?
I’m not sure if this is ok to ask you but also, what you’re proposing is absurd. - AnonT
This was a position none of these workers had ever been in before.
I would speak and my hands would shake. - AnonT
Workers ask a few more questions and start to feel out what this layoff negotiation process will look like going forward.
We would say, but wait, is this because of the pandemic because it seems like you have a very plan on who and what to get ride of and it seems like you want to get to a particular headcount and a particular company size that does not feel like it matches a proportional response to the drop in the revenue. - Kilian
Honestly, we were just trying to get to the root of why this was necessary. Because it wasn’t delivered that way. It was basically just like as we vaguely hinted in one AllHands maybe things are worse than we said and like we’ve decided this is the only possible avenue. And then layered on top of that, they were also like, this is kinda the direction we wanted to go anyways. So then you’re trying to dig into that and saying do you actually have to do this? Which was, as you can imagine, really not a conversation they wanted to entertain. - AnonT
And the company was like, nope, we're restructuring the company because of the downturn business but we're also planning to restructure the company anyway. And if that was the case. Why did we continue hiring people throughout the beginning of 2020. - Dannel
They said so many contradictory things during this whole layoff negotiation that I don't know what they truly believe anymore. - John
The more the conversations went on, they were leaning more heavily on the idea that like, yeah, this is what we wanted to do anyway, but covid has exposed the fact that we are so fragile. But what was so satisfying and perhaps upsetting about that answer was just I think everyone had watched in the year previous this intentional ramping up of the size of the company by leadership. - AnonT
Why did we hire so many wonderful people. And you're telling me that you were planning on doing this beforehand.... There are people who turn down roles from very big companies, very well funded companies to come work at Kickstarter because they too believed in the mission.... Ugh, frustrating, especially because management has that big picture. And that's kind of the point of senior leadership is to have the big picture and to see them continue to hire so aggressively weeks into the pandemic. I love those. I love I genuinely sincerely love working with all those people. We didn’t have to hurt them like that, you know, like... - Dannel
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On this same day, the union holds an emergency meeting for the bargaining unit to discuss next steps. Attendance is high.
I think 90% of the members of the bargaining unit were at that meeting. And everybody wanted to know what was going on and what we could do, and how we could fix it. - Oriana
In that first meeting I think we had 80 members that are on the zoom call pediatrics, you know, 80 out of 88. And that was incredibly impressive and really exciting. And it also shows you know there was a lot of difficult stuff that we're discussing but like We had an engaged group of people who, no matter how they do is they are going to show up. We had a lot of leverage because we had a group of people who already put up a lot of a fight to get some points. And for those who are not involved in the actual union process. They knew what was at stake. And that’s what we needed. - Grace
It was maybe our first our meaning Kickstarter United's first coming together moment. And post election of like uniting around a cause. We need to all be on the same page about this and come up with, get creative and come up with proposals to encounter them and We actually need to do something on our side to as workers. - Corey
The resistance and anti union sentiment that had colored every session since the No Votes joined union meetings evaporated and participation in the union, starting here in this emergency meeting, skyrockets.
There was so much participation among everybody in the company. It was a really tough time but it was really great to see everybody coming together in a moment. - Corey
People were more open about learning what it is to be in a bargaining committee, what a shop steward is, people signed up for Sandy’s trainings, they were like, ok, working groups, let’s go. - Camilla
Things went from theory to praxis and that’s when everyone was down to get their hands dirty, and they did. - John
Even the most visible leader of the No Committee put time and effort into winning a strong severance package alongside the collective.
She was one of our strongest organizers... that's kind of lost to history and I don't want it to be. Because that's someone who was very against this thing. - Dannel
With a wave of energy and renewed solidarity, the union kicks off polling to elect the Collective Bargaining Committee, the CBC, to represent workers in negotiations with management. This core union milestone had been put on hold in the early days of the pandemic so staff could focus on pandemic related issues through the temporary Covid Bargaining Committee. But now, workers were knee deep in negotiations about layoffs, something a union would traditionally place in the hands of an elected Collective Bargaining Committee.
We knew that the COVID interim bargaining committee needed to be replaced by like an actual elected bargaining committee. - Oriana
Negotiation was already happening, it was just happening with a group of people who weren’t elected to be there specifically for that purpose. And also had not signed on to be part of that thing. - Kilian
Having a Collective Bargaining Committee in place to negotiate the layoffs with management will allow these union representatives to learn the process of coming to an agreement with management and ensure continuity after the layoffs as this same group refocuses to negotiating favorable terms in a strong contract.
It was hard make sure everyone felt represented but we tried our best. - Kilian
After this union meeting, the Collective Bargaining Committee is elected and gets straight to work. This group of workers is usually focused on negotiating a contract with management, but given the pressing need to negotiate with leadership over specific terms on the planned layoffs, they set the work of bargaining a contract aside.
Yeah, then we negotiated for weeks, we asked hard questions of management. We asked them everything short of what is the cap table for Kickstarter. - Dannel
I would sometimes be on calls with management until 10pm 11pm. - Toy
Almost everything that the Collective Bargaining Committee learns in these calls with management is noted in real time in a Google Doc that is open to the entire bargaining unit. Everything was captured here, except what management explicitly stated as off the record specifics that could be considered sensitive information pointing to individual employees. Then a more coherent summary would be posted for the entire bargaining unit to read following each meeting. The union was striving for as much transparency as possible.
During the meetings. We were actually taking live notes. And people were following along, but there were certain times where we would say this is off the record and we'd stopped taking notes and people were like going wild on the slack because they're like oh my God what's happening in this moment of silence right now. - Toy
These meetings with management were meant to gather information and to deliver information. The CBC was not making any major decisions without going back to the larger collective first. As negotiations over severance started to take shape, the union created a survey to get a better understanding of the needs of the group. At the same time, OPEIU starts training members of the CBC as well as other members of the union to strengthen the collective’s understanding of how these negotiations work and what’s possible. Grace from OPEIU remembers the extremely tight timeline:
There was a lot of really quick back and forth on having to respond to certain emails that came out from the employer about their own intentions. We have to get people on the phone. It was also pretty early on in COVID it was pretty early on to work from home. I think we were all transitioning to this new style of life and I just remember everything happening so quickly. - Grace
These trainings were led by Sandy, the union’s seasoned negotiator from OPEIU who started to get more involved after the union vote and who would eventually help the union bargain a contract with Kickstarter.
Sandy’s great. I want that on the record a million times. Goodness gracious. The strength and compassion and intelligence with which she treats every single person is is like inspiring is like...wow, yeah, she is an allstar, goodness gracious. - Tom
And it’s a good thing the union had Sandy to guide them through this process because not only was this a new experience that came with a learning curve but it seemed like, in addition to layoffs, management was aiming for an austere severance package. The starting point that management suggested was one to two weeks of severance for every year of tenure. Which, at a tech company that has high turnover paired with aggressive hiring over the past year, where 50% of the entire company had been hired less than two years prior, this meant that many employees would be getting two to four weeks of severance total, in a pandemic.
Man, I just feel like all my fears were justified when management was like we’re laying off everybody and you get two weeks of severance. What a garbage pile. - Trin
All I could think of was thank fucking christ we had a union before, we got in under the wire. Because we would have been so fucked if we didn’t have the union to negotiate this stuff. - Kilian
Starting the night of the emergency union meeting, working groups began to gather information from union members to inform negotiations between management and the CBC.
We worked out an initial survey querying all of our bargaining unit members to see, would you accept as a severance package six months of pay, five months of pay, four months of pay, six months of health insurance, five months, four months. Would you be willing to go down to part time employment with reduction in salary, would you be willing to be furloughed for how long do you have extenuating personal circumstances that make this you know particularly difficult for you, for example, dependents under your care people who are sick close to you, immigration issues. Various things like that so that we could get a full picture of where everybody was at what they wanted, so that we can accurately represent their interests in all ongoing negotiations and we also I don't know if this should go in, but I'll just say it so we Can think about it. - Oriana
These working groups also started to formulate proposals to management that could halt the layoffs altogether. Many of these proposals were overwhelmingly supported by a majority of the bargaining unit.
We also put together a petition begging management to apply for a PPP loan which was through the new CARES act that the government passed which we thought would help them get enough money to tide us over and to save some jobs. - Oriana
The union asked workers what they were willing to give up to prevent layoffs. And the responses to these surveys motivated organizers to fight even harder against the layoffs proposed by management.
To continue to fulfill the mission of this company. People are willing to take up to a 40% pay cut. - Dannel
But every proposal, from salary cuts to furloughs, was rejected by management with little explanation. There was a kind of... unwillingness.
An unwillingness to furlough people. An unwillingness to wait it out and say, ok, what can we do to cut costs for a little while to see if things pick back up… The motivation to reduce the company’s size was this very specific task. They were not interested in reducing the expenditure of the company. They were not interested in getting rid of higher paid people in favor of keeping on lower paid people. We tried our best to say, you know, is it salary based, is it is there a figure you’re trying to get to. And the figure they were trying to get to was a headcount figure not a money figure. - Kilian
It was hard some days to feel like you weren't making a difference. And there were nights where we didn't get any sleep because we were thinking about 40% of our co workers, possibly including ourselves who would be out in a pandemic without any support system without any health insurance. - Dannel
Members of the Collective Bargaining Committee were getting more and more frustrated by this brick wall.
I understand that you want to preserve the business. I too want to preserve the business if this had been going on as long as you did. Why didn't you take action, earlier you know why. Why wait for the convenient excuse of X excellently time for you pandemic to come around. For us to then say, oh, you know what let's throw 40% of the staff out on the street. - Dannel
Any path that had the potential to avoid or delay layoffs was brushed aside.
Which was unfortunate because I feel like a lot of their narratives have been like we we got your back. Yeah, like where your friends, but When Something bad happens you're gone. - Corey
Just a few days into negotiations with management, after it was clear there was no way to counter leadership’s decision to lay off 40% of the company, the Collective Bargaining Committee joined another call with management. And this call was particularly hard.
There was a day where they gave us explicit information about the number of roles that they were keeping very specifically in certain and and what they were qualifying those roles like the qualifications of those roles that they were looking for which pretty much gave us an indication of who was being laid off. So it was really hard to see a list of essentially names of your coworkers that you knew would not have a job. - Toy
Adding insult to injury, when workers looked over the list of roles that management wanted to cut, 75% of these roles were from the bargaining unit and seemed to target vocally pro union workers.
After we saw basically how they were negotiating, who they were targeting, there was just no doubt in my mind. They were clearly targeting pro union people. - AnonG
One organizer who was on the chopping block had been vocally supportive of the union drive and actually facilitated the very first union meeting after the NLRB election.
There were a handful of people on that list that the union thought just like didn’t make a lot of sense. And one of those people was me. Which was really surprising because we had a handful of folks that were new on the design staff that started, um, either very close to, or during the pandemic, um, that like didn't have any performance reviews or, or things like that. I kind of was like, you know what, I'm, I'm not going to take a voluntary severance right now because I don't, I don't think that I'm someone that could possibly get laid off, especially considering like my, my performance and my, and my seniority. I just wasn't in a situation where I wanted to have to look for another job in a pandemic. I also had just recovered from COVID-19 and like, I still wasn't at a hundred percent. So the union actually went to bat for a handful of people, myself included. People in the bargaining committee were writing this document about all the reasons why Kickstarter shouldn't lay me off. And like I found out that mine was one of the longest documents. - AnonC
It’s a common anti union practice to lay off a percentage of the bargaining unit after a union is formed inorder to undermine the union by cutting down workers collective power.
I don’t know, it felt like a punch to the union because it was a punch to us. To lop off that many people who are actively working on Union is just, it's it's it's it can't not hurt the Union. - Tom
When the collective is smaller, it’s less of a threat especially when you cut out strong supporters who’ve demonstrated effective organizing throughout the drive and could continue to strengthen worker power throughout the process of contract negotiation.
You want to believe that someone would have put their foot down about it, you know that someone in leadership would have done something about it before it got so bad. But at the same time, the person inside of me who wears the tin foil hat wonders if the company didn't steer itself in this weird growth mentality, such that, if a union passed, they could then claim that they had grown too large… - Dannel
If we want to talk about real tin hat. Not even tin hat like objectively With all the layoffs going on. It's a, it's it's it's a it's a beautifully sinister time in the world to be doing layoffs, because it's so easy to say Oh, it's because of this global pandemic look outside and and to to mask mask huge structural changes that have been made under the guise of this thing, this common pain that we all feel. - Tom
I do believe that the people in charge. Want to make sure that they can save the company and carry it into the future with their stewardship. In my case specifically my jobs expandability was clear long before and completely separate from whether or not I was, and had been active in the Union, I don't know that that is something that could be said for at least some of the other jobs that got cut. - Oriana
No question that they did this to delegitimize the Union by stripping it of its supporters. Um, I have like no doubt in my mind. They used the pandemic as an excuse to let people go. The folks that they let go. They laid these folks off. Because of their involvement in union activity rather than at in in and kept folks who had been there. Little less amount of time had maybe let less experience. And there was really no reason for them to be let go, other than the fact that they were active in the Union. And that was hard, and there were moments where we tried to fight for those folks. Because we're like, this is wrong. - Toy
I kinda feel like it doesn’t matter whether they were targeting union people and they were trying to weaken us as a unit. They were doing something that felt completely amoral... period. They had a plan to reduce the company size that was advantageously enacted during a pandemic. And I think that by itself is just abhorrent, it’s not ok. - Kilian
At 2:43 pm on Friday May 1st, 11 days after the possibility of layoffs was first raised by management at an AllHands, the union sent out an email asking the bargaining unit to vote on whether or not to accept the terms of the most recent severance agreement negotiated with management. At the start of this process, management kicked off negotiations with the suggestion of just 2 weeks severance for every year of tenure. After intense back and forth, a lot had changed. As workers look over the new agreement they see 4 months of severance, 6 months of health insurance coverage, 4 months of coverage for workers making over 110k. They see that there is no Non Compete clause, no Non Solicitation clause, and they’ll have ensured recall rights so if the company wants to reopen these roles within the next year, they’ll need to offer the spots to laid off workers first. The union member charged with reporting the results of the anonymous poll back to the collective thought there was a glitch in the counting tool because there wasn’t a single objection.
It was probably one of the more beautiful times like of my whole Union experience was seeing like and people were thinking us like that was that was what was really cool is seeing folks who Have been almost anti union Union, in some cases, just come out publicly on the slack to be like this is so Incredible. And I know that I may have not been an active participant or even an active like antagonist of this movement. But I cannot tell you how much I thank you for all the work that you did and all of the conversations that you had and everything that you've put into this because Where would we be without a union right now. - Toy
It was very bittersweet. It was so much better than it would have been without a union. It was so empowering to be able to fight as hard as we did, but ultimately it was a really sad moment. - Oriana
During the union drive people vocally against the union and people on the fence kept asking: what are the union’s demands? Why do we need a union? Can’t the company just give the union what it wants now and we can all move on without an election? This line of questions became louder when management made a few early concessions based on what union organizers were saying in outreach conversations. This situation is exactly why having a union, and sustained.. organized.. collective.. worker power is better than one-off concessions. Employees who had worked at Kickstarter remembered how management handled layoffs in the past.
We’ve seen what happens. You know, it’s an ominous midday AllHands gets put on your calendar. And everybody goes, oh, I wonder if this is good news or bad news. And the people who’ve been there before go, it’s probably going to be the latter. - Kilian
And this is far from uncommon. Most workers just live with job insecurity and the uncertainty of what will happen if they are ever part of a layoff.
I was a part of two huge layoffs at two well known internet companies. And it was just night and day, seeing that play out at SoundCloud and then seeing that play out at Kickstarter. At SoundCloud we just came to work one day and then we were we were all laid off like 50% of the almost 50% of the company was just laid off at once. And we had no Recourse there was no way to like negotiate for different people or different rate, like we were just given the severance we were given. And that's all we got. And we have no option to negotiate whatsoever. At Kickstarter they couldn't make because we had a union. They couldn't make any changes to our employment agreement without going through a negotiation in good faith with the Union. - Patrick
So the fact that we got forewarning really like weeks of forewarning was a godsend by itself, nevermind the severance package that we managed to negotiate. - Kilian
Ya, who could have predicted that like the Conditions for would have been one of the most important thing on our radar at the time, and yet proven to be something very Very impressive with the Indian one. - Alex
Even though the union won significant severance for departing staff, the damage of losing 40% of Kickstarter’s workers, to the operation and health of the company, was undeniable.
We lost people who are the reason people work at Kickstarter like engineering wise and that's, that's a blow that they're gonna feel for the next year's. - Dannel
As staff said goodbye and wrapped up their last couple weeks at Kickstarter in early May, the effect of the pandemic on Kickstarter’s bottom line had completely subsided. Activity on the site was continuing to climb but Kickstarter’s staff was now 40% smaller. And the pain of being understaffed fell on workers.
I think there was a general acknowledgement that like, oh, you cut way too deep. Like you had no idea what you were doing, like we didn’t cut scope like you said. And like, the workload that people have now means that like the ability for people to be involved in the union side of things feels greatly reduced. There’s just not as much engagement and honestly, if you ask them it’s like well they don’t have time to do it. And it’s like, ok, that’s probably intentional. And the cruelest joke of all is like we’ve had bonanza pledge numbers. It’s like, oh, we weren’t really in danger at all. We’ve had better pledge volume than we’ve had in years. - AnonT
Day after day, as people were leaving, the graphs used weeks earlier to justify layoffs continued to tick upward and before the layoffs were complete, Kickstarter was seeing record high revenue.
Kickstarter is performing and doing better than it ever has. And that those best days and best months came on the tail of the work that the folks who have since been let go. - Toy
In parallel to these hard few months within the walls of Kickstarter, Taylor and I had been trying to get an update on our wrongful termination charges. Even with OPEIU’s help, we were getting nowhere. All communication from the National Labor Relations Board had stopped.
They have not reached out to me to ask or say anything else. - Taylor
Months earlier, just a week or two before the election back in January 2020, Seth, our legal rep from OPEIU got a notification that our wrongful termination cases were sent to Washington DC. Seth warned us that our cases were being taken out of the hands of our local Brooklyn NLRB officers and put on the desk of the highest ranking official in the US labor system, the NLRB’s Trump appointed General Counsel, Peter Robb. Robb was a notoriously pro management head of the NLRB who made notable anti worker changes to the institution’s laws and norms, reshaping the NLRB to advantage businesses. His tenure as General Counsel of the NLRB was a scandal in the labor community and he was at the height of his power and influence. It wasn’t good that our cases were now on this man’s desk.
🎶
After a bit of digging we soon discovered that Robb was pulling every case that got press, regardless of whether or not there was a novel issue that warranted taking a case away from the local office for additional review. Seth tells me on a call that now:
If an organizer or a union speaks to the press regarding the case, these cases automatically do to DC and automatically go to the General Council. This was a real shot at the first amendment which is not a surprise since the last four years have been an assault on the first amendment. Someone could say this happens all the time but no it doesn’t happen all the time. And there’s usually communication on why this occurs and not just that it’s going to Washington. General Counsel is trying to make end runs around the regions to make the regions irrelevant to centralize the decision making. There just so many holes it’s like swiss cheese. - Seth
To make matters worse, shortly after our cases were sent to DC, the NLRB officer who had taken down our affidavits and who was our one human connection to the agency… vanished. This is when it became virtually impossible for Taylor and I to get a hold of anyone at the NLRB or get any understanding of the status of our cases.
The NLRB never called me, never emailed me, never sent me a letter, nothing. All this information I’m hearing second hand through Seth Goldstein, who is not technically even our lawyer just someone helping us with the process. And I think that’s bullshit. I think if you’re gonna do what the NLRB did to us, you can at least have the decency to tell me face to face or over the phone - Taylor
After months of trying to get ahold of someone within the NLRB, someone in DC picks up a call from Seth, our legal rep from OPEIU, and tells him that our cases were just sent over - months after the Brooklyn office had said they had gone to DC. And when we asked what the new timeline was for our cases in DC, there was no answer.
They are a black whole that answers to no one except the president. - Taylor
The entire experience was a mess and we were losing confidence in the process.
The only hope I think we could have is if our cases remain unresolved until 2021 and Joe Biden appoints a more progressive appoints a more progressive board and GC to the NLRB and they can make a ruling on our case. - Taylor
So, we cross our fingers, and wait.
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In late July, while union members at Kickstarter were recovering from the massive layoff and 40% of workers were looking for new jobs in a pandemic… I get a call from Seth. After almost a year of waiting, he had news from the NLRB about our cases. At this point, I had started working on this Oral History for NYU, so, after I said goodbye to Seth, I recorded my reaction.
So, we heard from the NLRB and they are moving Taylor’s case forward but mine will likely be dismissed. I mean, they said that I could submit more evidence but if the 60 pages I sent them isn’t going to work then I don’t know what else I can give. So, Taylor’s trying to figure out his own plan and what he wants to do. And I’m in this weird limbo where I have a week, really a few days to decide what I want to do. And the folks from OPEIU are doing some research and investigating and seeing what they can do to basically settle with Kickstarter before we know the final outcome of my case. Because it’s really a coin toss right now. You know, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the NLRB and the NLRA and I think the thing that I’m struggling the most with right now is um, is how different the experience is compared to what I thought it was. The idea I had of the NLRB was that is was a workers’ institution. But I don’t think anything in our experience so far for the past year has lived up to that ideal. And, if anything, it really feels like another big amorphous process that we don’t know how to navigate and that asks us to defend ourselves without the collective. Which feels really… it feels really cruel. And, I probably won’t use this, at all, but if I had known how little control I would have had over this process, I don’t think I would have done it, I don’t. It’s funny, I’ve interviewed a lot of people who have cried um, and I always thought like it was really important to show what this process is like, emotionally. And I know that there are better ways to say this and I know that there are other people who’ve made this point already, even though I learned it too late… But um, the legal process to hold companies accountable is so so much weaker than collective action. To assume that a bandaid is going to make everything better, I think is really… um really naive. It’s really important not to rely on this process because you have no control and it is not a collective… there’s no mutual aid at the NLRB, there’s no collective action, there are no strikes, there are no open letters, you are alone. And, it’s really up to chance. And, I I knew the numbers, I knew the statistics, I looked at some of the graphs and charts and charts that the NLRB has on their website and I knew that my chances were slim and I knew that the deck was stacked against me but, yeah, I still had faith in this process. - Clarissa
After trying to get the NLRB to talk with us for months, while we were negotiating with Kickstarter over a possible settlement, the NLRB finally agreed to talk with me for about ten minutes on a call that Seth patched me into. On this call the local NLRB office in Brooklyn was very apologetic, they said they’d tried, and stressed that there was nothing they could do. We get off the call with the NLRB and Seth and I spend time going through what could have happened, but both of us know, we’ll never fully understand why this decision was made. Why an organizer who had exceeded every performance metric, had been at the company for almost four years, and who shared a manager with Taylor, whose case was moving forward - why was all of the evidence not enough to prove union related retaliation for the NLRB? The only thing we knew was that Taylor’s case had three major differences when compared to mine. First, he had a screenshot of our manager lying to the team about the results of his performance improvement plan. Second, he had been given a performance improvement plan which, after he passed, management refused to give me over and over. And third, the NLRB had identified another unlawful labor practice when his manager specifically instructed him not to use his performance plan in union outreach.
I don’t think anything here is justice. It’s difficult, and the only way, oftentimes that you can substantiate it is if they’ve, in the process of disciplining you have committed other unfair labor practices. I also do not believe that the NLRB did their job in evaluating these cases. I do not believe that the employer should just be given a free pass. - Seth
After all this time, and almost no transparency, it looked like we would never really know what happened or why. Seth told me that, to him, it looked like the NLRB quote “split the baby,” giving a win to labor and a win to business. Which falls in line with the historic raison d'être of the institution as a banal peacekeeper aiming to facilitate uninterrupted commerce.
So I always learned in law school that there is no right unless you have a remedy. And I’m wondering under the National Labor Relations Act, where is that remedy? And automatically the conversation isn’t so much about returning people back to work it’s about what type of severance, what type of backpay award they’re gonna get. So in a sense, the company’s won from the beginning right. Because the organizer doesn’t return. - Seth
Even though his case moved forward and Taylor won back pay of 30k after almost a year had gone by since we’d been fired for organizing… this experience shook his faith in the NLRB.
Even when I found out the major milestones, like, Hey, the NLRB has decided to pursue your case or, Hey, you know, Kickstarter has agreed to settle or, Hey, here's your check from the settlement. It always I'll be honest. Like, I guess I should say, like, it felt like an incredible victory for labor everywhere, but it didn't, it just felt like another bureaucratic step in this process in which I had no voice or control. And that's not anyone's fault except all of our fault, you know? I mean, that's, I think that, that says more about like, I am desperately trying to work every day to be able to afford rent and food. Right. And that's the forefront of my mind. And the further we got away from the unionizing drive, the less, I kind of cared about all that stuff. I mean, now, because I don't have the same beliefs or principles I do, but just like the basic day-to-day constant treadmill of trying to keep a float in a world where I'm probably never going to be able to get a quote unquote, real job again, right. Because of my history. I mean, who in the, what, what manager would hire someone as associated with, you know, fighting management and organizing unions as I, as I have. And so I've got to make it on my own and like everybody else, I'm trying to do that during a, uh, a depression and a global pandemic. And it's just like, honestly, even when I was getting good news, sometimes I would've just rather not been bothered with it. And I know that that's not like a sexy story. I know it's not fun to hear. It's not fun to say, but it's the truth because you know, we, we live in this system that forces you to only be able to focus on paying for whatever food medicine or house you need tomorrow. And even these victories are sort of taken away from us because we're kept on this treadmill. And you know, like the negotiation process, the NLRB process, that entire process is designed to stop any big victories and to stop meaningful change. The NLRB is a weak compromise made between centrists and pro capital conservatives. Yes, there is nothing progressive or save your like or heroic about the NLRB. Yes, they exist too. In the same way, the NLRB is like recycling. It exists so that you can feel like there is something meaningful you can do so that you do not attempt the actual, meaningful things you ought to be doing. The NLRB is not a solution. It is a Mirage of labor justice. Real labor justice comes from constant political activity and striking period. Stop the NLRB. Won't save you the NLRB. If anything, at all, all the NLRB is a speed bump on the road of capital. That's it? That is it. It is not, it is not going to save you. What's going to save you is getting lots of people to feel solidarity with each other and strike for their rights to be enshrined in the law laws. That ought to be way better and stronger period. So my story, if anything is a cautionary tale of like, there's never going to be like this big win moment. There's never going to be. Although I will say this hearing the results of the union vote, that was the big moment. That's the victory moment. The settlement, the court case, it's paperwork. I'm filling out like a severed head, finishing a sentence. The union votes, the victory. That's the win. - Taylor
I asked Taylor, as confused and lost in this process as both of us were, what could we possibly tell other people that can help organizers keep their jobs during an organizing drive?
I have an answer that people are not going to like. And the answer is that you might get fired. Even if you are excellent at your job, they can still fire you, right? They don't have to tell you why. I mean, you know, you just need to know that anything worth doing really is going to be hard and that everything good in your life exists. Every institution that still works a little bit, right? Every system that you depend on for comfort and safety and hope and potential, all those things exist because someone in the past made a sacrifice and they gave up something to leave the world better than they found it, whether it was their time or their family or all the other futures they could have lived in, they chose to give those up and instead make this one future that would make the world better for you. And I think that asking how do I protect myself is a low level question compared to what can I do to protect others, frankly, no, I have absolutely no faith in, you know, RB whatsoever. But if anyone listening to this, you should still file a complaint. Don't discount the institution to the point where, because here's the thing, they don't block everything, right? That it's not a brick wall. It's just a filter. That's hard to get through. So you should still file a complaint. You should still go through them process, but just know that chances are, you will not get justice with the NLRB. It's just not an institution that's deserving of trust, you know, but that's the thing it's like, if there was a way to protect you from getting fired, we wouldn't need a union. That's what a union is. A union is a way for employees to come together and protect each other from dumb. Like you have to, that system is possible and can exist, but you got to sweat to build it. - Taylor
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Contract Negotiation
From the beginning of the union drive, workers had been musing about what could go in a contract but now it was time to start solidifying what the bargaining unit wanted to pursue. OPEIU started sharing ideas for what a Collective Bargaining Agreement, a CBA, could look like more concretely.
A standard list of things as a basis. - Kilian
A working group comes together and creates a survey to gage what workers are most interested in so they know what to fight for when they’re across the table from management.
Obviously, we keep that close to our chest because we don’t want management to know that we’re willing to give on certain areas and unwilling to give on others. - Kilian
In contrast to the whirlwind speed of the layoff negotiation, once the Collective Bargaining Committee and advisors from OPEIU began to sit down with management to negotiate a contract, everything started to crawl.
A lot of the negotiation stuff was taking a very long time. And the back and forth, we felt like, it was just very hard. You know I heard Dannel mention how, in the early days of the neutrality agreement that they would be getting entire new documents sent back to them. We had made it clear early on that we wanted them to red line stuff. So you’re at least working back and forth on the same document. But pretty much immediately, we submitted our stuff and the next thing we would get back was a brand new document that had little to no common language between the two things. You couldn’t even dif them to get yourself around what was the same and what was different. They were just completely different documents. Even if a lawyer could read through them and say, they are essentially saying the same thing, it it was not in our words. The sentiment from Kate at OPEIU and Sandy too was like, they both said, this is the people’s document. This is meant to be your voice, this is meant to represent you. When you read it, you should feel that you are in this and that you can understand the wording in this. - Kilian
This was the first time that either of these groups, workers or management, were negotiating a collective bargaining agreement.
I just didn’t feel like we were negotiating with Kickstarter, I felt like we were negotiating with a lawyer and there was a couple of Kickstarter SOT people present to occasionally field questions. - Kilian
As these negotiations developed and the union started to negotiate specific working conditions with management, the union aimed to define working conditions and benefits that raise everyone up, building more equity in the workplace. And the way management responds to negotiation over specific aspects of Kickstarter’s working conditions becomes an education in how management views core aspects of employment, like putting a worker on a performance improvement plan.
Oh one that was like, that was very like revealing. And maybe like, maybe for everybody was, we talked about, um, pips I on good faith assumed that the point of a PIP is to, to help an employee improve so that you don't have to let them go. Right. And then in the course, and we wrote our language sort of like with that in mind, it's like, okay, like you have to provide the sort of like plan for them and like check in at this sort of time. And like, if they meet their PIP, like, it shouldn't be treated as though, like they're sort of forever on probation. And like at a certain point, maybe this is removed from their records and all this. And then the reaction to that was like very surprising that it was very much like, Oh, so you want this to sort of be like in improvement plan. And I was like, yeah. And like, and it just became very clear that like, maybe with the way it's typically used as like, this is us sort of like crossing our T's and dotting our I's like on your way out the door, just to like, show that we tried, you know what I mean? And this is like, yeah, it's like, it was just sort of shocking and like, not, it was just like what, like it says right in the name, what it is. It’s a performance Improvement Plan. - Anon T
The final episode of this oral history was released on April 27th 2021, and the workers of Kickstarter United have spent over a year at the bargaining table with management. It’s unclear if the length of this negotiation is an attempt to undermine the union effort.
To be honest, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck. Union busting regardless of its intent. If the effect that it has is that it shakes people confidence in something that is going to benefit them, going to make their employment safer, going to make their lives better at the company in terms of protections of their rights, protections of their benefits, protections of their jobs at large. Even if it was unintentional, it still has the same effect. - Kilian
All we can look at is how management’s actions are affecting the bargaining unit’s ability to continue to fight for real change. How is management steering the company after layoffs and how are operational tactics impacting the size and power of the union.
They cut the team so deeply, they’ve been hiring contractors in. - AnonT
Contractors, under US labor law, are not eligible to join the bargaining unit.
🎶(tense drummed)
Sometimes weekly, sometimes a couple times a week, still working remotely under the pandemic, Kickstarter United’s collective bargaining committee continues to meet with the company’s representatives and negotiate for a union contract in good faith. Almost all of these sessions have been after a full day of remote work for a crowdfunding platform that continues to do well. In this time, Glitch, a small creative tech startup out of Brooklyn has unionized and won a union contract, tech workers at Google and the New York Times have taken their union drives public, and collective action across tech is on the rise. While it will no longer be the first union contract for a major internet company, Kickstarter United’s Collective Bargaining Agreement will be a landmark contract for the workers that make Kickstarter run and every contract won by workers has ripple effects across labor.
The organizers who spoke about their experiences negotiating with management left the company before contributing insights about this process to this oral history. Workers who are currently in the thick of negotiation with management have agreed with Kickstarter that they will not share comments about this process publicly. And management has agreed to do the same. So, organizers who’ve left the company and workers across tech, wait to see what this contract will contain. Will it ensure workers have due process? Will it codify diversity and inclusion measures? Will it enforce equal work for equal pay? Only time will tell. But already, workers have felt the effects of having a union. Starting with winning severance to today, as management is required to run any changes to working conditions by the group first for negotiation.
And most of the time, it’s like, ok fine. But the fact that they have to ask us is very empowering. - AnonT
Strength & Gratitude
Even though the union is still bargaining a contract, what is certain is the value every organizer took away from this experience and from doing this work, sometimes for the first time.
This experience changed my life. Every element of this work has opened my eyes and changed my life for the better. I feel unbelievably lucky that I was able to participate in all of this that I was able to see up close firsthand what solidarity looks like what distributed power feels like what collaboration in its best iteration can look like. It was... Yeah, it was the most powerful and inspiring, year and a half of my life so far. - Oriana
We’re forever changed.
If I think back to myself that Trav approached and was like hey, this union is happening and just like my viewpoint then, I just I don’t even feel like the same person. - AnonT
We turned our friendships and shared experiences into power.
I think that the people at Kickstarter you included Clarissa, are some of the smartest brightest kindest creative people I've ever met, much less work with. And it was such an honor and I have no doubt that we're all going to go on and continue to do great things. With this experience in our back pocket, like the world is going to change because of organizers like us. - Sarah
We learned so much about how tech and labor converge in practice, and how we can come together to help hold this industry accountable.
It’s become increasingly clear in the past decade that especially big tech is incredibly powerful and there’s very low accountability. Things that actually matter to the world. Things like being irresponsible with your environmental policies. Things that really really can change the world. We care so much and then we see injustice happen and you want to do something because you care. You’re like, this is not ok. I can see people who work for these companies feeling powerless but I think they need to know that there is a way. You can have accountability, you can work hard to have systems that will give you a voice that will allow you to make a difference in policy. Internal and external. And I think we need this, tech needs this, we need us workers to make sure our leadership is accountable for their actions. - AnonG
This process redefined how we saw ourselves as workers.
If given the if it ever given the opportunity again in my life to be part of an organizing that for or something of a similar nature. I think I would go into it with a different understanding of what my role is, you know what, how I can help and and what that means to help you know I think, you know, for me, and I think other engineers to a certain degree. There's a degree to which, like you Know I put this without making me see like an asshole. There's a degree to which people go into engineering be as they They prefer not to work with people or to like engage in emotional labor. And I think if there's one thing that I learned from going through the process of unionizing and working Kickstarter alongside you know the very special, unique people there. That that is like that have been on anything is like the reason why the fuck up, you know it's it's that delusion, you can like make something good in the world without like engaging with it, you know, without listening to other people and other perspectives and incorporating them. - Brian
Many workers left this experience with a deeper resolve to stay politically active and help drive the change we want to see from the bottom up.
Listen to the people. Go to where the people are. Listen to the voices on the ground. Listen to the people who are most impacted. And ask them how you can help. Don’t listen to the politicians. We can’t just trust that they’re going to do the right thing. We have to show up and remind them constantly. - Camilla
So many of us came out of this experience with Tom’s kind of energy.
It's so important and like me like now I want every person I want to like shake them and, like, be like, look. Look around you look over this, like, like we got act now. - Tom
We will never forget the joy of building a union.
Something that I got from the Union was an immense amount of joy, that is, that I’m still feeling to this day. I didn’t know most of you. Yet I was so new to the situation that like I’ve only known the folks at Kickstarter United, some at most two years. That’s super telling to me, like, the powerful connections that we were able to make by bonding together and supporting each other. And that that brought me joy. It kept me going. I was so fucking tired but I was excited to go to work and to see the people I was organizing with. I was excited about the potential that it had for both Kickstarter and the labor community in this country. - Toy
After the layoffs, the community of people watching and supporting and cheering on organized workers in tech created a meme to represent this moment for Kickstarter United and the tech industry. It’s a simple image of a woman blowing the seeds from a dandelion.
The woman is Kickstarter. The dandy lion is Kickstarter united organizers and the field is the tech industry and the idea is that we are all landing jobs at some pretty big tech companies across the country so this is only the beginning of what I see as the potential to be a very large labor organizing movement in tech. - Toy
There are so many stories like this one. Workers in our industry are continuing to build on a labor tradition forged by workers across every industry who struggled and fought for us to have the foundation for collective power. This was just one story of collective action in tech, the story of Kickstarter United.
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The Kickstarter Union Oral History is brought to you by the Engelberg Center on Innovation Law and Policy at NYU Law. Special thanks to Micheal Weinberg, Executive Director of NYU’s Engelberg Center, for his boundless support of this project. This entire oral history is released under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 4.0 International License. And the music was composed by Michael Simonelli over at the podcast production company Charts and Leisure. Lastly, this oral history was voiced by dozens of generous, brave, creative, thoughtful current and former organizers from Kickstarter United. I can’t thank them enough. Their voices, ideas, and strength will stay with me for the rest of my life and so will the kind contributions and guidance from everyone who helped shape this oral history of Kickstarter’s union. Solidarity forever.