
BuzzFeed Journalists Vote to Unionize in Wake of Layoffs - koolba
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-12/buzzfeed-journalists-said-to-vote-to-unionize-in-wake-of-layoffs
======
flashman
BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti told employees in 2015 that "when you look at
companies that have unionized, the relationship [between managers and
employees] is much more adversarial."

I suppose the remaining employees have taken the layoffs as a sign that
management IS their adversary.

~~~
ardy42
> I suppose the remaining employees have taken the layoffs as a sign that
> management IS their adversary.

Nah, basic economics says that now that the supply of employees at Buzzfeed
has been reduced, the remaining employees have more leverage to negotiate with
management as rugged individualists. /s

~~~
mc32
I don’t suppose they’ll care to bail the company out with their own finances
if the company were to teeter on bankruptcy for the sake of collectivism...

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skilled
Do people read BuzzFeed because it's something to talk about during breaks at
work? Other than clickbait, does the site provide any kind of meaningful
content? Does BuzzFeed operate on a 'vision' or 'goal-driven journalism' ?! I
never saw the site for more than a junkyard selling bullcrap to make money.

~~~
tricolon
They do some serious journalism: [https://www.pulitzer.org/finalists/staff-
buzzfeed-news](https://www.pulitzer.org/finalists/staff-buzzfeed-news)

~~~
sandov
Makes me wonder if they've had difficulties selling their work as credible to
the general public, considering what the BuzzFeed name entails.

~~~
vermilingua
I absolutely discounted and avoided BuzzFeedNews work for the longest time,
until I accidentally read one of their investigative pieces [1] and was blown
away. I almost even think it vindicates the relentless stream of garbage from
their main site, if it allows them to fund such stellar journalism.

    
    
      [1] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/sheerafrenkel/fake-news-spreads-trump-around-the-world

~~~
malvosenior
The thing is that Buzzfeed cannot be trusted to write about topics like this.
They have an explicit and overt anti-Trump bias and this article is suspect
because of that. Really, any mainstream news organization using the term "fake
news" and suggesting it impacted the 2016 election cannot be trusted.

It was Buzzfeed News that released the unsubstantiated Steele Dossier and more
recently unsubstantiated and refuted claims against Michael Choen.

They are not journalists, they are activists.

~~~
fzeroracer
Calling the Steele Dossier unsubstantiated is just objectively wrong
considering we've seen many claims within it bear fruit over time. There's a
reason why many agencies take it very seriously.

What exactly is your bias here?

~~~
malvosenior
It's not objectively wrong, even the author himself says only 70-90% of it is
accurate and opinions go downhill from there. You can see for yourself:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump%E2%80%93Russia_dossier#V...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump%E2%80%93Russia_dossier#Varied_reactions_about_veracity)

~~~
fzeroracer
Now you're intentionally moving the goalposts. The author says it's only
70-90% accurate because you cannot ever expect an intelligence dossier to not
be potentially contaminated by other agents or sources looking to
intentionally provide false or conflicting information.

That does not render the dossier unsubstantiated as you claimed because you
have to evaluate the merit of each claim and use it as an avenue for further
investigation. Which is exactly what the Wikipedia article you linked says: in
that many claims have proven to be true over time despite some disinformation.

So can you tell me again what exactly makes it unsubstantiated?

~~~
malvosenior
Actually it's you who moved the goal posts. I said it's unsubstantiated,
provided a link with examples and now you want to debate what level of
unfounded rumor a report must contain before we can say it's unsubstantiated
(>30% is enough imo).

~~~
fzeroracer
You provided a link that proves the opposite. The fact is that the Steele
Dossier has mostly credible claims, many of which has gone under investigation
and proven to be truthful. To claim otherwise is to lie and/or deny the
reality of the dossier. You can't talk about bias while also denying the
facts.

~~~
malvosenior
_On January 11, 2017, Newsweek published a list of "13 things that don't add
up" in the dossier, writing that it was a "strange mix of the amateur and the
insightful" and stating that it "contains lots of Kremlin-related gossip that
could indeed be, as the author claims, from deep insiders—or equally gleaned"
from Russian newspapers and blogs.[177] Former UK ambassador to Russia Sir
Tony Brenton stated that certain aspects of the dossier were inconsistent with
British intelligence's understanding of how the Kremlin works, commenting:
"I've seen quite a lot of intelligence on Russia, and there are some things in
[the dossier] which look pretty shaky."_

~~~
fzeroracer
It's funny that you share complaints about Buzzfeed, and yet you decide to
quote me a website that does not run fact checkers and frequently shares
literal fake news as cited in their own Wikipedia article.

It would be fitting that you would focus in on that paragraph on Wikipedia and
not the fact that security professionals clearly took the document seriously
enough to use it as a reasonable basis for investigation.

~~~
malvosenior
Well at this point I don't think we're going to agree on much. I see all of
the literally unsubstantiated claims in the report as cause for suspicion and
you don't. I don't think there's anything that's going to convince you of its
shaky foundations. Do remember that _only_ buzzfeed reported this though. No
other major news source was comfortable with its unsubstantiated nature. Again
from wikipedia:

 _BuzzFeed was harshly criticized by several mainstream media outlets for
releasing the dossier without verifying its allegations.[6][7] Washington Post
columnist Margaret Sullivan called it "scurrilous allegations dressed up as an
intelligence report meant to damage Donald Trump,"[85] while The New York
Times noted that the publication sparked a debate centering on the use of
unsubstantiated information from anonymous sources.[86] BuzzFeed's executive
staff said the materials were newsworthy because they were "in wide
circulation at the highest levels of American government and media" and argued
that this justified public release.[87] The dossier's publication by BuzzFeed
has always been defended by Jack Shafer, Politico's senior media writer, as
well as by Richard Tofel of ProPublica and the Columbia Journalism Review.
Shafer defended the public's right to know about the allegations against
Trump, and saw a parallel in Judge Ungaro's ruling in the defamation suit
filed by Aleksej Gubarev.[8]_

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hlieberman
Something to be applauded, but I fear that this may be too little too late,
especially considering Buzzfeed's heavy dependency on "community content"
(read: unpaid work).

~~~
Barrin92
>Something to be applauded, but I fear that this may be too little too late

Well you could also see it as history repeating itself. We're only at the
start of the new gilded age and now it's service workers and people higher up
the value chain that are seeing the consequences of squeezes in the work
place.

Maybe this time around it'll be IT workers and journalists who discover that
organised labour exists.

~~~
dmix
As far as I can tell the vast majority of unions almost entirely existed in
dead industries that all moved to China (and now that China's wages are rising
as they develop mature markets to other countries behind the times) or have
very close connections to gov work.

~~~
Arn_Thor
Those developments didn't occur in a vacuum. American industry and politicians
have for half a century worked tirelessly to crush American unions or render
them as ineffective as possible.

There are plenty of examples of countries with strong unions, solid
industry/services sectors and workers that aren't being exploited (read:
underpaid, overworked, poor or unsafe working conditions, etc.). Every benefit
you have as an employee that is enshrined in law was fought for by a union!

~~~
CryptoPunk
That is not true. Unions totally dominated major industries in the US. Most of
those that didn't outsource saw themselves become uncompetitive and lose
market share to foreign competitors.

Public services that unionized saw costs go up and quality stagnate or
decrease.

>There are plenty of examples of countries with strong unions, solid
industry/services sectors and workers that aren't being exploited

Like what? Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Germany? Any countries without
strong work ethics and a tradition of engineering excellence? As for the
Northern European zone, how has wage growth been in there these past 40 years?

~~~
Arn_Thor
> Unions totally dominated major industries in the US.

Yes. They DID. And since their heyday they've been sliced and diced at until
there's nearly nothing left today.

>As for the Northern European zone, how has wage growth been in there these
past 40 years?

Not a lot. But that's the case for all of the west, and certainly also for the
US. Meanwhile, quality of life and happiness in those countries has risen. The
US, on the other hand..

~~~
CryptoPunk
That's ahistorical. The reason union membership rates declined is that the
industries they dominated shrank. By and large the unions killed their own
industries. For example, passenger rail service was bankrupted by the
punishing collective bargaining agreements the Brotherhoods coerced passenger
rail lines into.

>>Not a lot. But that's the case for all of the west, and certainly also for
the US.

Yes, and a large part of that is that any investor knows that any large stable
concentration of skilled workers in the West will unionize and began
extracting above market wages.

That's why the only unionized sectors in the West that have seen significant
growth are those paid for by the taxpayer.

------
dfischer
I do not see unionizing as the solution. The entire industry needs to reinvent
itself. It's totally understandable to seek security; but the issue is deeper.
This wouldn't be the economic solution that can sustain itself – it maybe
allows temporary job security.

The platforms that exist today are in danger of capitulating because the
common consumer of our zeitgeist no longer has the behavior to pay for what
they use. Social media has absolutely destroyed what paying for a product
means. The common consumer has become used to not paying online because they
are the product.

These businesses are not sustainable no matter what in the current zeitgeist
of ad money and social media. Besides the option of all journalists working
for Twitter and Facebook which wouldn't be my pick... but that's another
topic.

We need something radically different to offset that imbalance.

~~~
hackerpacker
Well they get upset if you tell them to learn how to code, could even get you
banned from twitter.

I prefer independants these days, folks on bitchute and youtube and etc. The
"organized press" has been gunning for shutting down independants with crap
like six degrees of hitler, like what happened with gab. But ultimately it has
next to zero overhead to start your own "channel", and you find people that
actually do a pretty decent analysis without being obvious political tools or
otherwise completely manipulative all the time.

------
fromthestart
I think this is a perfect anti union example. These "journalists" were
probably laid off because the market was not interested in their highly
politicized outrage "journalism," possibly in addition the recent expiration
of the Countering Disinformation and Propaganda act. A union would only have
kept these people onboard as dead weight.

~~~
jerkstate
If they unionize that means that the company as a whole would reap what they
sow with their editorial direction, instead of being able to just lay off the
employees who carried out the marching orders. Their listicle and quizlet
department can't save them now. I'm for it.

~~~
darawk
> If they unionize that means that the company as a whole would reap what they
> sow with their editorial direction

...And so you mean the company would fold. What would be good about that?

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fucking_tragedy
This is great news. Other industries, including software and IT, would stand
to benefit from unionization, as well.

~~~
CryptoPunk
Look at Detroit in the 1950s (highest median income in the US) and look at it
today (a ghost town), to see the long term effects of unionization on
industry.

The reason the US software industry has been getting stronger and producing
ever greater numbers of high paying jobs is that it enjoys the efficiencies of
a free market in labor, aka it's not dominated by monopolizing unions.

~~~
freeone3000
The impact of the gas crisis, a preference for foreign imports, and the
continued (real or percieved) lower quality of American-made vehicles might
act as several intervening factors for the fall of Detroit; moreover, while
all unions intervene on behalf of their employees, not all enforce wage
ceilings.

The Screen Actors Guild is a counterexample for both points - Hollywood
continues to be world-leading, and top actors continued to be paid well, while
even the actor you've heard the least of has a minimum wage, down to rules
around how many times they can be called-back for an audition.

The free market relies on free association, equal footing, and complete
information for both parties. For most people, the business has a significant
power advantage. Moreover, management is organizing together in order to
depress wages through non-poach agreements - why shouldn't the workers work
together as well?

~~~
CryptoPunk
Hollywood is a counterexample, I'll grant you that, but I'd argue it's only
because the nature of film making - with many short-lived independent
productions - doesn't give unionized work units the monopoly control they
would have in large stable production facilities, like factories, and
moreover, due to being cultural work, is very difficult to outsource.

Numerous industries in both the private and public sector have declined since
being unionized.

Germany seems to have strong unions and a strong auto industry, but the German
economy as a whole has suffered decades of wage stagnation. One outperforming
industry alone doesn't negate the broader correlation between restrictive
labor laws, and degraded economic performance.

>>The free market relies on free association, equal footing, and complete
information for both parties.

A free market merely means anyone is free to offer their products/services,
and everyone is free to take the best offer on the market.

There are plenty of market failures and government-imposed market distortions,
but the idea that locking the market down with one-size-fits-all labor
relation rules is going to mitigate the harm of these distortions is
unbelievable. It's just going to make industry less effective, and in the long
run, less beneficial to its workers.

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mesozoic
Seems like the kind of thing Buzzfeed would be all for

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deleteme12345
Lean management may be the answer

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CryptoPunk
I expect this will affect the political impartiality of Buzzfeed journalists.
They will have a direct financial interest in discrediting the idea of a free
market in the public eye.

~~~
Arn_Thor
By your very own logic the editorial board/owners of news media have a
financial interest in discrediting the idea of collective bargaining and
profit sharing in the public eye, instead promoting free-market ideas at all
costs.

If you claim they don't, then you can't draw that conclusion for unionized
journalists either

~~~
CryptoPunk
Of course, the owners are not going to support restrictive labor relations
laws that are directly aimed at reducing their private property and
contracting rights in order to enable their employees to extract above-market
wages from them.

But it's pretty hard for owners to prevent this kind of outcome. You are
legally restricted from exercising your right to free association and only
employing people who oppose unions, if you ever become an owner.

------
randyrand
Single company unions are very interesting.

There’s often very little reason not to join a single company union. Not
joining means your coworkers will already dislike you, and typically your pay
will be higher anyway. This makes single company unions incredibly easy to
form strong monopolies on their employers labor supply.

Contrast this to monopolies in the greater market, a company typically needs
to dominate the entire industry to form an effective monopoly.

Effectively unions limit a company’s labor supply to a single supplier - the
union - despite there often being hundreds of other near identical
suppliers/unions in the greater marketplace. Imagine if you could only buy
smartphones from Apple, and other people could only buy smartphones from
samsung. That’s effectly what single company unions accomplish. Quite
miraculous.

~~~
aerotwelve
The system you describe as a "single company union" \-- which seems to be a
closed shop contract with a union that operates a hiring hall -- has been
illegal in America since the late 1940s.

Therefore, that is not at all what Buzzfeed's journalists are organizing here.

