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I found these tweets to be very informative: https://twitter.com/okhanSTR/status/1207059687041982464 https://twitter.com/okhanSTR/status/1207059687041982464 He

I found these tweets to be very informative: https://twitter.com/okhanSTR/status/1207059687041982464 https://twitter.com/okhanSTR/status/1207059687041982464 He's a lawyer who moonlights as a writer for SactownRoyalty, a Sacramento Kings fan blog that is basically being shut down by SBNation. One interesting point he makes is that it's unsurprising that the Vox Union hasn't said anything about these hundreds of people losing work in favor of a dozen or so full time workers. It's not in their best interest to let people do part-time as a hobby what they do for their careers full-time.

dmix 7y ago
Unions always benefit the few lucky ones to get the work and the hiring process gets riddled with nepotism and friends/family of current union workers. It was an open secret in the small town I grew up in that you had to know people in the unions to get a job and multi-generational workers from families was the standard. It does give workers plenty of power but the exclusionary nature of it is rarely talked about. I remember reading a history of unions about how they originally started by white working class groups who wanted to prevent new black migrant workers from taking their jobs and working at a lower rate than them. https://www.jstor.org/stable/30030646 https://www.jstor.org/stable/30030646 It's too bad the focus couldn't have been giving freelance workers more rights and protections while still giving them flexibility work-wise. The fact freelance and part time workers are going to get burned by this shift isn't really surprising. People seem to want to force either/all in order to push more unions instead of a more mixed economic approach.
- reaperducer 7y ago
  Unions work for the benefit of union members. Not even remotely surprising, and I'm not even a big union guy.
  - AnthonyMouse 7y ago
    It's not surprising, but the narrative they prefer is that they're working for the benefit of union members against capital, not against hardworking independent contractors who are already making less money than them.
    - larrywright 7y ago
      Not to mention that if a business has the audacity to hire non-union labor, the unions will picket them and make all kinds of accusations about the business. Unions, for all intents and purposes, do not believe in free markets.
      - rchaud 7y ago
        "Free markets" in the Economics 101 sense don't exist anywhere but in the poorest parts of the world. A minimum wage is anti-market. So is paid time off, parental leave, anti-discrimination protections, and a host other rules and regulations that rich countries enshrined into law decades ago.
        AnthonyMouse 7y ago
        > A minimum wage is anti-market. A minimum wage is essentially a subsidy for certain poor people which comes mostly at the expense of different poor people. It's a very silly and inefficient alternative to better policies to help the poor, like a UBI. > So is paid time off This is also basically useless (but not as actively harmful as a minimum wage), because not long after it's passed, the value of the benefit gets priced into wages. If people wanted lower wages in exchange for paid time off then there was nothing preventing them from negotiating it to begin with. > parental leave Almost the same as paid time off, except that it's a cross-subsidy in favor of new parents, so you couldn't negotiate it in exchange for the same wage reduction in a free market, since you get the benefit (and wouldn't negotiate for it unless you intend to use it), but the wage reduction is spread across everybody and not just you. Notice that you could get the same cross-subsidy with less distortion by having the government pay your salary during parental leave rather than the employer, because then the cost wouldn't fall disproportionately on employers of parents. That would also require the government to do a more accurate accounting of the cost of the program rather than passing an unfunded mandate. > anti-discrimination protections This one's the weird one, because in theory it's a useless requirement since discrimination is irrational and money-losing so nobody should want to do it anyway. But that was a different story when you had white people refusing to patronize employers with black employees or then women, so the original reason this got passed was in the nature of antitrust, which is pro-market. It's debatable whether we still actually need it anymore but it probably doesn't do a lot of harm since (unlike e.g. minimum wage) it isn't prohibiting anything anybody has any good reason to do to begin with.
- sundaeofshock 7y ago
  Hold up. How exactly are part-time employees harmed by this? And the question is the answer to what to do about freelancers: make them part-time employees.
- pergadad 7y ago
  Worth stressing that this might be how unions work in the US (if that's really so generalisable). In western Europe unions are definitely not so exclusionary
- gamblor956 7y ago
  This is false. Also, blog writers and journalists don't have a union. If they did, this wouldn't have happened.
  - bpt3 7y ago
    Vox writers are unionized.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
morelisp 7y ago
If as he says "none of us wrote for StR for the money" then a change to how the money is allocated should not affect him in any way, right? If you get paid regularly for small amounts of work that's not a hobby, it's a part-time job. They're not remotely the same thing.
- AnthonyMouse 7y ago
  When someone says they don't do something for the money, what they mean is that some of the value of doing the work is that you enjoy the work. You might be able to get $15/hour doing something you hate, but doing something you love for $5/hour a few hours a week is worth the $10/hour difference. That doesn't inherently mean it's worth a $15/hour difference. And even if it is, that doesn't mean you're happy about losing the $5/hour.
- Kylekramer 7y ago
  I have to imagine that Vox Media is not going to allow people to write for them for free for a number of reasons, and the community the website developed is probably a main reason why they wrote there.
- kelnos 7y ago
  "None of us wrote for StR for the money" is a colloquialism. It doesn't mean that they'd work for free, or for under some threshold where the money they get isn't financially responsible for them given the time they put into it.

dmix 7y ago

Unions always benefit the few lucky ones to get the work and the hiring process gets riddled with nepotism and friends/family of current union workers. It was an open secret in the small town I grew up in that you had to know people in the unions to get a job and multi-generational workers from families was the standard. It does give workers plenty of power but the exclusionary nature of it is rarely talked about. I remember reading a history of unions about how they originally started by white working class groups who wanted to prevent new black migrant workers from taking their jobs and working at a lower rate than them. https://www.jstor.org/stable/30030646 https://www.jstor.org/stable/30030646 It's too bad the focus couldn't have been giving freelance workers more rights and protections while still giving them flexibility work-wise. The fact freelance and part time workers are going to get burned by this shift isn't really surprising. People seem to want to force either/all in order to push more unions instead of a more mixed economic approach.

reaperducer 7y ago
Unions work for the benefit of union members. Not even remotely surprising, and I'm not even a big union guy.
- AnthonyMouse 7y ago
  It's not surprising, but the narrative they prefer is that they're working for the benefit of union members against capital, not against hardworking independent contractors who are already making less money than them.
  - larrywright 7y ago
    Not to mention that if a business has the audacity to hire non-union labor, the unions will picket them and make all kinds of accusations about the business. Unions, for all intents and purposes, do not believe in free markets.
    - rchaud 7y ago
      "Free markets" in the Economics 101 sense don't exist anywhere but in the poorest parts of the world. A minimum wage is anti-market. So is paid time off, parental leave, anti-discrimination protections, and a host other rules and regulations that rich countries enshrined into law decades ago.
      - AnthonyMouse 7y ago
        > A minimum wage is anti-market. A minimum wage is essentially a subsidy for certain poor people which comes mostly at the expense of different poor people. It's a very silly and inefficient alternative to better policies to help the poor, like a UBI. > So is paid time off This is also basically useless (but not as actively harmful as a minimum wage), because not long after it's passed, the value of the benefit gets priced into wages. If people wanted lower wages in exchange for paid time off then there was nothing preventing them from negotiating it to begin with. > parental leave Almost the same as paid time off, except that it's a cross-subsidy in favor of new parents, so you couldn't negotiate it in exchange for the same wage reduction in a free market, since you get the benefit (and wouldn't negotiate for it unless you intend to use it), but the wage reduction is spread across everybody and not just you. Notice that you could get the same cross-subsidy with less distortion by having the government pay your salary during parental leave rather than the employer, because then the cost wouldn't fall disproportionately on employers of parents. That would also require the government to do a more accurate accounting of the cost of the program rather than passing an unfunded mandate. > anti-discrimination protections This one's the weird one, because in theory it's a useless requirement since discrimination is irrational and money-losing so nobody should want to do it anyway. But that was a different story when you had white people refusing to patronize employers with black employees or then women, so the original reason this got passed was in the nature of antitrust, which is pro-market. It's debatable whether we still actually need it anymore but it probably doesn't do a lot of harm since (unlike e.g. minimum wage) it isn't prohibiting anything anybody has any good reason to do to begin with.
sundaeofshock 7y ago
Hold up. How exactly are part-time employees harmed by this? And the question is the answer to what to do about freelancers: make them part-time employees.
pergadad 7y ago
Worth stressing that this might be how unions work in the US (if that's really so generalisable). In western Europe unions are definitely not so exclusionary
gamblor956 7y ago
This is false. Also, blog writers and journalists don't have a union. If they did, this wouldn't have happened.
- bpt3 7y ago
  Vox writers are unionized.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]

morelisp 7y ago

If as he says "none of us wrote for StR for the money" then a change to how the money is allocated should not affect him in any way, right? If you get paid regularly for small amounts of work that's not a hobby, it's a part-time job. They're not remotely the same thing.

AnthonyMouse 7y ago
When someone says they don't do something for the money, what they mean is that some of the value of doing the work is that you enjoy the work. You might be able to get $15/hour doing something you hate, but doing something you love for $5/hour a few hours a week is worth the $10/hour difference. That doesn't inherently mean it's worth a $15/hour difference. And even if it is, that doesn't mean you're happy about losing the $5/hour.
Kylekramer 7y ago
I have to imagine that Vox Media is not going to allow people to write for them for free for a number of reasons, and the community the website developed is probably a main reason why they wrote there.
kelnos 7y ago
"None of us wrote for StR for the money" is a colloquialism. It doesn't mean that they'd work for free, or for under some threshold where the money they get isn't financially responsible for them given the time they put into it.