The Organized Labor Movement Has a New Ally: Venture Capitalists (yahoo.com) 52
Union-organizing startup "Unit of Work" received a $1.4-million pre-seed investment led by the venture capital arm of billionaire Mike Bloomberg, reports the Los Angeles Times.
The startup's outside investors "have made fortunes backing technologies such as artificial intelligence, cryptocurrencies and video games. One is among California's foremost critics of public-sector labor unions." But the head of the startup's lead investment firm says that "whenever a community has a want that's going unfilled, there's an opportunity for companies." [T]hese people used to multibillion-dollar sales and IPOs see a big opportunity in the atomized, restive condition of America's workforce and the possibility of transforming it through a new era of unionization. "We only invest in areas where we think we can get a return," said Roy Bahat, head of Bloomberg Beta, the venture arm of billionaire Mike Bloomberg's media empire.
Unit's business model works like this: The startup's organizers provide free consulting to groups of workers organizing unions within their own workplaces — helping them build support to win elections, advising them on strategy in contract-bargaining sessions, guiding them through paperwork filings and around legal obstacles. Once a contract is in place, members of the new union can decide to pay Unit a monthly fee — similar to traditional union dues — to keep providing support.... Once the company starts earning income, it plans to buy out its investors and give their equity to the unions it helped organize, effectively transitioning corporate control to the customer base.
The approach has attracted some strange bedfellows. The second investment firm in the round, Draper Associates, is led by Tim Draper, a third-generation venture capitalist, bitcoin evangelist and outspoken critic of organized labor... [H]e launched a ballot initiative to ban public-sector unions in California.... "Unit of Work is making unions decentralized," Draper wrote in an email explaining his investment. "That will be awesome. Centralized unions tend to restrain trade, and government unions create bloated bureaucracy and poor government service on the whole.... "
Despite Draper's enthusiasm for independent unions, as opposed to nationally affiliated labor organizations, Unit's leaders and its website make clear that they support their clients if they decide to affiliate with a larger union.
The startup's outside investors "have made fortunes backing technologies such as artificial intelligence, cryptocurrencies and video games. One is among California's foremost critics of public-sector labor unions." But the head of the startup's lead investment firm says that "whenever a community has a want that's going unfilled, there's an opportunity for companies." [T]hese people used to multibillion-dollar sales and IPOs see a big opportunity in the atomized, restive condition of America's workforce and the possibility of transforming it through a new era of unionization. "We only invest in areas where we think we can get a return," said Roy Bahat, head of Bloomberg Beta, the venture arm of billionaire Mike Bloomberg's media empire.
Unit's business model works like this: The startup's organizers provide free consulting to groups of workers organizing unions within their own workplaces — helping them build support to win elections, advising them on strategy in contract-bargaining sessions, guiding them through paperwork filings and around legal obstacles. Once a contract is in place, members of the new union can decide to pay Unit a monthly fee — similar to traditional union dues — to keep providing support.... Once the company starts earning income, it plans to buy out its investors and give their equity to the unions it helped organize, effectively transitioning corporate control to the customer base.
The approach has attracted some strange bedfellows. The second investment firm in the round, Draper Associates, is led by Tim Draper, a third-generation venture capitalist, bitcoin evangelist and outspoken critic of organized labor... [H]e launched a ballot initiative to ban public-sector unions in California.... "Unit of Work is making unions decentralized," Draper wrote in an email explaining his investment. "That will be awesome. Centralized unions tend to restrain trade, and government unions create bloated bureaucracy and poor government service on the whole.... "
Despite Draper's enthusiasm for independent unions, as opposed to nationally affiliated labor organizations, Unit's leaders and its website make clear that they support their clients if they decide to affiliate with a larger union.
Hmm (Score:1)
Ally, or just a smart investment?
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Nice union you have there. Hate to see anything bad happen to it...
ROI? (Score:4, Insightful)
How do you generate ROI if you invest in a labour union? Do you call for a strike every 5 weeks because you aren't making your money back quickly enough?
Re: ROI? (Score:4, Interesting)
You destroy unioned businesses and then create a non-unionized clone which operates at a fraction of the cost. See BoltBus (popular bus service serving the north east and their sister companies) vs Greyhound as a great example of this. Bolt Bud costs $20 or something ridiculously cheap vs greyhound which costs $50 and up for the same route.
If you see billionaires behind a seemingly hood idea for the "little people" just assume there is an ulterior motive
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Re: ROI? (Score:2)
BoltBus donâ(TM)t have unions
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BoltBus donâ(TM)t have unions
Starting a non-union subsidiary is a common strategy for a company being strangled by high-labor costs. Then they can either shift more and more business to the subsidiary or threaten to do so to squeeze concessions from the union.
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Knowledge is power. If you can provide bargaining insight to labor, you can also provide insight to the businesses.
Business motives are always to generate income, but sometimes it's generating knowledge that can be sold.
Unions are notorious for mismanaging negotiations, there is an opportunity there for improvement but the only monetary reason to do so isn't going to come from labor itself. I want to think that Unit of Work started with a good idea, to inform that bargaining process and organize labor,
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I always used the analogy of fire
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The average union dues are between 1.5-4% of gross pay.
To someone making $18/hr (a common starting wage around here in the Midwest) that's $43-115/mo.
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What is your monthly health insurance fee - even if it's taken off before the pay packets are filled? In an American context, one service that a union could plausibly offer is (member's) family health insurance as part of the membership deal, while a case (invo
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The communist system you have depends on population growth for its economic growth
And this is different from the capitalist system ... in what way exactly?
It reminds me of the old joke:
What's capitalism?
The exploitation of man by man.
What's different in communism?
It's exactly the other way around there.
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And this is different from the capitalist system ... in what way exactly?
Capitalist systems grow by increasing productivity [investopedia.com], increasing profits by being more efficient. That's why GDP per capita continues to climb.
Communist / command economies aren't driven by profits. So there is no inherent push to be more efficient. And the economy stagnates.
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More specifically, capitalist economies tend to weed out underperformers while socialist economies tend to preserve them. This is why monopolies are a disease to both systems, they preserve underperformers.
Where it gets dicey is that unfettered capitalism tends to walk roughshod over employees and unfettered communism tends to walk roughshod over everyone not part of the Party. See the CCP in China for a prime example of the latter.
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socialist economies tend to preserve them.
This is known as Lemon Socialism [wikipedia.org]
This is why monopolies are a disease to both systems
Monopolies are a defect in capitalism that can be countered with anti-trust laws. Monopolies are an inherent part of socialism.
Hyper-growth unicorn unions (Score:3)
VCs aren't going to be into this shit unless they can scale UaaS (unions-as-a-service) to billions of users.
Re: Hyper-growth unicorn unions (Score:2)
Or let unionized companies die under their kafkaesque weight and start a competing company without the union.
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The failed company is a great tax write off too. Are union start-ups the tech world's version of Springtime for Hitler? [imdb.com]
We see big growth in unions (Score:2)
Just what I need... (Score:4, Insightful)
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I'd say it is not unlikely that a VC-fun
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Ally? (Score:4, Interesting)
A VC firm is NEVER. EVER. Your Ally.
"Oh yeah, this leech is an ally, it keeps part of my blood in storage, just in case."
Leech (Score:2)
The word is leech, not ally.
HOA (Score:3)
Sounds like an HOA.
This is just run of the mill union busting (Score:5, Insightful)
As an added bonus treating it like an investment means you can write your union busting activities off your taxes.
Back when the unions were first forming businesses did this to forming competing fake unions to try and draw away workers. One of the reasons why we have a raft of weak trade unions is because businesses wanted to keep the various trade unions fighting among themselves. It was also useful for keeping minorities out of the unions or in their own unions.
The goal is always the same: divide and conquer. The goal is to keep people who work for a living at each other's throats at all times and to keep us living paycheck to paycheck so we can't think long-term. That way people who own stuff for a living can take all the stuff because no amount of stuff and no amount of power is ever enough someone that greedy
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A large percentage of /. Readers (Score:2)
There is a lot wrong with that. For starters received or forgotten what kind of man he is despite everything we learned in the '80s, 90s and 2000s when he was running Microsoft.
There's also the fact that he has more money now than when he started giving it away clearly lying about giving it all.
He also prevented one of the covid vaccines from going into the public domain so he could profit from it. It w
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You're being too kind.
Saying the quiet part out loud, eh? (Score:2)
Big labor has always been about amassing power and influence. Just like the capitalism it claimed to fight on behalf of the little guy.
Not VC, just billionaire presidential candidate (Score:2, Interesting)
The Organized Labor Movement Has a New Ally: Venture Capitalists
No, its the same old ally. Democratic politicians running for high political office. This one just happens to have extra billions that he can throw away again, err - excuse me, devote, to his political campaign. He's not buying influence and support from the unions, honest, he's not. Just like the unions are not buying support when they buy some dipshit politician's book. Did you ever wonder why so many such books get written? They are a dodge around campaign contributions. Same thing here, Bloomberg is get
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After how he fared in 2020 if he is really considering another campaign he must have a real masochist streak.
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After how he fared in 2020 if he is really considering another campaign he must have a real masochist streak.
Maybe he's going for NY governor or senator.
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Yeah I guess he could but I don't know after that. It didn't even just sputter out but he had a case of spritual depantsing, you don't come back from that even in NY state, not at 80, just enjoy your billions.
Vote in the primary (Score:2)
We used to call it corruption (Score:1)
Remember when the mob ran the unions and skimmed dues? Now VCs want to do it. People who favor unions sing the common refrain of "they gave us the 40 hour work week and got rid of child labor". They omit that those were the unions of 100 years ago that were more like a labor party than a modern union. They were ad-hoc, grass roots, and didn't necessarily require you to be a dues-payer to gain benefits, because they engaged in political action. The early 20th century saw that kind of action which was *a
New Ally: Venture Capitalists (Score:3)
Lenin quote (Score:4, Interesting)
Is this part of ESG? (Score:2)
There are some big-money players embracing ESG. It's getting some folks riled up [pionline.com]. The "new" corporate VC elite has made some enemies in common with labor unions and may be seeking an alliance for that reason alone.
Or they're just looking to skim union dues. Possibly both.
Great investment - union dues are over $10B market (Score:2)
American greed at it's best (Score:2)
The Black Hand Returns (Score:1)