[woevdbz]

It sounds like OP wants to be a part of the kind of social change that fundamentally cannot exist independently of politics but trying to enact it without.

A single company, especially one that is not generating monopoly/oligopoly profits and is still dependent on funding, is not really able to: unionizing creates a steep competitive downside on the capital market that is not offset by enough employee retention benefit to be worth it, and that alone creates existential risk for the whole company. Long term, it simply helps another competitor to come up without a union.

Systemic problems need systemic solutions. It saddens me a bit that people want social change so much but dislike politics so much more that they take up the wrong fight, and then retreat to something like making videogames, which frankly as an industry has an even worse track record than tech in terms of respect for its workers.

I hope OP changes their perspective and fights a wider fight, either on behalf of a party or of a larger union.

[afandian]

It's surely not that bleak (at least, not everywhere). And it doesn't have to be remotely about 'politics'.

My old employer made the leap to employee-owned and they seem to be going from strength to strength. https://torchbox.com/careers/employee-owned-trust

[cyphar]

Having companies be employee-owned (which is commonly referred to as a worker co-op) is absolutely a political topic -- implementing policies to allow more companies to become worker-owned was part of the UK Labour Party's manifesto in 2017. Just because something is political doesn't make it bad.

[andrewmutz]

What government policies are standing in the way of worker co-ops?

[chobeat]

free market policies. Proper Co-ops are designed not to exploit workers, local resources or destroy communities in order to create profit therefore have a hard time competing with ruthless profit-oriented companies in most markets. Co-ops create social value and are beneficial to workers and society alike, but they need to be nurtured actively.

[int_19h]

Co-ops are doing just fine in a free market. In fact, the average lifetime of a co-op today is longer than that of a traditional corporation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative#Economic_stability

On the other hand, less free market - which is what you get when you allow monopolies and oligopolies to dominate it - is harmful to them, just like any other business that's not "big enough".

[woevdbz]

Right, that works until you need more funding (unless you can raise from employees, but that also has consequences and limits). I'm guessing that Mapbox is angling for an acquisition or more funding at some point.

[eldavido]

The other thing it does (giving employees more power) is make it harder for companies to change course. Most people hate change and will fight it as hard as they can, seeing all layoffs as "bad" and "evil".

Germany's auto industry is a great example of a highly unionized industry. Pay is good. But also, it's very hard for Germany to enact anti-oil and gas policies (carbon reduction / pro-environment) because it hurts auto workers. It should also give anyone really pro-union pause to consider why Germany didn't produce Tesla. They had every advantage imaginable including a well-trained workforce, existing manufacturing infrastructure, the deepest capital markets in Europe, and existing distribution relationships. And yet, the Americans beat them to it. Why, you ask? Because workers don't want to retrain or change what they've been doing for 50+ years. There's too much inertia, too much complacency, too much "this is how we've always done things".

[severak_cz]

Germany had/has promising range of electromobiles - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StreetScooter

[mistrial9]

> Most people hate change and will fight it as hard as they can, seeing all layoffs as "bad" and "evil".

this does not take into account the other side of the ledger -- the behavior, movement and dispersion of Kapital. Is there a shortage of profit in the last forty years, that requires creative destruction at every turn?

Perhaps the secret ingredient would be something called "stability" that includes accounting for the real system-level costs of luxury resorts, massive sports franchises, excessive personal medication and single-use plastics?

Am I seriously proposing that the German Auto Industry is good the way it is for the next 200 years? no.. is California a model for the world economic growth in the next twenty years? you tell me

[admax88qqq]

"stability" favours people already at a comfortable place in economy at the expense of everyone trying to enter the workforce or level up their pay.

Growth creates new opportunities.

[afandian]

Yes staying true to the rhetoric about 'making the world a better place' does preclude certain future states. But that rhetoric can be true, actionable, and not incompatible with profit.

Just saying here's an anecdatum about a money-making business that said the same kinds of things and is doing very well for itself.

[roguecoder]

So your hypothesis is that VCs put their class interests ahead of making money to such an extent that it is impossible to exercise our legal rights without putting the companies we work for in their political crosshairs?

You may be right. It still seems like the easiest solution is for all the startups to unionize so they don't have any choice: they can either invest in unionized startups or they can stop being VCs.

[whimsicalism]

> So your hypothesis is that VCs put their class interests ahead of making money

It's much simpler than this and it is about making money.

Whether unions impact the ultimate success (in terms of ability to build) of a company or not, they certainly shift the share of money that is going towards labor as opposed to owners who want a profit.

This lowers the expected return of company equity which means people will be willing to pay less and you will be able to raise less money while you are trying to scale up. A non-unionized competitor will be able to raise more money and if there are positive returns to scale, outscale & outcompete.

[astrange]

That’s mostly the US corporate union system (which of course you’d be using as a US company).

European approaches like sectoral bargaining and codetermination don’t have these problems; a single company isn’t disadvantaged vs its competitors and the employees on the board are motivated to grow the company. Europe doesn’t have VCs and the culture doesn’t support failure like Silicon Valley, but that’s for different reasons.

[whimsicalism]

> Europe doesn’t have VCs and the culture doesn’t support failure like Silicon Valley, but that’s for different reasons.

No, it is the same effect I am describing but inter-national as opposed to inter-firm. Capital allocation is transnational.

[astrange]

There isn’t an issue with starting companies in Europe as much though - Skype, Nokia, Booking are examples. The issue is they don’t stay European owned. US companies buy them out because they run out of ability to grow.

FAANGs have European offices with work councils and all and aren’t considered unproductive, but they’re not the corporate headquarters because they didn’t start there.

Certainly some European countries prefer having a few old large companies because it’s easier to regulate. Asia has the same problem; it’s an everywhere except Silicon Valley thing.

edit: actually, ASML is an example of a European headquartered tech company where all the value is “actually” American. Not sure how that happened. Video game studios also seem a lot more international than other tech companies.

[whimsicalism]

None of this is contradictory to what I am saying. The fact that companies have been started in Europe does not contradict the fact that it is harder to raise in Europe.

FAANG companies having EU offices with work councils is completely irrelevant to what I am saying.

[eldavido]

Absolutely it is, and anyone in denial about that can look at European GDP growth, GDP per capita, youth unemployment, firm valuations, or about 20 other economic metrics to back it up.

You can't start a company there because all this social spending makes it super hard to get going. I think the US is heading this way too now, toward lots of big companies with fat required benefit packages the little guys can never match (even if they eventually go on to become huge).

I wish people who would being so starry-eyed about Europe. One of the 10 biggest companies in Italy is the post office. Lots of industrial power, that.

[Apocryphon]

Well, perhaps labor relations in the U.S. are just so acrimonious- its history is literally soaked in blood and violence- that it's just one patch of grass of Europe that seems greener on the other side. Certainly the idea of more cooperation between labor and management, perhaps the German model of labor unions, wouldn't be so bad.

[woevdbz]

No the argument is not about VCs putting class interests above profits, it's about them putting their profit first, together with a perception that unions decrease the amount of profit that is distributed to capital owners as opposed to labor, and decrease the strategic maneuverability of the business by diluting control over operations between management and unions.

> It still seems like the easiest solution is for all the startups to unionize so they don't have any choice: they can either invest in unionized startups or they can stop being VCs.

Yes. Or fight for workers' rights in the even broader sense (not just startups or tech).

[jacobolus]

> Long term, it simply helps another competitor to come up without a union

Alternately, long term it helps attract and retain excellent staff who care about the business and feel like they have a stake, and helps the business make better decisions because the decisionmaking process takes more information into account.

[woevdbz]

If this were the case, I would expect many more successful companies to have discovered this secret competitive advantage. It's not like employee-owned or union businesses are new. They've been around forever at the timescale of the Internet, and it's not like they haven't tried investing. I used to work for one that tried to diversify into tech and I can tell you what I saw: during growth phases, union pay wasn't competitive enough to retain top talent (due to a more egalitarian pay structure than the industry), and pretty quickly the strategic long term prospects of the company became pretty bleak compared with where the industry was going. So everybody who stayed aboard the egalitarian pay ship basically sunk with the ship.

Again I agree exceptions exist, but if it was some magic secret sauce, it'd probably be obvious by now...

[Aeolun]

> unionizing creates a steep competitive downside on the capital market that is not offset by enough employee retention benefit to be worth it

Citation needed.

Unionizing by itself does absolutely nothing, and if I, as the employer, genuinely want the best for my employees there will be little friction even with a union.

[woevdbz]

A "competitive advantage in the capital market" means something that VCs require from the companies they invest in, like "strong founder team" and "established product market fit". I don't see a lot of VCs demanding or preferring unionization among the companies that they invest in. Do you know of many VCs that have pro-union stances? Even if there are some, I think it's fair to say they're not the majority, hence it's likely a unionized business will not have as good of a capital-raising opportunity as a non-unionized business.

[Aeolun]

> it's likely a unionized business will not have as good of a capital-raising opportunity as a non-unionized business

I think a huge factor in this is that there are zero unionized businesses around in general. Chances of any of them being invested in by VC is therefore similarly zero.

If some marginally popular company unionizes, everyone will see that it’s not the big deal they make it out to be.