[mvexel]

LinkedIn says Fastmail has 116 U.S. based employees. I may be completely off base here, but if you're that small an org and employees feel the need to form a union, wouldn't that indicate a significant problem with company culture?

[morvita]

There's power in bargaining as a collective, whether you're a collective of ten or ten thousand. Either way, it helps with the power imbalance between employees and management.

[JumpCrisscross]

There's also cost in coordination and agility--this is fundamentally true of any new bureaucracy, company, system or process.

I'm reading this as a sign of cultural stress unless we have evidence to the contrary. (EDIT: I didn't realise Fastmail has almost 1,000 employees, with many remote. That comes closer to where structure is merited, though I'd still argue that this points to dysfunction in the U.S.-HQ bridge given only the Americans are unionizing.)

[zbyte64]

The kind of coordination that requires less representation does not have your interests in mind.

[JumpCrisscross]

> kind of coordination that requires less representation does not have your interests in mind

Take this to an extreme: a start-up. A union is overly bureaucratic. I’d wager a union doesn’t start making sense until the lowest-ranking employee ceases to have on-demand access to senior management.

[givemeethekeys]

That's quite small. Having worked at a few companies in the 30-50 employee mark, while it is true that I could speak to management almost any time, it was also obvious that they were very busy.

[JumpCrisscross]

> companies in the 30-50 employee mark, while it is true that I could speak to management almost any time, it was also obvious that they were very busy

Sure. But if you had a grievance, you could voice it. And if you needed to pull some like-minded coworkers together to underline it's shared, that could be done ad hoc. If a 50-person company needs a union (because e.g. management refuses to listen) that's a problem. That's my point.

I don't know where the delineation is. But there is very obviously a point below which unionization is a sign of dysfunction. For the same reasons a middle-management layer or expansive C suite, below a company of a certain size, is a sign of dysfunction [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nature_of_the_Firm

[Vinnl]

According a toot posted today, they have 50 employees: https://mastodon.social/@fastmail/111585249083411392

[dboreham]

> Fastmail has 116 U.S. based employees

Wow. Considering they're not a US-based company this seems amazing (yes, I'm aware that unicorn startups need a zillion people because...reasons, but this is Fastmail not a unicorn).

[kevin_thibedeau]

If they're generating massive profits and not receiving proportional compensation then collective action can produce a fairer outcome.