[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

[coldpie]

> But there is very obviously a point below which unionization is a sign of dysfunction.

FWIW I don't think that's obvious at all. Even a small group of happy employees could form a union to set the current policies everyone is happy with in stone and protect themselves and future employees against potential changes in ownership or a downturn in company health.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Even a small group of happy employees could form a union to set the current policies everyone is happy with in stone

I'm not arguing it couldn't be done, nor that it doesn't have benefits. Just that it has costs, and those costs at a small level should outweigh the benefits. While they're doing that, and maintaining that structure, they could be doing something else. (Something more enjoyable and lucrative.)