Kos wrote a diary, and everyone decided unions were bullshit.
I did not expect to be writing this post today. We decided to give the entire company a mental health day to regroup after the difficult week everyone has had. But the Daily Kos Guild account has posted something so wildly inaccurate and defamatory that it violates several Rules of the Road and our Terms and Conditions. Here’s our response.
Don’t you see how much you’ve hurt us by fighting for a better life, Union? We had to take a mental health day. And when we did, you said things that we didn’t like. How dare you, Union? How dare you act in your own best interests when it was so very hard for us to look at the internet and use our authority to shut you down thereafter? How dare you, labor, do something that might be effective in your fight to be treated with the respect you deserve for providing this site with content and the sweat of your brow?
I’ve explained the reasons why we lost a major revenue stream: Unscrupulous campaign email providers decimated our ethical email list-building business, and the defeat of Donald Trump tanked traffic and engagement.
I told you people, you fucking ungrateful people what the narrative was when it comes to who was at fault. How dare you reject management’s argument? Aren’t we progressive? Aren’t we left-leaning (when it suits our click numbers)? I told you and you had the audacity to reject my narrative.
Now if you want to blame us for helping defeat Donald Trump, then sure, guilty as charged. But we’d do that all over again.
Look at this amazing thing we did. We profited from Trump’s campaign, but also we defeated Donald Trump. We (and everyone else, but let’s not credit dirty leftists) did this. And now, you ungrateful fucking serfs, how dare you come here and try to make us look bad?
We’ve only had employees for 14 years, and we have had some small layoffs in the past.
Look at this technicality. I mean, the crux of your point was true, but you (maybe) misstated the numbers so the heart of your argument may not be considered.
Still, if you want to blame management for having layoffs, why not blame management for growing the company to a point where we were able to hire those employees and offer them generous salaries and incredibly generous benefits … until changing market conditions decimated key revenue lines?
Look at this favor we did you. We benefited in no way from your labor. We were so awesome you should feel grateful you got canned by us.
This is a lie that beggars belief. From the agreement we negotiated with the Guild, impacted employees who accepted the severance agreement (which is all of them) receive:
Yes, you’re right, we did something super shitty when we had the option to do something somewhat better than super shitty. But we’ll call you a liar here and ignore the fact that we had the power to keep you employed and covered by lowering our own salary or cutting management, or by keeping you on one day more to buy you a month of no Cobra, extending your health insurance by an additional month while you try to find work in your narrowing field. Good luck!
(i) A base severance of 12 weeks' pay, plus an additional 1 week's pay for each year of service with the company.
We were better than most horror shows in the American capitalist hellscape, so you should thank us instead of speaking up for yourselves, you dirty ungrateful leftist commies.
Emphasis mine, in case anyone has trouble finding the health care provision. Why would the Guild lie about this?
Every take that makes us look bad is a lie. Not a different outlook, not a desperate struggle to make sure their families are safe and taken care of – a lie.
Furthermore, the agreement signed with the Guild ensures resources beyond just health insurance coverage and multiple months of severance pay. It also provides three months of professional outplacement services in support of job transition, re-placement support, and work-life coaching.
We did the bare minimum in a sane universe; therefore, you should be happy and feel lucky you got fired by us instead of someone else. We cannot concern ourselves with what happens to you when our benevolent termination of your livelihood runs out. Suck it up, buttercup, ‘murica.
No one is being asked to work longer hours. The claim is a lie. Full stop.
I mean, you probably had to work longer hours. No one “asked” you to, but we may not be able to meet our revenue goals, and we might need to let some folks go next time…
As I stated above, today is a company-wide mental health day, which the Guild utilized to attack us. That is, of course, on top of the two and a half months of paid time off everyone at Daily Kos already gets.
Did I mention our pizza party and the family outing you were expected to attend? Look at how benevolent we are. Look at how amazing we are.
Will Rockafellow has attended multiple bargaining sessions.
As Management defines Bargaining Session, not as the Union does, because the union isn’t management, and we get to determine what words mean.
We have the receipts: emails, notes, agendas, you name it. We have communicated with the staff regularly throughout the entire process.\
We won’t show you the receipts. We’ll just delete any Kos Guild posts now and claim they were lies, and we won’t back up our assertions with actual evidence.
There appears to be a belief within the Guild that union protections mean no one can be laid off.
We will assert this without evidence, and make organized labor look bad to our customers so they won’t get all… woke… on us.
That is simply not the case. When layoffs were announced, management engaged in good-faith negotiations with the Guild over the layoffs.
Ignore the Guild’s lived experiences with Management’s “good faith”, and literally the entire history of organized labor disputes with management. We, DailyKos, somehow rose above our greed and profit-motive, and were literal saints when dealing with the eeeeevil union.
The Guild proposed the agreement that was negotiated, voted on, and approved, which was then signed by all parties and adhered to at every turn. Whether Will or I attend bargaining sessions is irrelevant.
Remember when I said Will went to meetings? Well, just in case you actually check with the guild about my weaselly bullshit, it doesn’t matter if we did or didn’t. But we totally did. But if we didn’t that’s OK because reasons…
We cannot pick the Guild’s negotiating team, and the Guild cannot pick ours. That said, the Guild has been nothing but disdainful of our Black-, LGBTQ-, and women-led negotiating team.
Now we’re going to make them look racist/bigoted because we don’t want to answer for our corporate shit and because we like throwing a bigotry smoke grenade to cover for our malfeasance and lies.
The Guild is not an equal partner in management. Management is management. Labor fights for better wages and workplace conditions. Note that the Guild still can’t point to a workplace condition they disagree with. The average Guild salary was $95,000 before this process began. It's now $98,000, as we’ve added resources to the community team (which directly serves you), as well as other adjustments benefiting several Guild members. Members get two and a half months of paid time off. They have employer-paid health coverage. They have a generous 401(k) match. And there are myriad other perks.
Know your place, plebes. Also, we’re super proud to have done the bare minimum and provided a living wage to people living in high-end markets like DC and California. Look at how noble we are for doing the bare minimum. Also, we like to use averages so we can look benevolent without actually getting into the specifics of what people were paid.
We had to make extremely difficult decisions over the past few weeks to protect the organization’s long-term health by sizing our workforce to match revenue. The Guild would rather us waste your money—community support is our largest source of funding—than make sure that we most efficiently use your hard-earned dollars to support our mission.
We had to fuck labor so management could keep out jobs.
Regardless of what the Guild wants to claim, none of the ideas they brought to us actually cut costs.
We’re not going to post any analysis here, just our own biased idea of what might cut costs and what won’t. We rely on your loyalty and confirmation bias to do the rest. We will post our opinions as objective facts.
One plan involved putting people without experience in roles they weren’t qualified to perform.
We’re not going to actually post any evidence here. Just our opinion and label it as fact. We’re also going to not let the guild respond to this shit and pretend it’s because thy “lied”.
In another instance, they tried to replace a remaining employee with another remaining employee and claimed there would be “savings.” There are real, financial, nuts-and-bolts reasons why the Guild proposals were rejected: They wouldn’t have solved our financial shortfall.
But we didn’t actually negotiate this or have a real meeting or conversation about it. We look at our own managerial interests and decided fucking over labor was our best course of action.
There was no “targeted gutting” of the union. Over 60% of the departing Guild staff left voluntarily
See, when people leave voluntarily, it’s because management is amazing and flawless and for no other reason. It couldn’t be because the writing is on the wall and they have to make the best calculation they can is a shit situation. No. It must be because we’re amazing. Also, we didn’t target the gutting. We were way broader than that.
. In fact, we rejected voluntary buyouts from several of the most active Guild organizers because of how much we value them as contributors and employees.
Once again, look at our benevolence with wonder. Also, we didn’t do anything wrong to put us in a bad financial spot. It was just the world and our dumb luck. Nothing more. No one in management did anything wrong ever. Labor must go.
If we were trying to “gut” the union—a union we voluntarily recognized—we really did a poor job of it.
We did the bare minimum – respecting people’s fundamental right to organize. Therefore, we can’t have done anything wrong.
Eight members of the guild volunteered for a buyout. They were not laid off.
We’re going to muddy the waters with technicalities (that may or may not be in dispute – we don’t do evidence here, just statements without documentation). That way people will get tribal about it and we win.
All departing employees received a base severance of 12 weeks' pay, plus an additional one week's pay for each year of service with the company, with prorated credit for partial years with the company.
We did the bare minimum, so again you should be pleased and never complain or make us look bad.
They also received reimbursement of health care benefit costs extended through COBRA for a period of three months.
But we definitely had the choice to add an extra month by terminating people on the 1st. Yes, it would have cost us something. Please don’t look at my actual annual earnings.
Furthermore, the company was never "insolvent," nor was it descending toward "insolvency." A post-Trump era correction was needed to avoid ongoing losses. We took these actions precisely to avoid a worsening financial picture.
This correction came on the backs of labor and not management. What do you take us for, suckers?
Note that they never mention what this “catastrophic mistake” is. Was it hiring people in the first place, and building a revenue line that eventually got disrupted into oblivion, years later? The catastrophic mistake would be to do nothing as revenues failed to cover employee costs.
Here we blame labor and refuse to take any blame ourselves. It was merely happenstance. No one in management ever made a single mistake. They made it all up! They never specify what our mistakes were so we can’t have made any! That’s just logic.
Daily Kos is a lean organization.
We like to pretend we pay well. We are also lean. This is not contradictory.
Ninety percent of our costs are staff, which is unsustainable. So yeah, we lost 30% of our revenue, and the cuts had to come from staff. There is literally nowhere else to cut, unless you think the servers running the site aren’t important.
` None of the staff costs relevant to an overabundance of managers and high manager salaries should be considered by the plebes who read Dkos. Labor is the problem. Not management.
Management did what it needed to do to right the organization.
On the backs of labor, and not from their own pocket books. But that’s life in capitalism, yo! Pass the Chianti.
Instead of buckling down and working to avoid having to do this all over again, the Guild continues sabotaging the company’s standing by spreading outright lies. It’s shameful, and quite frankly, embarrassing that it’s coming from our employees, in an organization dedicated to truth and justice.
Look at these sabotaging union people. How dare they not simp to us? How dare they advocate on their own behalf? HOW DARE THEY? It’s shameful they would organize and fight hard for better lives. How dare they, when we were so very benevolent and cool. I mean. we are so cool here; we deserve a labor pool that doesn’t ask for anything more.
One final point: When challenged to provide more details by a commenter in their story, including details of their plan to supposedly save the company, the Guild account responded that it was “unable to release proprietary information about DKM’s decision-making processes without opening our members up to termination or legal action from the company.”
I control their access to this site, and later state I will censor their posts. But look how they’re not posting. Look how they’re not responding to my accusations! Clearly they are dishonest.
![February 6, 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr., Roman Catholic Bishop James P. Shannon, Reverend Ralph Abernathy, Rabbi Maurice Eisendrath (carrying a Torah), and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel led 2,000 people down Arlington Ridge Road in a protest against the Vietnam War. [King was assassinated 2 months later.] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arlington_Ridge_Road#Elimination_of_North_Arlington_Ridge_Road](https://images.dailykos.com/images/753312/story_image/2Friends2Prophets-AbrahamJoshuaHeschelMartinLutherKing.jpg?1578080534 "February 6, 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr., Roman Catholic Bishop James P. Shannon, Reverend Ralph Abernathy, Rabbi Maurice Eisendrath (carrying a Torah), and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel led 2,000 people down Arlington Ridge Road in a protest against the Vietnam War. [King was assassinated 2 months later.] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arlington_Ridge_Road#Elimination_of_North_Arlington_Ridge_Road")
