Workers help each other through retaliation and resolve to build a union.
Just after the emergency AllHands, staff is frustrated and disillusioned by management’s intransigence. For hours, workers passionately spoke out against management’s decision to cancel the comic book project, Always Punch Nazis, and management had not moved an inch from their original stance. In part three of the oral history, we’ll hear how management’s response to collective action galvanized workers and mobilized the union’s first organizers.
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We’re picking up just after the word union was spoken for the first time within the walls of Kickstarter. Staff is upset, Taylor just yelled union at Brian in the bike room, and many folks have left the office drained and angry. Angry at how Perry’s new senior leaders handled their first crisis.
So I was the office light. Most people have left. I had a we were going to play D&D in the library later. So I we went up there and we're in the library. And I walked in the library, the bathroom and I walked in the hallway and I pass where the big meeting rooms in the hallway. This is like 830 or nine o'clock that night and I see the entire senior team all the management is sitting in this room and in the middle of the table. They got the speaker phone set up, they're having some kind of conference call and every single one of them looks like they are sweating bullets. They look like they have seen a ghost and the ghost is now yelling at them telling them they did a bad job. Later I would learn is that they were conferencing Perry and they were briefing Perry on what had been going on. - Taylor
In many ways the story of Always Punch Nazis is really the story of how was SOT formed. Because it really revealed it forcibly revealed what that structure was. - AnonB
Aftermath
The next day, a Friday, the Vice President of Community Strategy sends a memo out to the entire company stating that leadership had reversed their decision. They would not suspend the project as they’d originally planned but would go back to the original decision of the Trust and Safety team and allow the comic to continue funding on Kickstarter.
And we thought we had won. I mean, we thought, holy shit, this is great. Like, yes, having to convince them to do this sucked. But they listened and we did the right thing. Like we as we Kickstarter, we as a company did the right thing. We can be proud to work here, the list of companies that capitulated to like the resurgent rise the NEO Nazis in the early 21st century is not going to include Kickstarter. We can say that as small as it was when our time came in the spotlight was on us. We did the right thing, right. That's great. That feels good and these new management people these new leaders, they'll listen like they'll fight you, but they will do the right thing and that also felt great because it was their first crisis. And so now we felt well we might disagree, but we can trust them, right, they're like us to listen and they're willing to think through this stuff. I remember the feeling that, you know, and I mean, it was, it was almost euphoric. Everything was clicking like, Oh man, this could work like we're not alone here. We did the right thing. And that feeling lasted for a week, week and a half, two weeks and then... - Taylor
And then, a week after that emergency AllHands, Trust and Safety gathers for their weekly team meeting. But immediately they sense that something’s off. Kickstarter’s new General Council, the same person who had led the emergency AllHands, was about to kick off a calculated mass retaliation effort across the company, starting with the team that blew the whistle.
There was one seat at the head of the table that was empty. I walked in, try to sit at it and will was like, no, no. (General Council) is gonna sit there and like not even kidding. - Sarah
The General Council walks in, sits down at the head of the table, looks at the analysts across from him, significantly raises his voice and launches into a prepared statement.
The way he yelled at people so far below him. I mean, this is our general counsel coming to the lowest level employees at the company and yelling. It was so unprofessional. So On leader like it was horrible. It was horrible. He raised his voice and said I'm deeply, deeply disappointed in the way your team acted last week… - Sarah
Deeply disappointed on it and how our team acted last week. This is not a discussion. Huge difference between personal politics and company politics. If you can't separate the two. You should find another job. We do not operate by consensus, there's the decision making process, we may disagree, Your respect the decision making framework, we are in a unique position have access to a lot of sensitive information for unclear about what is confidential flash what isn't go see (General Council) don't want to have these conversations going forward hope we can maintain a level professionalism team prior to last week. And then --- left got probably left. - AnonB
Then, the Director of Trust and Safety looks around the room at the analysts, his direct reports.
Very… in like a sort of sotto voce he said, I agree with (General Council) on all these points. But he said he had faith that we can write this come out stronger and he wanted to hold one on ones with each individually and will schedule some next week. He wants folks sit with it. He left there and as well. And the analysts were just left there and I was silent. Silent silent. And then the words started coming out. And I remember a couple people. I will. One person definitely cried. And I remember she said I love that something along the lines of, like, I love this company and I just can't believe like we can't stand up for what is actually right and like the one time that I stand up for what I think is actually right. I get punished for it, like, well, I have a job. I see so much bad stuff and the one time that I say that like us taking on this project is bad, you know, people like come after me forever, essentially. And I remember she cried. And that was hard to watch. It's really, really hard to watch. - AnonB
I think the feeling was shock and despair. These are pretty strong words but grief. Honestly, about It was a very difficult meeting. The folks on the trust and safety team have always been very thoughtful about the work that they do very empathetic and cared a lot about what they did. And so having identified that the process failed. I could immediately say that you know the reasons why. We were where we were. We're not, you know, it was not the fault of the individual employees, it was but fault of Folks that were not traditionally inside that room. And so now the idea that we were in a meeting where a lot of my colleagues were Hurt very deeply was Very difficult to watch... - David
Yeah, I mean, the first thing that I said was that was abusive like that was toxic. This was horrible. The way he treated us. This was extremely uncalled for and this should not be acceptable. (General Council) had the opportunity to come into that room and say hey last week did not go as any of us had planed like what are some ways that you all things. That we could do better. Or he could have said, here are some ways that I think we could have done better or what do you like it so many different ways that he could have approached this but coming in and yelling… I'm like, trembling and even thinking about it because he threatened our jobs. It was So, clear and he's yelling at us while he's saying, so it was very clear that if you don't sit down and shut up and stay in line, you get the fuck out. - Sarah
We are only able to do our jobs when we can communicate openly about how and why decisions are getting made. So this was like, not out of this was not out of the purview of how we normally operated that. We were told that, uh, you know, we had a fucked up. - RV
It was all very calculated. Everyone on T&S was taken into a specific one on one with our Director. He wanted to suss out how we felt individually. - AnonD
And I remember this conversation asking him, you know, how he accounted for, um, cherishing diverse perspectives in nuanced conversations like this. Um, and how, like, how he expected, um, like how he expected folks of diverse perspectives to feel like they could continue participating in these conversations when he and another white man were going to bat for Nazis. Uh, and he was not too pleased about that. - RV
After the very difficult meeting between the General Council and the Trust and Safety team, management encouraged staff to come to them individually if they had any follow up questions or concerns. But when members of the team use this direct line to management to speak up about how they had been treated or voice concern about retaliation it becomes clear that these feedback channels are not safe.
I was very anxious because I felt that they were going to fire. Just being like Justine. Honestly, I felt extremely guilty that she was being treated like that by --- And by leadership, because I had reached out to him and Robert to to kick this off. You know, so I felt I felt personally responsible. I don't know for a minute. I just feel bad for the role that I played, I think it was still the right thing but I felt bad and I reached out to (head of trust and safety) and my director and my boss my manager. And wrote them a slack message. It was a, like a long paragraph that said like, Hey, I like I appreciate you taking the time to read this, like, I'm really concerned about the way that --- spoke to us. I really feel like Justine does the right thing. I really hope that our team can like rebuild and feel from this, like, I think there's a lot of growth that we can learn from this But express that I was concerned, you know, I was concerned about ---, I was concerned about Justine and I wrote that message and hopes to I don't know. Like shed some light on how we were feeling and as a team like they, the way they were treating us was really it was so mean the way they were speaking to us and the emails that we have been receiving were Horrible. It's just horrible. So I tried to express that in a slack message. And I also felt that they respected me As an employee, I receive this positively. I really did. - Sarah
Sarah followed the direction of management and shared a concern about how the General Counsel had reprimanded the Trust and Safety team and in this slack message she expressed concern about retaliation against a fellow team member. Immediately, Sarah is pulled into a meeting with her manager, the new head of Trust and Safety, and the head of HR. This meeting is not to address her concerns or for management to better understand the behavior of the General Council. This meeting is to formally discipline Sarah for speaking up. When listening to the audio from this disciplinary meeting, it’s clear management’s main goal is not to protect employees or the health of the team, it’s to identify employees who might question decisions or behavior management in the future and silence them. And this would become a central tactic in management’s future anti-union strategy. Here is the Director of Trust and Safety with the head of HR speaking to Sarah just hours after she reported the General Council’s inappropriate behavior.
While I find it admirable that you want to try to jump in to defend somebody. It’s simply not appropriate or acceptable for analysts to be involved in those types of conversations. You don’t have to support every decision, but I simply can’t have someone on my team that feels that if their opinion is not selected from the options that it’s acceptable to circumvent the system. Just trying to get their way. - Director of Trust and Safety
I was honestly really just trying to be helpful in communicating that to you today. I’ve been told last week to talk to your managers and leadership about expressing concerns or issues that you might have so I actually thought I was doing the right thing by messaging you. It clearly was not received that way. So I would like to know the right way, the way you would like me to communicate those concerns with you because we should be on the same page about communicating… healthy, you know. For the betterment of our team. So what is the best way for me to raise concerns to you about that? - Sarah
Just to chime in on that, I think the challenge with that is, it would become a very one sided conversation when leadership and the people who were trying to work through making a decision here weren’t given the opportunity to communicate it in the way that they saw best for the organization. The reason that meeting needed to take place last week with --- is because nobody followed the appropriate channels of speaking to their managers about that. It just got taken to a public forum before the process was complete. And that puts leadership in a really bad spot and led to a very very toxic situation. And it needed to be addressed. It’s just not an acceptable way to do it. I think coming to managers after the fact, while appreciated, it’s like, there has to be a reset in terms of expectations. - Head of HR
I brought it up to my managers the way that I was told to do. I’m just trying to figure out, like, what’s your preferred approach? I want to be as helpful as possible, you know. - Sarah
I don’t think we need to get too stuck on like how to report this. I think the fact that we’re having this conversation is because we wanted to have a dialogue with you based on your feedback that you gave us in the email. I don’t think we need to get stuck on how to give the feedback and how to do it. We’re here having the conversation right? So… like you escalated feedback, and we’re having a discussion about where we think there is some misalignment there. - Director of Trust and Safety
Something I would ask is, Sarah, coming out of the meeting last week and the follow up email that (General Council) sent. To me the content of that email and the expectations that come from that, whether it be the tone or whatever it was, from that conversation, but the content of that email, I wanted to make sure that you were aligned with that. Because without that I think there’s more of an issue. - Head of HR
That was our biggest takeaway was that what you expressed this morning was at odds with the expectations that (General Council) and myself outlined. - Director of Trust and Safety
Now something very interesting happens. A theme that would come up again and again in union related retaliation is an accusation by management that, by questioning management or reporting an issue, a worker was undermining their direct manager and creating an environment where the manager was unable to function in their role. This idea of worker feedback being a kind of punishable insubordination will come up again as a key tactic in management’s anti union strategy.
In order for (Director of Trust and Safety) and (Manager of Trust & Safety) to succeed in their jobs, it’s leading the team in they way they see best fit to do that, you know. I just want to make sure there’s not a misalignment. I know people have said I signed up for a different type of role and I think the role is different now. So that’s why I totally support (Director of Trust and Safety) in saying that if the role has changed and it’s not something that you’re excited about or happy about, it’s ok to have that conversation so I figured this would be a good opportunity for that. - Head of HR
I don’t want to put someone in a position where they are having to make decisions that they just can’t live with. Beyond the work and the workflows, I think what I want to hear, and I know we’re almost out of time here, but like you personally, as a person, I know you’re very passionate, you stand up for what you believe in… I think that’s fantastic, um but there’s going to be situations like this one that are going to go against those feelings that you have. - Director of Trust and Safety
By the end of this disciplinary meeting - a meeting that was prompted by an employee expressing concern about the treatment of herself and her team members - management has made it so clear that expressing dissent or any level of discomfort with their decisions in unacceptable… by the end of this meeting, they’ve backed her into a corner and she now has to apologize for reporting inappropriate behavior from senior leadership. The head of HR makes it clear that directly communicating anything other than agreement with management will lead you to the door.
Ya, I like, again, I want to apologize if this came across wrong today. My goal really is just to strengthen our team… and to help our team because… I really just didn’t want to risk anything deterring us from our long term vision.... - Sarah
Justine’s Firing
One on one conversations were part of management’s strategy to identify and stamp out any lingering dissent in the Trust and Safety team and across the company. But for Justine, the team member who commented in Slack making the larger company aware of management’s decision, far harsher retaliation was around the corner. Sarah was right. The new Head of HR and the new Director of Trust and Safety took Justine into the room with no windows, set her down, and told her she could no longer be trusted.
We in the rest of the company, especially the outreach team need to know when a decision has been reached in these cases where the the trust and safety team is deciding on the outcomes of canceling or not canceling projects that is a common sense thing. We need that information. She gave us that information and she was now being fired because of it. They gave her a letter of resignation and a a deal a termination package that they would promise her if she resigned and they put that on the table, and she took the deal now legally in some aspects that is not a firing because she volunteered to sign and leave the company. What it is is constructive termination. Right. It is a clever way to fire someone without it technically legally being an exact firing, but absolutely this constructed termination was in effect, in all ways a firing. - Taylor
I could have very easily also been that person. Justine, is an amazing she is at her job. She is an internet sleuth by nature, but also so detailed and her work like she. She's an incredible human being I feel very lucky to have worked with her. - Sarah
And not only is Justine an amazing person and such an asset for any company, she was just very good at her job like she gave a fuck. I swear, in the analysis she would provide, she was just a really good employee, a great integrity analyst. It’s like, if Kickstarter were a capitalist place, that wanted people who were good at their jobs, then they would have kept her for that reason. - AnonD
Individual Reprimands
After management came down on the Trust and Safety team and fired the visible whistleblower, they began to divide up the company and identify outspoken members of the collective action that threatened their authority. Brian, the worker who had threatened to quit in the emergency AllHands was pulled into a one on one with the VP of engineering.
And he chastised me for my brinksmanship which was in reference, you know, to me, threatening to quit. - Brian
And this happened over and over across every team at the company in different but coordinated forms.
I was brought into a meeting with my manager, where it was basically like we talked about Individually, you know, meet just me and my manager talked about, like, How I had acted during the, during the During the incident basically all I had said was, this is a great, this is a great time for Kickstarter to act with moral clarity. That's literally verbatim. The effect of that meeting was like basically don't speak up, basically just don't rock the boat. - Patrick
And he says something to the effect of your behavior during the library. And I go, excuse me like I was not at the library meeting. I did not attend that meeting. And he goes, sort of, like, oh, okay, well, just your whole behavior was Inappropriate and you didn't leave space for like other people's opinions, who felt the project should be taken down. And I go, like, Okay, tell me when and where you have evidence for that because I didn't do I didn't. No such thing, you know, in any public setting no such thing. Which like You know, I, the term gaslighting has usually a really negative connotation because generally it's in the direction of someone who is powerful doing it's someone who is less powerful. In this case, I think it's kind of funny because it's like --- was absolutely right that I was involved in this situation, but he had absolutely zero evidence to back that up. And so I really could just throw it back on him and be like, What are you talking about, I don't know what you mean. And after sort of like digging in. You know, he sort of said a few kind of like dodgy things are like, whatever. And I kind of just kept kept asking the same question kept just like kind of poking at it a little bit and eventually get him to admit (General Council) had Googled me and had found that I had radical politics and wanted to make sure that I was okay working at a place that had different political views than my own. - Amy
Kickstarter’s General Council had identified workers believed to have had a hand in standing up to management and forcing leadership to reverse the decision… and then he researched them, and then he directed management to discipline them, whether there was evidence of their involvement or not. It was an incredibly wide net.
Our manager sent our team an email calling us toxic. And in a face to face meeting in the office, made it very clear that we were not to question management's decisions again and said that this is just a job and we don't need to care about that sort of stuff. And we should just be quiet in do our job. And, you know, reiterated that our behavior speaking out of the meeting had been toxic. Toxic, mind you. - Taylor
Yeah, I was like, Just sort of thrown off for like the next week, I was just kind of like, man, did I do something wrong, like was I, you know, taking up too much space was I like being too loud. Did I was I being an asshole unintentionally. I tend to, you know, if someone gives me criticism like that. I'm usually going to take it and like Honestly, examine it. But yeah, that that like made me feel just really Kind of alone and shitty for the next week. Until I started talking to other people at work who had also been brought into one on one meetings like that and they kind of said it went down the same way for them. And then I started thinking, well, wait, we hold on I'm not wrong here. We were all saying good things we were trying to get Kickstarter to make the right choice here. - Patrick
When we spoke out against their decision and then when Perry told them that they better not doing anything stupid and they better do it the staff says, right there invalid so that they had been validated from below and then they were invalidated from the top. And that cannot stand. If we speak up against them and then the boss comes down and says, No. Well, then they're crushed. And so you have this little like compressed pocket of middle management that is now extremely angry, but they can't show that they're angry, right, because that would that would reveal that would let them that would let the cat out of the bag. That would be the reveal of the whole game, right. They can't let us see them sweat so that they now have to use work language and work levers to exact revenge. So they call us toxic. They said we should never do that again even though no one was harmed by their own admission, and like you said they ended up making the right decision. - Taylor
Staff Support Each Other
After this week of retaliation, more and more of us start talking, we start sharing what happened to us, and what happened to other people on our teams. A handful of engineers make their way to a bar that looks across the East River and one by one they start to share that they’d been individually reprimanded by management.
So the four of us were talking and I was Brian explained his story of being reprimanded he and Patrick noted that other folks that they knew I'm engineering team who had also spoken up. We're also reprimanded. - Sarah
I was like, Oh, me too. I think at that point I was aware that many people I forget exactly how I was aware. Again, I'm sort of like, I don't know. I was just talking to people, I guess, but I was aware that, like many people were receiving this feedback and also kind of bizarrely similarly formatted feedback. But these other engineers were like not aware of that they were like more isolated and so they're like, oh, I was feeling really bad about what I had done. I felt like I had messed up. And I wasn't sure why, like I didn't understand what I had done wrong, but I guess like I must have messed up or made people uncomfortable or whatever. And I was like, I'm so glad we're having this conversation because like you didn't like you did great. You know you stood up for what you believe in, like, You know, like everyone is receiving this feedback. It's like totally bullshit like don't take it personally. And then I think that conversation was where Me and Sarah decided to try and organize what we call the like unofficial debrief. - Amy
The Unofficial Debrief
The workers who, a week earlier, had set the collective action in motion put together a small gathering to process this wave of retaliation from leadership.
There needs to be a debrief of this management is not going to do one. So let's just do one ourselves. - Amy
And in this small gathering, workers start to put together the full extent of management’s retaliation.
Okay. Let's all just understand more sides of like how this went down and kind of our shared our shared experience. To help our to help us kind of move past it. - Amy
It was mind boggling. Like I knew that our team had gotten that bad, but then seeing engineers who were just yelled at for asking a question during the library meeting was ridiculous. It's just like, what do you mean? They can't ask a question. What do you mean? They got pulled aside by their manager and yelled at, like, what? - RV
And this is the first time many of use heard about what the General Council had done to our coworkers on the Trust & Safety team…
I just remember feeling so sad and disappointed and hurt. I already understood this devaluing of non engineers at the company and to hear that he felt like cuz he didn't come do that to me, you know he didn't do that to me. But to feel like he had the right to go into that room with the employees that were just doing their job and like You know, it needs to be said that the people on these team were, you know, mostly women, people of color trans, queer, you know, he felt that he had power over them in some way that he could yell at them like that. I don't think he would have felt comfortable going to a team, full of engineers and doing the same thing… And that's, yeah, it was, it wasn't fear it was infuriating. And I didn't. I wanted to do it. I couldn't make sure no one had to go through that again. - Brian
Yeah. I think it was a really like a really powerful moment to see, um, the commonality between, um, people's experiences of, um, censorship and retaliation. Um, I think that it's really easy, um, at work to feel isolated and like, my relationship with my manager is individual. And, you know, if I have a problem, it's because of my manager, it's because of me and not, Oh, this is reflective of a problem with the, the overall culture of the company. And in that moment, it felt like the first moment of kind of like pulling the rug back and seeing all of the retaliation and kind of individual moments of conflict that had been swept under the rug, um, and being, and I think it felt like a moment where we got to start piecing together, um, that this was not like an individual problem. This was a collective grievance and a collective issue, um, embedded in Kickstarter's culture and how Kickstarter's leadership abuses power in order to, um, control its employees. - RV
Then we started to talk about how there was no process in place for holding leadership accountable or protecting staff against retaliation. The head of HR who was working with the General Council to carry out this widespread coordinated retaliation had never been able to build trust with staff.
Someone said HR so useless and someone else was said something like, well, what if we ran HR. What if we had a people's HR and that's an I remember me saying, oh, people's a charge that's called a union maybe what we need as a Union. And that was actually the first place where I heard someone mention the idea of a Union. - Amy
This small employee huddle happened to be in the room with no windows inside the walls of Kickstarter. This huddle is where we see the union begin to take shape. Employees came together, shared experiences, concerns, frustrations… and they started to brainstorm possible solutions to these issues that could protect workers from management. But this was happening in different ways all across the company.
Kind of in parallel to me, setting up this debrief Taylor was doing these one on ones where he was just explicitly Attempting to start union organizing. - Amy
I really genuinely wasn't sure. That these conversations we're going to lead to a union. I was open, if there was a better option if there was a better solution. I was open to it. I didn't know enough to be sure about a union at first, but I knew these conversations had to happen. - Taylor
🎶
Demise of Drip
Before workers could catch our breath, something else happens. Leadership is about to make another decision detrimental to the company, the community, and to staff’s faith in management. At this point, Kickstarter is a crucible, staff is worn down by the chaotic leadership decisions, we’ve said goodbye to far too many coworkers, and we’ve started to get a sense that management is becoming more and more adversarial. The internal turmoil within the walls of Kickstarter is making it harder and harder for staff to focus on work, and we’re just weeks away from the planned launch of Drip, one of our most promising platform expansions. Drip had been in beta for quite a while as the team onboarded creators so that the engineering team could work out bugs and the platform would launch with strong content. Just two weeks before Drip is slated to go live, leadership announces that Kickstarter is ending the development of Drip, that there will be no public release, and that they are trying to find a way to give Drip a new home to another company outside of Kickstarter.
I ran into the office for the end of the workday. So listen to Perry at an all hands say to the whole organization that Dirk just wasn't working and kind of needed more attention. This coming from the primary person who was neglecting that product and had been since the jump. - Trav
That was also the first time that I really had the visibility and access to leadership that proves to me that these are not people who have some kind of secret merit or people who You know, are so far beyond my capacity or ability to understand this product for the people that use it. These are just people who, you know, due to their circumstance and largely their privilege have ended up in positions of power and are doing everything they can to hold on to them. And it was a really eye opening moment for me, I think, you know, as someone who is really optimistic, by nature, and Really been seeing the entirety of the organization through rose colored glasses since day one. As soon as Perry came back and undid all of the work that I had spent the past year doing for that product I realized, Okay, there's a large systemic issue at play and Kickstarter. - Trav
Now management was not only threatening the moral compass of Kickstarter, and the security of workers, now they were jeopardizing our ability to serve the community and stay competitive. And it was about to get worse. Not long after the subscription platform had been handed off to a team outside of Kickstarter, leadership announced that even that team would also not launch and maintain the platform. Drip was dead.
It was heartbreaking. It was heartbreaking to get that announcement and to know that the years of work that we put into that prior Seemingly overnight was destroyed, it was, it was really hard. Trav and I spent hours and hours and hours making sure that things went off smoothly and scoping projects and plans. I think part of the company viewed it as a very important project, but I think Perry viewed it as a carryover project from the previous CEO Yancey And I don't think that the appropriate resources or credit was really given to that team. - Sarah
We had this thing Kickstarter. That is like a money making machine like that like it's remarkable that even now after they laid off a ton of people. Amidst this recession that there's still these blockbuster projects that just like generates so much money for Kickstarter and We were living off of that for like four to five years. We could have afforded to like redirected resources to a new project like drip and not just cut it. - Brian
So much of the reason why I wanted to do this work was to have these two different options for how to counsel people about fundraising and it really felt like losing drip was going to reduce my arsenal of tools to share with the creators who I wanted to target. Margot actually offered me the opportunity to withdraw from the hiring process because we both understood how that how much I had been thinking about these two sides of the same coin.- Oriana
The unfortunate thing about drip was I mean, it was pitched to us, you know, as essentially the thing that was going to make the product better. Perry came back and he kind of stood up at all hands, and he said, Here I am for lead you into the future. We are at a point where the product has not changed in years, we have the one core product offering and it's time to Expand the mission and drip is our best hopes of doing that. But it's a product that was immediately. Immediately neglected by leadership and Looking back, it's clear to see that they never actually cared about the product. It was used as a vehicle to be able to have this regime change that put him back at the top of the organization as CEO majority shareholder chairman of the board. It was a tight fist. - Trav
This is when the spark becomes a flame. The employees of Kickstarter had weathered a contentious leadership change, we’d watched a mass exodus as workers and management fled Perry’s new regime, we navigated an inoperative organizational structure while sprinting to hit unreasonable deadlines… we’d seen management make unethical decisions and then we experienced acute retaliation for standing up to those decisions, and now years of work and significant investment in Drip was recklessly washed away. This was a moment of clarity. Leadership had continually failed to support the community Kickstarter served. This was bigger than how we were treated, this was about the sustainability of the platform and the creative community. We needed a way to safeguard Kickstarter itself. Workers needed a seat at the table.
All these problems. Everything that Perry has done since he's come back and the big problems that we faced before Perry came back. All those problems have the same root. All the power, it's concentrated in just a few people. That is the key problem is that there is a bottleneck of agency, there's only one person Perry that gets to make decisions that affect everybody else. And what we have seen in the last year is that he makes very bad decisions. And with the always punch Nazis project and the way management retaliated afterwards, we can see that both Perry and management are not making just bad decisions but aggressively malicious decisions in revenge and not revenge against people that deserve it revenge against people that did nothing but want us to not help Nazis. The only way to fix all these problems is to change the nature of that power. Right. The end. The only way. Well, the most part, the most obvious way right let's say that the only way that is clearly built for this is for us the group, the people that actually work here and do the work and provide the value if we come together and demand to have some of that power for ourselves, not to take over the company, but just to act as a check and balance against all the power right now being concentrated in just one person. - Taylor
Cue Kickstarter United, here we go! - Trav
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The Drive Begins
At this point, staff had experienced a plethora of challenges that are systemic across tech. Pay inequity, retaliation, costly product decisions. It was clear the power imbalance was hurting the employees and the community we served. We were starting to settle on a path forward. We knew that a union is a group of workers committed to each other… Now we just needed to figure out how to build one.
I don't know what the Union's right. Neither of us knows if you did this, right, but it's definitely the only solution that we know of right now. Let's start talking. Let's talk about other people that might agree with us on this that might feel the same way and that list of names was long, let me tell you. - Taylor
Sarah, a colleague on my, um, on the trust and safety team, um, told me that some folks were meeting, um, and asked me if I wanted to come and, you know, she was vague, she didn't say the U word. Um, but she said that it was kind of a continuation based off of, um, the, like, based off of the original conversation we had had about retaliation. - RV
After APN, I was approached by one of my friends in the workplace and she asked if I wanted to go grab a coffee and talk about what happened… it didn’t go in a unionizing direction, it was more of like hey we’re thinking about meeting later tonight outside of the workplace and we’re going to talk about what we can do regarding the situation and maybe we’ll write a letter as a show of solidarity. Would you be interested in that? And I was like ya, sure, why not. - Corey
It felt really cool to do something secret always So it was like, yeah, I think it was just like, oh yeah, like, cool. We all want. We all want this thing. We're all in this room. Talking about it, like it felt very like secret society ish or something like it was very it felt. Cool. And it was just really exciting. That sort of like energy around starting something new and exciting that people are like that can really make a huge difference is, like, just so cool. I'm so it was like a very, it was really exciting. And and also just really eye opening right and and powerful to see that, you know, each one of us like none of it. We weren't alone in it. Even in the early meetings we had like a pretty significant number of people come to the meetings, especially considering the size of the company. Right. So in the initial meeting we had like 10 or 12 people or something like that. The whole company is like 160 hundred 70 people right so it's like already we had like a significant percentage of the company in the room. - Amy
This afterwork meeting we were having felt more like a way to kinda vent frustrations in the workplace and talk about the events that were unfolding. It felt like the union word was thrown around occasionally but it didn’t feel that serious at the time. It was more of just a space for us to vocalize how we felt about the way management was running the company. - Corey
Experience With Unions
In these meetings the idea of a union quickly became a central topic and workers, sometimes in groups, and sometimes on their own, were researching this tool that most of us had little to no experience with.
So I knew that there were not really any unions in the tech industry at the time. And I had never worked a union job in my life. - John
I just knew that it was a way, it was kind of like a way for workers to have a voice at work basically. - Patrick
I had done some kind of general leftist political organizing and and I had some friends that had done labor organizing and so sort of like Aware of the idea, definitely like knew that, you know, in amongst the my beliefs and people that believe what I, you know, the things that I believe about the world like unions were good, and that we wanted them. So definitely was like You know, very pro union knew that that was something that would be awesome, but it had sort of always felt like it was like out of reach. - Amy
People in our generation just don't know anything about unions, because so few of us are in them. And the history, certainly not taught in school, heaven forbid. Then you know our society should educate children about the, the, one of the most important ways to create and balance. The benefits and resources that society provides for normal people. I've heard it. So most people just don't know about any of this. I had no clue. But I did know that it was power. - Taylor
We set out to learn from everyone we could, friends, books, archives, family members.
When I grew up my parents were both in unions. My Dad was an airline pilot so he was part of ALPA and my mom was an elementary school teacher and she was part of the CA teachers union. And I had grandparents who were in UFCW and my other grandpa was in the firefighters’ union. So unions were not much of a complex thing in my family. It was just something I grew up with and something I was familiar with so I didn’t really know how much stigma there was around them until the union drive. It was just like, oh ya, my dad is going to stay home from work today because United Airlines is doing something bad, ok. I didn’t realize that they were so political. Going into tech, I didn’t really give it much thought going into tech like that unions aren’t here but maybe that’s fine. It wasn’t until a few years in tech that I was like wow, we really need unions. - Corey
In Spanish, the reunion is seem to gather and so my experience with the word union is seeing the counter better so like a worker syndicate almost is a direct translation and so that I've seen people strike, and I think the the most times that I've ever seen people strike. Were for like better working conditions and stuff like that. And those were Mining Industry workers, right. I've seen people strike, and I think the the most times that I've ever seen people strike. Were for like better working conditions and stuff like that. I experienced these, all these things as as a child right like or as a teenager. So when when my like when the the nationwide. Group of teachers would strike like that just means that like that that would affect personally like my classes and stuff like that. And so Similarly, when the, when the mining industry workers would strike that would mean that, like, because I lived in a town that was dedicated to you like a mining company. It basically mean that they would close roads and blockade and like actually like march and strike. So, um yeah, it's kind of a kind of a crash course in collective action in some ways. It was definitely like wow, like groups of people can achieve something if they are in agreement or sending their minds to it so… - Dannel
Some of our coworkers had real world experience with unions. They had seen first hand how these human institutions functioned.
So I was in a Union once before, although I was not involved in organizing it. I worked at the strand bookstore, which is perhaps an unlikely place to have had my union education. But the strand is in the auto workers union if memory serves, and we actually did. We did go on strike once while I was there. When contract negotiations broke down and we did a little walk out and I think we picketed and it was this, like, you know, a small group of like young hipster bookstore workers. Surrounded by A lot of like burly auto workers who came to, you know, lend support and help us out and make the demonstration more dramatic. - Oriana
I used to work at a union when I was in highschool. I worked in a union in Bayridge Brooklyn for about 3-4 years. I was just like aware of like the benefits of the union, you know, in the classic sense of like, Oh, we got a bunch of people who didn't have access to healthcare before we got the access to healthcare. I remember talking about my experience, um, in, in a few of the meetings and being like, if we're going to do this, I want to make sure that we do it right. - Alfie
So I’m a long time organizer. I’ve been doing community organizing for about ten years and the past few years before joining Kickstarter were really focused on sharing resources and knowledge among community organizers around the globe and locally. This included union organizers who’ve been doing everything from traditional labor organizing to some of the newer organizing that’s happening. For example, with United for Respect that’s organizing Walmart workers in really interesting and decentralized ways. - RV
Cliffhanger: MGMT Will Love This
In these early days, while we were researching and starting to form a working collective, quite a few of the organizers thought that management might be open to the idea of a union.
I remember, I remember distinct conversations between like me and Taylor and, and, you know, like the, the, the first union meeting that we all had being like, Oh, this is going to be no problem. We're going to, it's going to be easy. - Alfie
That was a bit naive. Perry would later go on to fight the union tooth and nail. - Taylor
Next in the oral history of Kickstarter’s union, we’ll get an inside look at what happens when management becomes aware of organizing and how they react.
We had a mole. - Toy
We have become aware that some kind of collected action or possibly a union effort has been going on at the company and we know that people in this room are involved. - Amy