WIRED NEWS
Unions Next Dot-Com Revolution?
by Farhad Manjoo

2:00 a.m. Dec. 2, 2000 PST

Considering the chilly economic times for e-commerce, Friday's news of
layoffs at the consumer electronics site
etown.com might have seemed routine: another struggling dot-com sacks
employees to stay afloat.

But 13 of the company's 28 layoffs were in its San Francisco customer
service department, where during the past
several weeks employees have been engaged in a labor dispute with
management. Last Monday, they filed a
petition to hold an election that could, eventually, turn the customer
service department into a union shop.

To the employees, then, Friday's layoffs seemed to be a message from
management: If you want a union, get out
of etown. Management denied it was lashing out at union-lovers, saying that
the layoffs had been planned in
advance and had been determined by employee seniority, not by who wanted a
union and who didn't.

Given how few employees it really affects -- about 30 in all -- the etown
imbroglio might seem like a fairly trivial
matter. But it's one of the first efforts to organize at a dot-com company.

Because of that, labor leaders and new economy executives alike are paying
attention. What happens here, some
think, might be happening at other companies soon enough.

Lew Brown -- the president and chief operating officer of Collaborative
Media, the company that owns etown --
said he didn't think his employees were generally upset with conditions at
etown. He disputed claims of workers
who said that they were underpaid and badly treated -- pointing out that
etown's customer service wages of
between $10.50 and $16 per hour were consistent with customer service wages
in San Francisco.

But Erin Poh, of the Northern California Media Workers guild, which is
trying to organize etown, said that
employees' concerns go beyond pay.

"This is about security," she said. "Dot-com employees are realizing that
they are just that -- employees. The
honeymoon is over with the idea that you'd join a company and become a
millionaire. The stock options are
dwindling and the reality is that they face the same issues that workers all
over face."

This end-of-the-honeymoon idea seems to be the central thought among labor
activists who are trying to
organize new economy workers. Carl Hall, a science reporter at the San
Francisco Chronicle and the president of
Local 39521 of the Newspaper Guild, said that workers in the digital age
have pressing reasons to unionize.

"They're overworked, underpaid, many have no health benefits and no job
security," he said. "More power to them
if they become millionaires with their options -- but most people don't
become millionaires these days. And do
potential millionaires not have a need to get their kids braces before their
options pay off?"

Hall is currently in negotiations with the Hearst Corporation to unionize
workers at the SF Gate, one of the Web's
first daily news sites.

Hearst, which recently purchased the Chronicle and the Gate, seems to have
taken a decidedly more cooperative
attitude toward unionization than etown did.

Instead of hiring a law firm such as Jackson & Lewis, which the AFL-CIO says
is notoriously anti-union, as etown
did, Hearst has agreed that Gate workers will be given the option to join
the newspaper guild. All that remains to
be negotiated, Hall said, are the details.

Hearst's accommodation to a union at a dot-com perhaps reflects the fact
that it isn't a new economy
corporation, and that it has a long history of dealing with organized labor.


But digital-age companies such as etown -- and Amazon, which has also
recently had its union troubles -- are in
a brave new world when it comes to organization.
"Many business may prefer to work in a 'union-free' environment," Poh said.
"But they have found that working
with unions isn't all that terrible."

When etown executives told the employees about the layoffs on Friday, people
in the customer service
department immediately became suspicious, according to Ruben Cadabes, an
employee who did not lose his job.

Cadabes said they had reason to be wary. After employees staged a sickout in
October in retaliation for what
they thought were inadequate pay raises, two managers who had organized the
protest were promptly fired.

Then last week, two other workers who had voiced their disagreements with
management were suddenly let go,
Cadabes said.

So the layoffs seemed "awkward," Cadabes said. "To an extent, I understand
their reasoning. They did it to get
funding. And I expected there would be layoffs -- but not half the call
center."

Cadabes said that the employees had started a drive to unionize because they
were given extra responsibilities
without pay, and because they felt they had no job security. He added that
the latest layoffs highlight the
security issue.

"All these guys that were working today, they had no clue that they would be
fired," he said.

But Lew Brown knew they were coming, and that's what matters, he said. Brown
said that because the layoffs
were decided upon two weeks ago at a board meeting, they are clearly not a
reaction to the union drive.

"The six people we know of who signed the petition are still here," he said.
"The people who were laid off were
those who were hired most recently."

"And we didn't lay off 15 other people from other departments in order to
get to a union effort -- it's not like we
would try to disable our organization to do that," Brown said.

Brown was emphatic on the key point. "No one has been terminated for any
kind of union activity."

Asked whether he thought a union would be a bad thing for etown, Brown said
he didn't know. "I'm not familiar
enough with this particular union," he said of the Northern California Media
Workers guild.

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