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Red Hat layoffs trigger ‘black anger,’ call for employees to unionize (wraltechwire.com)
24 points by FollowingTheDao on April 30, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 13 comments


Red Hat should convert to a democratically run worker owned enterprise and get rid of their execs and board of directors.They are parasites extracting profits that should be divvied up by the the workers. Improve job security. Fire the bosses.


Hopefully this is a joke. I’m a programmer and don’t know the first thing about running a company nor am I interested. I’d bolt the first day some nonsense like this was introduced.


That is how the owner class wants you to think of yourself.

Some light reading:

https://web.archive.org/web/20220720120426/https://www.bloom...


To each their own, but that lifestyle is not for me.


Agreed, I don't care how much you own but if you tell me how to live my life we're not gonna be friends. stcroixx, go have fun building the future yesbut will be complaining about no matter how awesome it ends up being. I'll be right beside you!


I mean building a future that doesn't require countless poor to exist in order to maintain a parasitic billionaire class seems pretty awesome to me.


a.k.a. "empowerment through self-subordination"

https://academic.oup.com/book/3144/chapter-abstract/14399353...


I don’t believe there is anything illegal about organizing a company like you suggest. If it would work, why hasn’t anyone done it?

Democracy is not very good at decision making. For the outermost system which involves the potential for violence, the trade off makes sense. For systems nested within I’m not sure it does.


Lots of companies have done it. The largest is Mondragon in Spain, ~81k+ employees across its federation of worker cooperatives.

https://web.archive.org/web/20220720120426/https://www.bloom...

A newer game development company, Motion Twin (France), is doing something similar:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Twin

You can still have a management structure, but many of these types of enterprises rotate their management, by vote and with term limits, from the ranks of the employees. It makes everyone more aligned with the larger goals of the organization and helps mitigate long term favoritism.


People haven't done it recently because it simply doesn't work for many of the same reasons that nonmarket socialism doesn't work.

You inevitably have people with notions that everyone should work as hard as they can and only be paid based on need. Claims that its an extended family. Everyone belongs to each other, yada yada yada.

It gets real twisted real quick, and the only people to benefit are those that lie at everyone elses expense. The ones that are exploited the most are the ones that produce the most, so it drives any kind of efficiencies out of the business. There's no incentive to do anything productive, and you get the same inefficiencies of bureaucracy and corruption with negative production value. Those that are better get socially punished for being better and making everyone else look bad.

You also can't have that dynamic when you are using other people's money (investors) unless you want to lose everything.


Anyone happen to archive this article before they took it down? Its showing up as a 404 resource now.


WRAL is totally owned by the local oligarch, so I am not surprised it was taken down.

Here is an article that talks more about the unionizing effort:

https://www.theregister.com/2023/04/28/red_hat_layoffs_union...


In other words, the call for employees to unionize calls for anger about the layoffs.




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