Thread by @BrianMBauman

Did everyone have an enjoyable weekend? I hope so. If you did, thank unions.

@PaizoWorkers is currently still waiting for @paizo management to voluntarily recognize our union. While we wait, let's talk about union eligibility, and what it means for the #UnionizePaizo effort.

When I've used the term "eligible employees", I've been referring to two separate things: the set of people who are eligible to join a union under the National Labor Relations Act, and a more nebulous set of people known as a bargaining unit. I'll explain both below.

The NLRA protects the rights of some workers to unionize. Govt. employees, agricultural laborers, independent contractors, etc. are covered under other legislation. At Paizo, the criteria are predominantly whether a given employee is not a supervisor or a confidential employee.

In the context of the NLRA, supervisor status has nothing to do with an employee's job title. Rather, the term refers to someone who has a certain degree of authority over another employee - hiring, firing, promoting, disciplining, assigning tasks, and so forth.

So there's a little bit of fuzziness there. Usually someone with direct reports is a supervisor, but it's also possible for a "work manager" (as opposed to "people manager") to still be considered a supervisor if they have the latitude to create tasks and assign them to others.

The other category - confidential employees - includes employees whose job duties make them privy to sensitive managerial information and create potential conflicts of interest. These would be roles involving HR or payroll, assisting supervisors directly, or similar.

Ultimately, the NLRB is the arbiter of which employees fall into which categories, but their criteria are publicly available, so the UPW put in a fair bit of effort analyzing the positions at Paizo and predicting which employees are eligible to unionize.

We reviewed the entire employee roster and assembled a full organization chart, with job titles and job descriptions where possible. Working with the @CWAUnion, we also acquired a survey designed to suss out whether a person should be considered a supervisor or not.

All told, UPW went through three full passes of the entire company over several weeks, each time refining our best understanding of which employees are NLRB-eligible. We even had a few people actually take the survey. We finally settled on a list of 50±3 union-eligible employees.

This brings us to bargaining units. The NLRA considers a bargaining unit to consist of 2+ employees who share a "community of interest" and who may be reasonably grouped together for collective bargaining. There are some legal restrictions, but largely this is a judgement call.

The UPW *could* have gone any number of ways on this. The editorial side of the building could have decided that their interests really don't have anything to do with operations, and could have organized around a bargaining unit that only included that half of the company.

Or perhaps the warehouse team could have decided that the @Teamsters would better represent their interests, and opted to organize as a separate bargaining unit under that union.

The UPW has chosen an intentionally "big tent" strategy, for several reasons:

One reason is because Paizo is a small company that is further divided into a fair number of vertical silos. For example, we do our own warehousing, but we only have a handful of eligible warehouse staff. Our technology team is in-house, but the eligible team is only nine people.

The editorial side of the building is even more fragmented, with little teams of two or three working on various permutations of editing, design, and development for Starfinder, Pathfinder, and Organized Play. Each of these groups, organizing separately, would be small and weak.

As our slogan says: "Don't split the party."

There are other reasons we'd prefer to stick together, as well. Most of our concerns are applicable across the company at large. And we generally like each other and want our colleagues' working conditions to be better.

Going big tent also protects us from a common anti-union tactic - petitions from management to increase or decrease the bargaining unit in ways that the union doesn't expect, to effectively gerrymander the results.

If we didn't include a department in our organizing effort, management could petition for them to be added to the bargaining unit while simultaneously telling them that we didn't want to include them and don't have their best interests at heart.

Boom - division sown.

Management could also petition to split up a unit, but it's harder to divide workers who want to bargain together, and if the union goes into the process expecting to need everyone's support then it's likely that even divided bargaining units would remain majority in-favor.

So ultimately, by being diligent about which employees are eligible, and by pursuing a big tent strategy, we've created an environment in which we can plan effectively for achieving and maintaining majority support, no matter what curveballs get thrown our way.

And so far, it's been working extremely well. When we went public on October 14th, we had union card signatures from 70% of eligible employees. That number has since grown, and we now have signed cards from over 75% of eligible employees - and we hope to add more this week!

Everyone's support has been so heartening, and it's crucial to maintain consistent momentum as we go through this process. I enjoy putting together deep dives on various parts of the unionization process, so if there's a topic or question you want to hear more about, please ask!