Workers Accuse Kickstarter of Union-Busting In Federal Complaint

On Monday night, unionizing employees at Kickstarter filed a complaint with the National Labor Review Board (NLRB) for allegedly wrongfully terminating two employees. Both of the employees were on the Kickstarter United organizing campaign. Motherboard reports: Kickstarter told Motherboard that the workers, Clarissa Redwine and Taylor Moore, were fired over performance issues within the past two weeks. But employees at Kickstarter are accusing the company of “discharging employees” because “they joined or supported a labor organization and in order to discourage union activities,” according to the NLRB complaint, which was first reported and obtained by Slate’s April Glaser. A third employee and member of the Kickstarter United organizing committee, Travis Brace, was informed on Thursday that he would no longer be needed in his role. In a September 12 email obtained by Motherboard, Aziz Hasan, the CEO of Kickstarter, wrote to employees, “There have been allegations that we are retaliating against union organizing. Those allegations are not true. No Kickstarter employee has been or ever will be fired for union organizing.” Redwine says the company complained to her in recent months that she was not satisfactorily working with her managers. She claims that she was not given specific guidance on how she could improve. “Suddenly, after becoming a public union organizer, I started to get very strong negative feedback,” Redwine told Motherboard. “After my best quarter at the company, I was told I was being put on a Performance Improvement Plan for slippery reasons like not building trust with my managers. I asked how progress would be tracked over and over and only received answers akin to ‘just trust us.’ I assume they never crafted the Performance Improvement Plan because they couldn’t come up with anything concrete for me to improve.” Redwine and Moore are asking for back pay and to be reinstated to their positions. In response to the complaint, Kickstarter said: “We’ll be providing the NLRB with information about these firings and supporting documentation.” Kickstarter told Motherboard that it “recently terminated two employees for performance reasons. A third was working on a service we shut down, so his role was eliminated, and there were no other positions here that would be a strong fit. That staff member will be transitioning out of the company. All three of these employees were members of the organizing committee, but this has nothing to do with their departures. (We have fired three other people who were not organizers since March.)” “We expect all employees — including union organizers — to be able to perform in their role and set up their teams and colleagues for success. We use a range of approaches — twice-a-year performance reviews, peer feedback, manager feedback, one-on-one coaching and, in some cases, mediation — to ensure that employees have the support they need to meet those expectations. When someone has been through this process and we have sufficient evidence that they are not meeting expectations, we must unfortunately part ways with them,” the company continued.