(C) Daily Kos
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Daily Kos' response to Daily Kos Guild post [1]

['Daily Kos Staff', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags']

Date: 2023-03-03  

I did not expect to be writing this post today. We decided to give the entire company a mental health day to regroup after the difficult week everyone has had. But the Daily Kos Guild account has posted something so wildly inaccurate and defamatory that it violates several Rules of the Road and our Terms and Conditions. Here’s our response.

In January 2023, Daily Kos Management (DKM)—under the leadership of Will Rockafellow—projected that without layoffs, Daily Kos would have only enough funding to continue operating for six more months. Ultimately, Daily Kos management made the strategic decisions that put the company in the red. The responsibility for Daily Kos’ catastrophic financial situation, and the anti-worker choices made in response to it, lie solely at their feet.

I’ve explained the reasons why we lost a major revenue stream: Unscrupulous campaign email providers decimated our ethical email list-building business, and the defeat of Donald Trump tanked traffic and engagement. We have never used the term "catastrophic" nor claimed that operations would cease in six months. However, we had a clear and present need to adjust the size of our workforce—something that virtually all media organizations face today. I am not happy about this, but we had to respond and adapt to changing economic conditions.

Now if you want to blame us for helping defeat Donald Trump, then sure, guilty as charged. But we’d do that all over again.

These are the first layoffs in Daily Kos’ 20-year history.

We’ve only had employees for 14 years, and we have had some small layoffs in the past. Still, if you want to blame management for having layoffs, why not blame management for growing the company to a point where we were able to hire those employees and offer them generous salaries and incredibly generous benefits … until changing market conditions decimated key revenue lines?

The last day of February was the official termination date for our involuntarily laid-off staff. Adding insult to injury, when employees are terminated on the last day of the month, rather than on the first, their healthcare coverage ends immediately.

This is a lie that beggars belief. From the agreement we negotiated with the Guild, impacted employees who accepted the severance agreement (which is all of them) receive:

(i) A base severance of 12 weeks' pay, plus an additional 1 week's pay for each year of service with the company. (1) Years of service shall be calculated on a prorated basis with credit for partial years with the company. (ii) Reimbursement of health care benefit costs extended through COBRA for a period of three months.

Emphasis mine, in case anyone has trouble finding the health care provision. Why would the Guild lie about this? Furthermore, the agreement signed with the Guild ensures resources beyond just health insurance coverage and multiple months of severance pay. It also provides three months of professional outplacement services in support of job transition, re-placement support, and work-life coaching.

Over the last few days, not only have our remaining members been reckoning with the unnecessarily cruel way these layoffs were approached, we have also been mourning the loss of our coworkers and friends and working to ensure that members who were laid off have the resources they need to land safely in their next jobs. All this, while having to put in longer hours in our roles at Daily Kos to cover for team members who were let go.

No one is being asked to work longer hours. The claim is a lie. Full stop.

As I stated above, today is a company-wide mental health day, which the Guild utilized to attack us. That is, of course, on top of the two and a half months of paid time off everyone at Daily Kos already gets.

As for resources to find their next jobs, see above.

Will Rockafellow never attended a bargaining session until an emergency session was called on Feb. 24 between our Pacific Media Workers Guild attorney and representatives and DKM's bargaining team. In fact, aside from announcing a 20% staff layoff that violated our Guild members’ status quo protections, Will has only sporadically communicated with the Guild, and only indirectly at that, through two members of the People Operations team and the company’s attorney.

Will Rockafellow has attended multiple bargaining sessions. We have the receipts: emails, notes, agendas, you name it. We have communicated with the staff regularly throughout the entire process.

There appears to be a belief within the Guild that union protections mean no one can be laid off. That is simply not the case. When layoffs were announced, management engaged in good-faith negotiations with the Guild over the layoffs. The Guild proposed the agreement that was negotiated, voted on, and approved, which was then signed by all parties and adhered to at every turn. Whether Will or I attend bargaining sessions is irrelevant. We cannot pick the Guild’s negotiating team, and the Guild cannot pick ours. That said, the Guild has been nothing but disdainful of our Black-, LGBTQ-, and women-led negotiating team.

We need a leader willing to roll up their sleeves and figure our future out together—as equal partners in pursuit of our shared goals, and standard-bearers of our shared ideals—not one who hides behind Human Resources staff when faced with difficult decisions.

The Guild is not an equal partner in management. Management is management. Labor fights for better wages and workplace conditions. Note that the Guild still can’t point to a workplace condition they disagree with. The average Guild salary was $95,000 before this process began. It's now $98,000, as we’ve added resources to the community team (which directly serves you), as well as other adjustments benefiting several Guild members. Members get two and a half months of paid time off. They have employer-paid health coverage. They have a generous 401(k) match. And there are myriad other perks.

We had to make extremely difficult decisions over the past few weeks to protect the organization’s long-term health by sizing our workforce to match revenue. The Guild would rather us waste your money—community support is our largest source of funding—than make sure that we most efficiently use your hard-earned dollars to support our mission.

In the end, we offered Daily Kos management multiple plans that reduced harm to employees, protected marginalized members, and ensured the company’s financial security. They rejected every single one.

Regardless of what the Guild wants to claim, none of the ideas they brought to us actually cut costs. One plan involved putting people without experience in roles they weren’t qualified to perform. In another instance, they tried to replace a remaining employee with another remaining employee and claimed there would be “savings.” There are real, financial, nuts-and-bolts reasons why the Guild proposals were rejected: They wouldn’t have solved our financial shortfall.

We held this vote weeks before the targeted gutting of our union group and further union-busting actions from DKM the weekend of Feb. 25-27. Our members’ disappointment is both palpable and warranted. None of us applied to work for union-busters, and we will always call out anti-worker action when we see it.

There was no “targeted gutting” of the union. Over 60% of the departing Guild staff left voluntarily. In fact, we rejected voluntary buyouts from several of the most active Guild organizers because of how much we value them as contributors and employees.

If we were trying to “gut” the union—a union we voluntarily recognized—we really did a poor job of it.

But we are facing a challenge. Will Rockafellow, self-professed owner of this financial crisis, and absent party to our layoff negotiations, is here to stay—no matter how many of our unionized staff have departed. After laying off 17 employees, who are currently all without income or health care coverage, he continues to face no consequences for the company’s descent toward insolvency.

The factual inaccuracies are numerous:

Eight members of the guild volunteered for a buyout. They were not laid off.

All departing employees received a base severance of 12 weeks' pay, plus an additional one week's pay for each year of service with the company, with prorated credit for partial years with the company.

They also received reimbursement of health care benefit costs extended through COBRA for a period of three months.

Furthermore, the company was never "insolvent," nor was it descending toward "insolvency." A post-Trump era correction was needed to avoid ongoing losses. We took these actions precisely to avoid a worsening financial picture.

We get it. We can’t fire the president for making a catastrophic mistake and then failing to communicate it to the union before it was an emergency. We can’t fire him for deciding that cutting our jobs was the only remedy for his calamitous mismanagement. We can expect better from Daily Kos leadership, though, and we are demanding Will do better.

Note that they never mention what this “catastrophic mistake” is. Was it hiring people in the first place, and building a revenue line that eventually got disrupted into oblivion, years later? The catastrophic mistake would be to do nothing as revenues failed to cover employee costs.

Daily Kos is a lean organization. Ninety percent of our costs are staff, which is unsustainable. So yeah, we lost 30% of our revenue, and the cuts had to come from staff. There is literally nowhere else to cut, unless you think the servers running the site aren’t important.

Management did what it needed to do to right the organization. Instead of buckling down and working to avoid having to do this all over again, the Guild continues sabotaging the company’s standing by spreading outright lies. It’s shameful, and quite frankly, embarrassing that it’s coming from our employees, in an organization dedicated to truth and justice.

One final point: When challenged to provide more details by a commenter in their story, including details of their plan to supposedly save the company, the Guild account responded that it was “unable to release proprietary information about DKM’s decision-making processes without opening our members up to termination or legal action from the company.”

Here is what the severance agreement says:

Nothing in this Agreement prevents you from discussing or disclosing information about unlawful acts in the workplace, such as harassment or discrimination or any other conduct that you have reason to believe is unlawful. Nothing herein prevents you from disclosing or discussing information related to hours, wages and working conditions pursuant to Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act.

We encourage the Guild to provide the relevant examples they think illustrate their points, including all their proposals. We have nothing to hide.

The Guild account has published other stories on Daily Kos over the past few weeks that we've allowed to remain on the site even though those stories have contained inaccuracies and falsehoods. This is ending now. I care about this company. My name is in the URL. I will continue to make sure that Daily Kos exists to do the important work that we all have to do. Lies and false accusations do not help. We will continue to work with the union to productively help this company and serve our community. And we welcome the union's constructive, good-faith participation.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/3/3/2156093/-Daily-Kos-response-to-Daily-Kos-Guild-post

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