Direct FB link. TLDR: A lesson in real time that power, not money, is at the heart of the capitalist system. It's easy to be a "good" boss, giving your workers good pay and benefits. Much harder to share power.
I'm trying to produce a more formal statement about it but bottom line is: I screwed up badly and did not live up to my values. I feel bad because I think I've generally done a good job for five years of making Current Affairs a pretty ethical organization and in a single day I bungled it and disappointed a lot of people. I've got a lot of work to do to rebuild trust, but I'm not sure if CA will survive, as subscribers rightly feel betrayed and we're getting cancelations. I don't blame people who cancel, all I can say is that I tried hard for five years to do right by people who worked for us and I'm really sad that I undid it in a single week.
Even though I screwed up, the truth is more complex than the 'fired the staff for wanting democracy' narrative. I've done many egalitarian things with Current Affairs. I don't earn any more than anyone else (we all get $45k a year). I gave up ownership over it, and don't make any kind of profit from it. Anyone can tell you I don't order people about. Everyone works when they like. I've hardly ever exerted authority over it internally at all. Partly as a result, the organization developed a kind of messy structurelessness where it wasn't clear who had power to do what and there was not much accountability for getting work done. The organization had become very inefficient, I wasn't exercising any oversight, and we were adrift. I did feel that it badly needed reorganizing. Our subscription numbers had not been doing well lately and I felt I needed to exert some control over the org to get it back on track, asking some people to leave and moving others to different positions. Unfortunately, I went about this in a horrible way that made people feel very disrespected, asking for a bunch of resignations at once and making people feel like I did not appreciate their work for the organization.
The charge made in the statement by staff is that I didn't want CA to be a worker cooperative. I think this is complicated, or at least that my motivations are somewhat explicable. A worker cooperative had been floated as one of the possible solutions to the structurelessness problem. I am not sure my position on this was defensible, it might have been deeply hypocritical and wrong and selfish, but I will at least explain how I felt. **Since starting CA, I have resisted making Current Affairs 'owned' by staff not because I want to own it myself but because I don't want it to be owned at all, I want it to operate as a not for profit institution that does not belong to particular people. ** ow, I don't want to be a workplace dictator, and I think nobody can say that before this I acted like one in my day-to-day work, but I do feel a strong sense of possession over the editorial vision and voice of the magazine, having co-founded it and worked at it the longest. I had been frustrated at what I saw as encroachments on my domain (editorial) by recently-hired business and admin staff. I had also been frustrated that people were in jobs that clearly weren't working. Plans that were discussed for making the organization more horizontal in its decision-making seemed like they would (1) make it impossible to fix the structurelessness problem and exacerbate the problem of lack of oversight/accountability/reporting structure (2) make it less and less possible for me to actually make the magazine what I think it can be. I felt that without making sure we had the right people in jobs, this was going to result in further disorganized chaos and slowly "bureaucratize" CA into oblivion. But I do not think I tried to fix that problem in the right way at all.
I have never ever tried to own CA or make a profit from it. This was not about money, or keeping people from getting their rightful share of the proceeds. I am not a capitalist, I do not expropriate surplus value. I have never taken more money for myself than anyone else on the full-time staff got, and want to do everything possible to ensure fair working conditions. What I did want was the ability to remain the executive director of the organization and be able to have staff report to me so as to make sure stuff was getting done. That may have been wrong. But that is how I felt.
I am open to believing that this cannot be justified. I can say where the feeling came from which is: for years I made the magazine basically alone in my living room, and I have felt like it is my baby and I know how to run it. It was hard to feel like I was slowly having my ability to run it my way taken away. I think that it's easy to talk about a belief in power sharing but when it comes down to actually sharing power over this thing I have poured my heart and soul into, it felt very very difficult to do. I found it easy to impose good working conditions and equal pay. Giving up control over running CA was a far harder thing for me to accept. This is a personal weakness that ran up against my principle.
I am sorry to all of you and to the staff of CA who did so much to make it what it is today. It's my sincere hope that CA makes it through this because I think we have much more great work to do in the future. I will try my very best to make sure this is done in accordance with sound leftist values. This was not that.
So...I dunked pretty hard on NJR, but if this is right he was actually mostly correct and the other writers are being babies. Like, workers' co-ops also need management and structure in order to ensure basic things are getting done. Huawei is the most successful workers' co-op on earth, but Ren Zhengfei still gets to run the fucking thing. The Mondragon Corporation members elect their bosses and regulate wage differentials, but they still have to do the things their bosses tell them.
Nah, this is basically a confession to running an abusive workplace. NJR admits he's bad at running an organization, but demands the unilateral power to hire and fire and editorial control over the business. He wants to be a workplace dictator. Co-ops can have managers, sure, but co-op bosses are democratically decided on and are accountable to the workers. NJR demanded everyone be accountable to him and he be accountable to nobody.
NJR is a liar and an abusive manager, and leftists shouldn't fall for his narrative. His actions are not only antithetical to everything we organize for, they're arguably a labor law violation. Don't lose sight of the facts: he blew up his workplace because his workers asked for better conditions. That's the only thing that matters.
And I want to be clear I'm not saying this because I have an axe to grind with him. I literally have a stack of CA magazines on my nighttable and one just has to look into my post history to see I'm a huge fan of his work. But his statement should be read as a confession and little else.
It sounds like he has personally invested a lot of time into this magazine and doesnt think other workers with fewer responsibilities, who havent invested the same time or energy will care as much about it succeeding. Hell he might even feel responsible for the magazines success and in turn feel entitled to controlling the workplace based on his efforts. Its like how when you create a band thats lasted a few years and has has developed a following, you dont want to hand off creative control of the band to the roadies.
In other words, NJR is a fake fucking socialist.
But seriously all the writers should just fuck off and make their own co-op. Nathan doesnt have any means of production that they need and they are the ones that make the magazine run.
:fidel-si:
Fair enough.
"Abusive" is totally unwarranted. How is a company that pays everyone equally, isn't enriching any ownership, and has an informal-to-the-point-of-ineffective management style abusive?
We don’t know if it’s “informal to the point of ineffective” - that’s just what the boss is saying to (conveniently) undermine worker organization. The business manager at CA has said the company was doing fine and was in no financial danger (https://twitter.com/ajthrillcox/status/1428133516009672707?s=21).
Just because there’s pay equity doesn’t absolve management at CA. Working conditions matter. It would be like defending an abuser by saying “well, think about all the types of abuse he’s not doing.” It’s cleverly disguised anti-worker propaganda, comrade.
I make the charge of abuse because the employees who were fired for organizing mention being humiliated in meetings and receiving scathing emails for the crime of organizing. The business manager has said as such here: https://twitter.com/ajthrillcox/status/1428043400960434176?s=21
The workers at CA are united in saying NJR is lying about the situation to undermine their attempts at improving working conditions. I don’t see a reason not to believe them.
If we're going to be skeptical of NJR's story, we should be skeptical of the other story, too. You could just as easily say that the rest of the staff omitting any mention of workplace disorganization suggests they weren't on the ball, or weren't adequately concerned about the problem. A company doesn't have to be in financial danger to not be getting stuff done. They were notorious for getting print issues out late, for instance.
Similarly, a claim of being humiliated at a meeting -- with no supporting details or corroboration -- should not be taken as absolute truth.
NJR is a worker, too. No one is making money off of anyone else's labor here, least of all the guy who produces the most content. This isn't a typical labor dispute. It sounds like he shit the bed from a management standpoint, but that doesn't make him automatically wrong on everything and the rest of the staff automatically right.
My best guess is that a lot of people weren't quite getting the job done, NJR failed at the extremely difficult task of telling one's friends that they need to step it up, and he balked when the folks already underperforming brought up the issue of taking on even more responsibility.
Because the company mass fired everyone for questioning the boss.
Sounds like there were some firings, some pressured registrations, and some unpressured resignations. And "boss" here doesn't mean what it usually does, because no one in this scenario is a capitalist. No one is making money off anyone else's labor, least of all the guy who seemingly works the most of the whole staff.
They’re generating revenue from subscriptions and that’s going somewhere. Plenty of businesses run at a loss the first couple years. There’s still capital being generated, even if it is only covering operational costs and salaries.
I’ve seen nothing to indicate NJR works more than the other workers of Current Affairs aside from NJRs claims, but maybe I missed something. I’m not going to trust anything said by a boss who just fired the majority of workers for organizing.
Regardless of that, should the person who works the most at a company deserve to control whether the other workers stay employed? That seems dysfunctional. How do you measure “works the most”? Is it time? Senority? Effort? How do you measure the value of different labour against each other?
NJR controls the LLC which owns Current Affairs and has power to fire and remove anyone who questions him. Current Affairs sells subscriptions and so is paid for the value of their labour. NJR controls the proceeds of those payments. NJR is against the workers employed by the LLC organizing.
NJR sounds like he’s practicing capitalism.
Capital is being generated, but that doesn't necessarily mean anyone is making money off anyone else's labor. They're all paid the same low salary. Not for profits specifically don't allow anyone to profit from ownership shares, either.
As for who works most, flip through the site and see who wrote the most articles. Especially early on, CA was basically NJR's blog with occasional contributors. Even now that there are a lot more authors, the guy's still the most regular and frequent.
I don't think he was right to fire anyone. I think he should have handled this situation far differently. But ask a different version of that question: is the organization going to succeed if people who (supposedly) aren't great at getting work done are given more work and responsibility? That outcome doesn't look very promising, either.
Yeah, I guess the mass firing of people dependent on that job for income is what really rubs me the wrong way here. I’ve been on the other end of that and being retaliated against by a boss is terrible.
He fucked up big time, no argument there. It seems more like a failure to manage an extremely tough situation, though, and less like something greedy or egotistical. People are way too eager to shit on the guy, and have been for a long time.
The workers were fucking fired. For demanding a more equal workplace. The fuck are you on about? NJR wants you to believe that if he isn't personally in control, the magazine would fail. That's just not true. The workers can democratically elect, from amongst themselves, who they feel shall best lead the rest. The position can be alternated. The role can be distributed among different people, each focusing on what they can do. Not to mention, given that he was already the boss, which means he already had more experience, they probably would've just voted to keep him in charge!
If anything we’re seeing exactly what happens when he tries to personally control the magazine. He just demolished “his baby” within a day.
The workers don’t need him. They should leave, found their own co-op, and blacklist him. Their subscriber base is even ideologically sympathetic to backing the workers here.
Guarantee there’s a sympathetic comrade with access to their mailing list
Based on what I've read in CA, those workers with their own co-op will do substantially less quality work to less acclaim than NJR by himself, probably even with all of the fallout from this.
I dislike NJR for some of the fights he's chosen to pick, but I think it's pretty reasonable to expect that people in positions of artistic control don't want to be unseated by hacks. Communist orchestras would still have conductors, and the best conductor doesn't try to take the average of every musicians opinion on each section of the music.
:chairman-moa-panic:
Any organizational management should be democratically elected by the workers. It sounds like NJR thought he wasn’t going to win that vote or is so rabidly insecure that he didn’t have confidence that others viewed him as a good fit for the role.
Ironically, he went and proved them right.
Exactly! Like, a lot of long-term staff were personal friends. They all knew each other very well. They (probably) would've voted to keep NJR in charge because he has the most experience at that position. Like...this is a nothing "apology".
Of course it is, NJR wrote it. The hack has made a career out of eloquently saying nothing.