• 420blazeit69 [he/him]
      ·
      11 months ago

      He asked for a few people to resign, yes, and he didn't have the authority to fire them, yes.

      What's the difference between this and firing someone? They knew he couldn't fire them (which makes their "I was fired here's where you can donate" tweets extremely bad in my eyes), so they could and did refuse to resign, and they kept getting paid even as the magazine went on hiatus and they did no work.

        • 420blazeit69 [he/him]
          ·
          11 months ago
          • Person A is a little more senior in an organization than Person B, and Person A delegates some work to Person B.
          • Over time, there is some dispute over how well Person B is doing their job.
          • Person A asks Person B to resign.
          • Person B stays, and keeps getting paid, because they know Person A can't fire them.
          • Person B tweets out "I've been fired, donate here."

          Is "Person A fired Person B" at all a fair characterization of that situation? I don't see any way someone who claims they were fired and asks for money while still drawing a paycheck is in the right -- they're just straight-up lying.

          There's room to criticize Robinson for not handling a difficult situation particularly well (and for not setting up a better group structure in the first place), but this is wildly different than "he fired employees for unionizing." There's was certainly no effort to unionize, in any case.

            • 420blazeit69 [he/him]
              ·
              edit-2
              11 months ago

              extremely badly written diatribe

              Come on. It posts receipts, names names, and is a conventionally-formatted narrative.

              As for who's credible here: I'm sure not going with the people who (at minimum) lied about being fired so they could grift money over twitter. They also declined to be interviewed for the article and never piped up to dispute the key "not actually fired" part despite continuing to tweet about the situation years after the fact.

              it sure sounds like every single person involved in the dispute is insufferable and shouldn't be published or paid attention to

              One reason "only me and my five online friends are True Leftists" is so popular is that being dismissive is easy. Mao and Stalin worked closely with plenty of leftists who didn't have perfect takes on everything, and even allied for a time with reactionaries like the KMT and U.S. That's the reality of a mass movement, not writing off people who are closer to you than probably 95% of the U.S. population.