BuzzFeed Management Hints Some Folks Should Consider Learning to Code

I know it is Lent. And I know schadenfreude is wrong, but sometimes you see things that are just so delicious you can’t not take pleasure in the misery and discomfort of people who richly deserve it.

Apparently, the editorial staff at BuzzFeed, these would be the brainiacs who churn out cat videos and listcicles, have decided to unionize. I suspect watching battalions of their fellows, all with tons of student debt and no apparent skills or motivation, troop off to coding boot camps has focused their minds and they’ve decided it is easier not working and cowering behind collective bargaining laws than it is to turn out a product anyone wants to read.

A couple of days ago, the little bolsheviks of BuzzFeed set up a meeting and this happened

This meeting was a crucial opportunity to make progress in agreeing on a bargaining unit, after more than 7 weeks of frustratingly slow communication with BuzzFeed. Instead, they abandoned today’s negotiations.

BuzzFeed management is engaging in clear union-busting.

— BuzzFeed News Union (@bfnewsunion) April 3, 2019

We’re a dynamic newsroom where desks and teams collaborate freely and employees are encouraged to experiment. The union is determined to maintain that spirit — and that’s why we need to be recognized as a full editorial unit.

— BuzzFeed News Union (@bfnewsunion) April 3, 2019

Read our full letter to our @BuzzFeedNews colleagues, and please — if you support the journalism that we do, support the BuzzFeed News Union. pic.twitter.com/7W3WGKOiUN

— BuzzFeed News Union (@bfnewsunion) April 3, 2019

I’ll take a hard pass on that “if you support the journalism that we do” bullsh**. BuzzFeed is fairly loathesome in that has no compunction whatsoever in ruining lives of people they disagree with. It functions that way because the people who work there aren’t really journalist, they are propagandists.

According to BuzzFeed management, the talks didn’t happen because the company thought it was negotiating membership on a position-by-position basis and the union wanted to unionize everyone in specific units within BuzzFeed. I imagine this latter impulse comes from the January layoffs where nearly all of their so-called LGBT, national news and national security desks were told to learn to code.

The level of indiscipline within the proposed bargaining unit is really something to behold. These are tweets from BuzzFeed employees trashing management, basically calling them garbage people, to coin an expression,

Our organizing committee has been working hard and in good faith to reach a point where the company voluntarily recognizes our union. This is deeply disappointing and disrespectful. https://t.co/yuvsciqyyx

— Nidhi Prakash (@nidhiprakash) April 3, 2019

don’t cultivate a large, tightly knit team of some of the best and brightest internet content creators in the history of the medium and then just… piss them all off at the same time. this seems like… self-preservation 101?

— Kristin Chirico (@lolacoaster) April 3, 2019

This is so disheartening and a slap in the face and goes against the first thing we all learned in preschool: treatothersthewayyouwanttobetreated

jfc. https://t.co/4lX2gcI6y6

— Brianna Sacks (@bri_sacks) April 3, 2019

You don’t really have to be a labor relations expert to see how this plays out. BuzzFeed has no interest in letting a union into its business because this particular union brings no added-value to the table. They have no skills that couldn’t be filled within 24-hours if BuzzFeed tweeted out that it was hiring spoiled, snotty writers with no life experience. This union has no interest in organizing in a traditional manner because they are trying to protect internal fiefdoms as much as improve working conditions.

Odds are these talks never really move forward and in another six months, you guessed it:

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