(Disclaimer: the post is not about supporting employers as forbidden by the rules but aims to provide you with another perspective to help you be more efficient when defending your rights).
I am myself an owner at a startup.
Recently we went thought a very complicated and painful stage when we almost run out of cash. First we had to cut my salary, than put managers on a “hungry diet”, then reduce bonuses and comp for employees.
This was a decision which we negotiated and agreed with the entire team but, strictly speaking, it was against the contracts.
Nevertheless, we survived and the profits we are making now are going to our employees in excess of their contractual pay to show our appreciation for their support.
So I wanted to use this post to provide a little perspective on defending your rights as an employee.
A lot of businesses are run by f*cks who don’t care about their employees and will go an extra mile to squeeze an extra penny out of you. Defending yourself against bosses like that is a holy war worth of every support.
On the other hand, there are situations where the business is genuinely fighting for survival and the management took all the hit it could and there is no way out other than options affecting employees.
I totally understand why you’d be unhappy with such situation but it’s important to understand: rallying against a business is a position like that will either get you immediately laid off (if you are a single campaigner) or will kill the business and you’ll also end up unemployed (if you manage to organise your co-workers).
So I think it’s really important to draw a line between the cruel owners who exploit their workers to get another yacht and the guys who are making less than their own employees and are in a genuinely bad position but keen to make sure that at the end of the day you have a job.
Campaigning against your employer in the second situation will likely be damaging to you as much as to the owner and so I call on everyone to put some time into investigating your wider business situation before engaging in (totally justified) defence of your rights as an employee.