I’m not sure when this issue of unionizing bloggers became a mainsteam issue (seeing as how, even in the sphere where the idea started it’s basically universally derided), but it’s taken on enough steam that I feel I need to provide some perspective on it (especially as the discussion has shifted to network “owners”).

Good context can be found at Telegraphik. Not because he has any kind of salient insights, but because he does direct the argument specifically at network owners, basically painting it as “bloggers should become employees and get all the rights and benefits of being employees”.

I’m not going to even touch the issue of forming a union, attempting to form a global union, wondering who (exactly) is going to represent this union, etc. I’ll simply be tackling the economics of this for network bloggers.

But before I do, let me state point blank to b5 bloggers: if you guys want to unionize, let’s talk about it. To me, folk who unionize are unhappy. And if folk are actually that unhappy that they feel they need strength in numbers (instead of, y’know, opening a subject in the forums or emailing me directly) then it’s worth talking about.

That said, across-the-board unionization, and treating everyone as employees, to me, stinks. For a few reasons:

  1. If you want to get paid as employees, you get treated a employees. Less leniency, less transparency, less community, it all becomes about your output vs the revenue you’re driving. And that sucks the soul out of the whole thing.
  2. It’s vastly more expensive to give everyone benefits, etc. To the point where we’d need to retool the entire workforce to be based on a handful of senior writers with a handful of junior ones to support them. This not only gives us less of a depth of content, but also means that folk who aren’t at all passionate about a subject end up writing about it because they have to – which, again, sucks the soul out of the whole thing.
  3. It puts a communication barricade between the team behind b5 and the bloggers that make the magic happen every day. Again, soul… poof.

But that’s all touchy feely stuff, which everyone knows I’m always down for. So some numbers. First, I’m going to assume a US perspective on this issue – primarily because the big names driving this are in the US and are asking for US-style benefits. Which is weird to me, because those most likely to be “oppressed” and to need unionization (and, conversely, to get the benefits of said unionization) aren’t actually in the western world at all.

I’ll be assuming the following factoids:

  1. That in order to provide benefits, insurance and the other items outlined (vaguely) at Telegraphik, that these things are extended only to full-time, salaried, employees. It makes no economic sense to provide it to temps and part-timers… Indeed it’s counter-productive as the cost of maintaining those policies vastly outweighs the benefits they’d provide… So a business would end up outsourcing that work to keep the costs down.
  2. As they are employees, they’ll need certain basic required to do their jobs, such as computers and cellphones and software and a place to work, provided for them. Not necessarily a full-scale office building, but if nothing else a properly-kitted out place to work (since in the US you can’t pay someone to do a job without giving them the tools necessary to excel at it).
  3. Because there are suddenly dozens more employees to employ, a much larger “support infrastructure” would be required, including HR, IT, regular purchasing of hardware and software, license management, real mail servers and all the things you’d expect from a 40-50 person company.
  4. As a result of these issues, and since outsourcing all writing wouldn’t go well with a union, you can’t maintain benefits, HR, IT and support for bloggers in dozens of countries. The legal costs alone of contract negotiations, taxes and regulatory compliance would make that impossible. As a result, you need to refocus the company on 3-4 countries (max)… Though a truly frugal management would likely refocus on just one or two… And because the US union system is so powerful, you can bet one of those would be the US.
  5. As a result of these costs, you end up dropping any property that isn’t low-cost/high-revenue.

Now I don’t want to get into too many assumptions, so let’s run some numbers. In the last year, b5media has paid out more than $1MM to our bloggers (perhaps more than anyone else, but I don’t really know). So if we assume a budget for writers and supporting writers of 1M$, what kind of staff of writers are we actually able to employ, according to US standards (because no US union would stand for us hiring cheap overseas labour, even if it is better, more passionate, etc)?

Well, benefits and insurance and such cost, on average, 1000$/employee/month in the US. In addition, the operational costs of phone, internet, etc, an be assumed to be roughly 100$/employee/month if they’re in an office though you add an additional 100$/emp/mo for office space) or 150$/emp/mo for stay-at-home. For simplicity’s sake (and because otherwise we’d need to factor in moving expenses and cost of living adjustments) we’ll have people work at home.

We’ll also need to provide them hardware and software (3500$/emp), basic utilities and stationary (500$/emp/year). We’ll also have to have HR and IT staff (80K each), more IT equipment (1000$/emp/year) to run the backoffice stuff and at least once-yearly meetups to keep the company engaged (2500$/emp/year).

Which gives us basic costs, pre-salary, of $21,300/emp/year. Let’s just round it way down to 15K/emp/year in additional costs and assume we can find some savings here and there to cover it (ie: this model will get so expensive so quickly most people will do a double-take so I’m fudging some figures to make this cheaper). In addition, we have 200K in backoffice expenses.

Then we need to set some kind of salary. As in any typical media company, for every 10 writers, you’d have one “star” at 100K/year, 3 senior writers at 70K/year, 4 junior writers at 50K/year and a couple of lowbies at 30K/year. Which gives us staffing costs of about 570K/year for every group of 10 writers. Add in their base costs above of 15K/writer and you get a total of about 720K/year for 10 writers + 200K for backoffice staff and additional expenses and you have about $1MM in costs.

Which means that if an organization like b5media wanted to follow Telegraphik’s advice and pay our employees full time, with full-time benefits, and didn’t want to vastly increase costs, we’d need to have only 10 writers. And of those 10 writers, nearly 45% of the costs would have nothing to do with writing at all.

Could a blog union work? Sure. But not as long as the basic demands are full-time employment for everyone, full benefits and insurance, and treatment as employees. If the demands are more reasonable, such as regular reviews, visibility into the financials of the company on a yearly basis, profit sharing, etc, then yeah it could work.

But you’d still need to figure out a union structure that works, and is legal, around the world, you’d need to find a whole whack of bloggers to agree to said structure, and you’d need a whole whack of bloggers to elect representatives and to abide by their decisions.

Personally, I’m a much bigger fan of bloggers simply communicating with the folk who pay them, working as a team and building something where everyone gets rewarded for their work. With pay, with support, with community, with lots of soft benefits and, if the company does well, a proportionate payout of some kind.

If that’s unfair, exploitive, etc, then I guess I’m a slave driver.