Hi all. Hoping someone could help here. We are a biotech startup. Yes, we're venture backed and yes, we voted to unionize last week. Unionization makes sense for us from a financial perspective and we are adopting it into our core culture. We're trying to write our employment contract. I'm the majority founder and CTO. In our board meeting we voted to "allow and encourage all our engineering staff to unionize". We also want to word our employment agreement to eliminate any at-will language, require progressive discipline to terminate any employees. We've also created a structure where by software engineers can still be covered by the collective bargaining agreement. We also want to make sure a new regime can’t just lay off employees in case something happens to current leadership. All I can find is statements like "This is an at will employment offer", which we are not but officially we don't have a collective bargaining agreement yet. We voted to offer: 32 hour a week work week/4 day work week. Time and a half after 8 hour day or 32 hours in a week including engineers. Double time on holidays or after a 12 hour day or 45 hours a week including engineers Part time engineering roles up to 20 hours a week 15 paid holidays Progressive discipline requirements, e.g. all terminations require documentation as to cause Pegged salaries to an external unit with built in annual cost of living raises A Simplified Employee Pension plan Right to union representation at all discipline hearings Full healthcare to all employees (PT or FT) I'm a disabled software engineer, I'm building a startup since December of 2021, we put in this board motion after Elon's vomit-inducing "work more hardcore" attitude. Often times its the disabled and those who are most easily taken advantage of, who end up becoming hardcore. We voted to accept a collective bargaining agreement to go on record as a company as to where our values lie, and as a disabled person the only times I haven't been targeted for "special treatment" has been in union positions. How can we word our job descriptions and offer letters/contracts to reflect that essentially we don't have a collective bargaining agreement yet, but when the employees vote to have one, we will negotiate in good faith, in the interim, this agreement should be treated as a collective bargaining agreement kind of thing. So we want to make sure they are represented by a union from day one without any lag time, to make sure that there is never a time where the employees are at a power disadvantage to us.
suggest however your legal counsel advises
You need to talk to a lawyer. Best wishes for your startup.
Why are you allowing unions? It’s going to come back and bite you in the ass. Remember, at the end of the day, you have to deliver results (in terms of revenue). Also, why tf are you providing insurance to part-timers? Just contract them out
This is a stupid troll post. Lawyers are the only ones that could successfully draft the agreements and contracts. And, as a founder, you would already have one of these agreements in place for yourself.
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I'm interested in how the backing VCs received this news.
They were thrilled actually. Let’s us lock in an employment budget for upcoming years. And these are smaller funds. Took some of the risk away for them.
I should also add because some of our tech has to be installed professionally, we already had some Union labor (low voltage electricians) around and it just made sense to extend that to everyone rather than doing two classes of employees.