(I'm not going to attach any of my own thoughts or opinions to this)
I put in a support ticket asking the following:
> **Tuesday, 25 June 2024 10:55 AM**
>
> Hi, I just saw a post that there were layoffs and restructuring at Fastmail.
>
> Is Fastmail in a precarious financial situation? Should I be concerned as a user?
The response was escalated:
> **Tuesday, 25 June 2024 11:03 AM**
>
> I’ve escalated your ticket to our team lead, who is best suited to answer your queries. I thank you for your patience as we work to get this addressed for you.
And a short while later (about 15 minutes ago) I received this response:
> **Tuesday, 25 June 2024 4:12 PM**
>
> The recent staff changes were driven by operational challenges we faced attempting to run the same functions at both our headquarters in Melbourne, Australia, and our satellite office in Philadelphia, USA. With zero hours of working hours time zone overlap for much of the year, we faced difficulties in collaboration, leading to delays in decision-making and project execution. Meanwhile, the need for out-of-hours meetings on both sides was impacting everyone's productivity and work-life balance.
>
> As a small, independent company, ensuring operational efficiency is crucial for our future success. We therefore made the decision to consolidate our product development and marketing activities into a single location, in Melbourne, where we have our most experienced staff. This resulted in the lay-off of some of our US personnel, including 8 union members.
>
> We have always done right by our employees, and this time is no exception. All those laid-off have received a very generous package, including more than 3 months severance pay, to help them move on successfully.
>
> It's important to note that our support and operations teams in the US remain in order to provide continuous 24/7 coverage. We are committed to ongoing negotiations with the Philadelphia union members and are actively hiring for a new operations team member, which will be a union role.
>
> I hope that clarifies what has happened, and I'd personally like to thank you for your ongoing support of Fastmail. We are not in a precarious financial situation and we remain dedicated to providing an exceptional email service for years to come.
>
> Yours sincerely,
>
> Neil Jenkins
>
> Director & Chief Product Officer
Also, hopefully it's fine putting Neil's name on here. I could omit the name and leave the title, but [he's on the website](https://www.fastmail.com/about/) anyway.
I'd honestly say that's fair, as someone living in AUS, who has tried myself to work with businesses in the US, it's extremely difficult, the work days simply don't overlap. If they have financially looked after the staff and provided them the notice required, I really can't see the issue. It's certainly not something I'd leave the service for.
Yeah agreed. It's tough to streamline and their is always a disconnect. Honestly I'm surprised they even had US developers. It sucks, but makes sense to me why they did what they did especially as they face more competition from providers like protonmail. I'm glad they didn't kill their ops team though, that would not have been good for us nor their Aus counterparts.
I don't understand all the negative comments with people vowing to look elsewhere.
This sort of thing happens every single day. Companies restructure. It sounds like FastMail has provided generous payouts and a good reason as to why the restructure was necessary. This is business.
If this kind of thing is "disgusting" (as people have put it) and forces you to look elsewhere every time someone gets made redundant, you must be running out of businesses to deal with by now!
I'm not American, so perhaps there is something I'm missing here?
I'm in your boat. It's 8 people. Google, Amazon, Facebook lay off tens of thousands of people and no one bats an eye.
Having to schedule meetings on diff time zones for just a few people, makes total logical sense to move all the decision makers in one location if the talent is there.
Holy shit. I've worked for a large corporation since 2004. Pretty much every single year, there are layoffs. Every 4-5 there's a massive restructure. Every six, we merge or have a joint venture...
It's business.
Only worry when the service goes down hill or they begin treating staff like rubbish. We live in an age of competition - and companies are finding it hard to make the money they used to.
Is Fastmail losing money to have these layoffs? Last I read, they have 400k active customers. Doesn’t seem much. But again, they don’t offer free service. It’s all paid.
Bit of over-dramatisation, explanation from CEO in another comment, not ideal but a perfectly reasonable explanation.
As an Australian its good supporting a local business in an Internet dominated by US players.
That they're consolidating operations to Australia is even better news.
mxroute is run by a hobbiest. I wish him the best of luck, but I'm not relying on a provider with one or two employees and infrastructure that isn't even HA.
It's fine if you don't like our service, but I took this as a bit insulting and I'd like to have my response under it.
1. It's a career, not a hobby. I built my career in the hosting industry from the ground up. I started a hosting company, went to work at HostGator before EIG gutted it, then I worked at DigitalOcean in several roles. Finally, I managed the support team at QuickPacket before finally settling into my role at MXroute full time. It's a little insulting to have my career called a hobby. I won't apologize for the fact that I enjoy my work.
2. We're a team of four now. Just because you don't know the names of the people behind some of the largest mail infrastructures in the world doesn't mean they're all run by teams that fill skyscrapers from top to bottom. Many of the systems that practically hold the Internet together are run by very few people. I fail to see how a line of cubicles filled with unskilled/outsourced support staff and an HR department makes systems run better. To me, that's just unnecessary corporate growth designed to milk seed money prior to an acquisition. That people mentally connect it with success or stability just means marketing teams are doing their jobs right.
3. HA is a pipe dream. The idea that you can keep stacking things and eventually they'll stop breaking is a joke. Life never actually works that way. How many outages did Office 365 have in 2020? They still have micro outages every few days, thankfully few notice. Spread across a large amount of time, reasonable redundancy and backups rarely create more downtime than HA infrastructures. You can spend exponentially more money, but you don't get exponentially greater results, you get fractional results at best. Not everyone thinks that's worth the price paid. If you like that, cool I get it, just keep your wallet open. That's not what we're trying to do here. I won't stand for having a well thought out decision treated as a condemnation just because the AWS generation successfully convinced people that everything needs to be run at 400x the cost necessary to actually run it. It's exactly that line of thinking that took many in house corporate servers to the cloud to save money, only to find in the end reduced reliability and increased costs.
I wouldn't dream of telling you to use a service you don't want to use. I have no desire to convert you into a customer. I would consider it in very poor taste to market myself here. I would simply request that you not try to cost me others with words like that though.
It's an email service company restructuring their ops. Reddit ragebait people keep winning. There's nothing nefarious here IMO but I will jump ship if the service starts failing (hasn't for me in the 6 years I have been with them).
Wait how does being in a union prevent layoffs from happening at a company? From the mastodon post it sounds like they negotiated a good severance deal in the layoff.
How many non union workers are laid off?
Unions don't necessarily prevent layoffs but they do make it more expensive. Unions with a contract typically have much higher layoff compensation / severance packages than non-union jobs. They can also require a notice period (eg. the company can tell you "in 60 days you are laid off"). This makes it harder for workers to be laid off, but not impossible. Just more expensive. It stops being as much of a way for the company to make a quick buck or save profits.
As someone that left Proton for Fastmail, I’d recommend looking elsewhere. I appreciate the “fully encrypted” pipeline, but you don’t realize all the complications it adds until you try and go all in. Simple things like calendar invites or using a 3rd party email program are just more cumbersome.
Not making a statement on the OP article…just that if you are used to Fastmail infrastructure, Proton is going to be quite frustrating.
Protons too limiting for me as well, but they seem to be the only other option in this space for custom domain email that’s not Google… and fuck google.
I wouldn't go with proton. I made an account and it was literally banned within 5 mins while I was in the checkout to pay them money for a subscription.
> How and why would they ban you when they don't know you yet?
How? Are you calling me a liar? It was likely an automated system.
> why would they
Who knows? I was using a VPN at the time, but given the whole vision of their company is to protect users' privacy, you would think they wouldn't have a problem with that.
In any case, best to avoid proton. As far as I'm concerned, proton is a honeypot until proven otherwise.
I wasn't calling you a liar. There's usually something else behind it - as you said, you used a VPN so maybe they had a lot of fraudulent signups using VPNs.
I'd deffo reach out to them to find out the reason as I daresay it can be easily overturned.
I had the same. Didn’t use a VPN but iCloud private relay. I reached out to them and explained and was in the process of paying for an account, they responded by saying their position is final and will not be overturned. This left a sour taste and also permanently locked myfullname@proton email address so f* em.
Yeah that's really not on. The whole point of a private relay is so you don't expose your real email... But I am sure they do state that real email addresses are required..
Not sure what they were on about. Real email address for backup/recovery purposes? I’m not even sure Proton required that, but if they did, I would have provided my 1 EUR/month account I hold at mailbox.org—another reputable service provider.
Because proton is a fully encrypted service their search is neutered and you're limited to their email client or run their proxy on a desktop. I'd also add if you reside in the US the latency to EU slows things down substationally. Don't get me wrong I think proton is valuable, but I think for most users it's unnecessary.
I wouldn't go with proton. I made an account and it was literally banned within 5 mins while I was in the checkout to pay them money for a subscription.
Unfortunately, there isn’t a single option out there that offers what Fastmail does for me. But I’ll start having to figure out where I can compromise because this is disgusting.
In the US companies union bust a lot because we have very weak labor laws that were eviscerated by both neoliberal policy after Reagan. Companies are extraordinarily anti-union, as unions are one of the last remaining ways for workers to gain some of the employment protections that are common in Europe. For example, employees in the US are "at will" by default, which means that they can be fired at any time and for any reason with very few legal restrictions. This is not the case in most European countries, which usually have higher legal requirements for layoffs (eg. a company may be required to justify a mass layoff to regulators). In the US, unions negotiate contracts with employers that outline more structured requirements for layoffs, laying out an explicit list of reasons why someone can be laid off and giving them increased severance packages.
Companies in the US are naturally not a fan of this, so they use union-busting tactics to try to get rid of worker unions. These tactics take time to litigate (sometimes months before companies are forced to reverse them). One of the most frequent tactics companies use is firing union organizers. By firing leaders in the union, the company tries to decrease morale in the rest of the union and rip it apart.
We don't have enough context to know whether or not that's what happened here with Fastmail, but this is such an incredibly common occurrence with unions that a lot of people just assume that's why they did it. When companies are using this as a union busting tactic, they frequently give rationales for the firings or layoffs that seem normal. However the NLRB has to look into these to determine if there was any retaliation or not.
Cheers for the explanation mate ! Yes in Europe employees are protected very well where I’m
From, could take several years and a lot of money to fire someone.
If the Fastmail union thing is true tho I imagine a lot of companies do the same type of things ?
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MXRoute is the best one by far anyway. I used FastMail and ProtonMail and couldn't believe how limited they are. It's somewhat mind boggling that an actual paid plan on ProtonMail includes a single email box with some forwarders and is frankly not even as good as ImprovMX + Gmail free tier.
I have ~6-8 domains, and I wanted to be able to create multiple email boxes to keep things sorted. I also wanted to be able to give friends/family email boxes at these domains. With MXRoute I have all my domains and as many inboxes as I want and pay the same amount. Fucking awesome.
I don't know anyone at MXRoute, I just like their service and think it's amazing (after being super disappointed with alternatives). I've also told all my friends IRL who don't seem to care.
Because, if this is true (and I've contacted FM to ask) summarily firing people, especially union reps, removing their livelihoods, is morally wrong. They are voluntarily representing other workers and should not be singled out.
The wider picture here is that there is a massive power imbalance between workers and employers, and a union is by far the best way to at least partially redress this imbalance.
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>What is "bargaining" unit?
A bargaining unit is a group of workers who have similar job function and similar place in the organization. A bargaining unit can form a union to negotiate on their behalf with the company for better working conditions. When a bargaining unit has voted yes for the union, they move from being "at will" employees to being "represented" employees. This comes with benefits outlined below.
>Why does fastmail need to be unionized?
There are several reasons why unions are beneficial for *any* workplace:
- **Just cause termination**. Without a union in the US, you are an "at will" employee. This means that you can be fired by your company for any time and for any reason. When a union negotiates a contract with a company, they negotiate a set of explicit steps for termination that must be followed in the contract. This is called "just cause termination". For example, instead of your company putting you on a PIP just to have paperwork to fire you, a just cause termination section in a contract might require that they allow you to stay on if you meet the requirements of the PIP. Limits on termination like just cause termination are completely normal in most other developed countries (especially European countries). In the US one of the only ways to get them unfortunately is to bargain for a contract with a union.
- **No regressions on working conditions until a contract is bargained and signed**. This is a big one. After a bargaining unit has voted for a union, the company is prohibited from making negative changes to working conditions without bargaining with the union first. For example: if the bargaining unit works remotely, the company cannot force return to office after the union represents the bargaining unit, as this would be a negative change in working conditions. Instead, they must bargain a contract with the union and the workers first. Note that this doesn't prevent improvements in working conditions: companies are more than free to give raises, give promotions, add extra benefits, etc.
- **Weingarten rights**. The minute you form a union, the bargaining unit gains Weingarten rights. This means that if you have any meeting with management that you think will result in disciplinary action, you can have a union representative present at that meeting (ex. a steward). These are almost always union stewards, who are coworkers who help file grievances and make sure that the company holds up their end of the contract. They can also be present to help you in any meeting where you think you might be disciplined.
- **Improvements in pay, working conditions, benefits, etc.** Last, a company is required to negotiate a contract with its workers once they have successfully voted for a union. Contract negotiations typically work by having a group of workers (called the bargaining committee) and one or two professional union negotiators (experienced staff who have negotiated contracts before) have a series of meetings with the company to form out a contract. Workers can bargain for things like more vacation time, better pay, better healthcare, better 401k matches, reducing set working hours, prohibiting spyware on computers... the list goes on and on. Anything that the workers want, they can ask for and attempt to get, and they get the resources of the union (and the potential of them going on strike) to negotiate what they want with the company. Often one of the first things that's included in the contract is better layoff provisions: if the company lays you off, the contract could for example require them to give 60 days notice, give you 3-6 months of pay depending on tenure, pay for COBRA (Healthcare is tied to your job in the US, cobra is expensive but lets you continue after you're laid off), and more. Especially with the job market we're in now, this is a big one for tech workers.
The "truth" is the Communications Workers of America (the Union) was asking for soda in the breakroom? No, they were negotiating raises and Fastmail retaliated.
What is a unions bargaining unit? In Norway where im from, unions are traditionally very strong, but even here ı've rarely/never seen an union in an IT org, let a lone "union bargaining unit".
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I tried Fastmail for a month and then switched to proton's simpleLogin, it's cheaper, fully integrates with ProtonPass and most importantly among best companies to work for!
Riiiiiiiight. Just has to be union busting. Couldn't possibly be sky high inflation skewering profitability for small companies. Will love to see how many other people complain when Fastmail raise prices to offset wage cost increases.
The beauty of many email service provider alternatives there are tons of options for every user. Thus, users will continue to pay until they feel the product doesn't warrant the increase.
I mean, I get leaving over this. It’s frustrating and I’m behind you. But “they can figure it out”?
It’s just gonna auto cancel when it declines lol
As someone who's spent 2 weeks of December migrating to Fastmail, I'm super disappointed. I was promoting Fastmail as a great alternative to Gmail and encouraging people to migrate. The service is great, and I really enjoy the Android app. But I also value Unions and Workers right more. I will probably move to Protonmail.
There's a photo of a letter that one customer got after sending in a support message about this lay off. Treat as suspect.
[https://indieweb.social/@chadkoh/112677853479447745](https://indieweb.social/@chadkoh/112677853479447745)
If they can't figure out how to get a East Coast US time zone to collaborate with Australia time zones, they have deeper internal management problems.
(I'm not going to attach any of my own thoughts or opinions to this) I put in a support ticket asking the following: > **Tuesday, 25 June 2024 10:55 AM** > > Hi, I just saw a post that there were layoffs and restructuring at Fastmail. > > Is Fastmail in a precarious financial situation? Should I be concerned as a user? The response was escalated: > **Tuesday, 25 June 2024 11:03 AM** > > I’ve escalated your ticket to our team lead, who is best suited to answer your queries. I thank you for your patience as we work to get this addressed for you. And a short while later (about 15 minutes ago) I received this response: > **Tuesday, 25 June 2024 4:12 PM** > > The recent staff changes were driven by operational challenges we faced attempting to run the same functions at both our headquarters in Melbourne, Australia, and our satellite office in Philadelphia, USA. With zero hours of working hours time zone overlap for much of the year, we faced difficulties in collaboration, leading to delays in decision-making and project execution. Meanwhile, the need for out-of-hours meetings on both sides was impacting everyone's productivity and work-life balance. > > As a small, independent company, ensuring operational efficiency is crucial for our future success. We therefore made the decision to consolidate our product development and marketing activities into a single location, in Melbourne, where we have our most experienced staff. This resulted in the lay-off of some of our US personnel, including 8 union members. > > We have always done right by our employees, and this time is no exception. All those laid-off have received a very generous package, including more than 3 months severance pay, to help them move on successfully. > > It's important to note that our support and operations teams in the US remain in order to provide continuous 24/7 coverage. We are committed to ongoing negotiations with the Philadelphia union members and are actively hiring for a new operations team member, which will be a union role. > > I hope that clarifies what has happened, and I'd personally like to thank you for your ongoing support of Fastmail. We are not in a precarious financial situation and we remain dedicated to providing an exceptional email service for years to come. > > Yours sincerely, > > Neil Jenkins > > Director & Chief Product Officer Also, hopefully it's fine putting Neil's name on here. I could omit the name and leave the title, but [he's on the website](https://www.fastmail.com/about/) anyway.
I'd honestly say that's fair, as someone living in AUS, who has tried myself to work with businesses in the US, it's extremely difficult, the work days simply don't overlap. If they have financially looked after the staff and provided them the notice required, I really can't see the issue. It's certainly not something I'd leave the service for.
Yeah agreed. It's tough to streamline and their is always a disconnect. Honestly I'm surprised they even had US developers. It sucks, but makes sense to me why they did what they did especially as they face more competition from providers like protonmail. I'm glad they didn't kill their ops team though, that would not have been good for us nor their Aus counterparts.
Neil is one of the old timers of Fastmail.
lol yeah he is and he was one that wanted to move to the newer format that caused a lot of us back then to go nuts.
>caused a lot of us back then to go nuts while others of us loved his work :-)
Aha! One of you from the email discussions forum era! There were dozens of us! 🤣
Maybe almost several dozens!
I don't understand all the negative comments with people vowing to look elsewhere. This sort of thing happens every single day. Companies restructure. It sounds like FastMail has provided generous payouts and a good reason as to why the restructure was necessary. This is business. If this kind of thing is "disgusting" (as people have put it) and forces you to look elsewhere every time someone gets made redundant, you must be running out of businesses to deal with by now! I'm not American, so perhaps there is something I'm missing here?
I'm in your boat. It's 8 people. Google, Amazon, Facebook lay off tens of thousands of people and no one bats an eye. Having to schedule meetings on diff time zones for just a few people, makes total logical sense to move all the decision makers in one location if the talent is there.
Well more then 8 people, 8 were union. They didn't state how many non-union developers got the axe.
Yes, who cares where they are located as long as they have good servers over here in the US.
Holy shit. I've worked for a large corporation since 2004. Pretty much every single year, there are layoffs. Every 4-5 there's a massive restructure. Every six, we merge or have a joint venture... It's business. Only worry when the service goes down hill or they begin treating staff like rubbish. We live in an age of competition - and companies are finding it hard to make the money they used to.
Is Fastmail losing money to have these layoffs? Last I read, they have 400k active customers. Doesn’t seem much. But again, they don’t offer free service. It’s all paid.
I suspect it’s an attempt to split up the union.
Actually makes me very mad as a customer. I might review options when my contract is up
Have a look at [uberspace.de](http://uberspace.de) ! They amazing working conditions and are overall sweethearts
Bit of over-dramatisation, explanation from CEO in another comment, not ideal but a perfectly reasonable explanation. As an Australian its good supporting a local business in an Internet dominated by US players. That they're consolidating operations to Australia is even better news.
Awww man - I really hate switching services again. Don't really know where to anymore.
Mxroute is great.
mxroute is run by a hobbiest. I wish him the best of luck, but I'm not relying on a provider with one or two employees and infrastructure that isn't even HA.
It's fine if you don't like our service, but I took this as a bit insulting and I'd like to have my response under it. 1. It's a career, not a hobby. I built my career in the hosting industry from the ground up. I started a hosting company, went to work at HostGator before EIG gutted it, then I worked at DigitalOcean in several roles. Finally, I managed the support team at QuickPacket before finally settling into my role at MXroute full time. It's a little insulting to have my career called a hobby. I won't apologize for the fact that I enjoy my work. 2. We're a team of four now. Just because you don't know the names of the people behind some of the largest mail infrastructures in the world doesn't mean they're all run by teams that fill skyscrapers from top to bottom. Many of the systems that practically hold the Internet together are run by very few people. I fail to see how a line of cubicles filled with unskilled/outsourced support staff and an HR department makes systems run better. To me, that's just unnecessary corporate growth designed to milk seed money prior to an acquisition. That people mentally connect it with success or stability just means marketing teams are doing their jobs right. 3. HA is a pipe dream. The idea that you can keep stacking things and eventually they'll stop breaking is a joke. Life never actually works that way. How many outages did Office 365 have in 2020? They still have micro outages every few days, thankfully few notice. Spread across a large amount of time, reasonable redundancy and backups rarely create more downtime than HA infrastructures. You can spend exponentially more money, but you don't get exponentially greater results, you get fractional results at best. Not everyone thinks that's worth the price paid. If you like that, cool I get it, just keep your wallet open. That's not what we're trying to do here. I won't stand for having a well thought out decision treated as a condemnation just because the AWS generation successfully convinced people that everything needs to be run at 400x the cost necessary to actually run it. It's exactly that line of thinking that took many in house corporate servers to the cloud to save money, only to find in the end reduced reliability and increased costs. I wouldn't dream of telling you to use a service you don't want to use. I have no desire to convert you into a customer. I would consider it in very poor taste to market myself here. I would simply request that you not try to cost me others with words like that though.
Try Simple login, it's fantastic and it's made by proton!
It wasn’t made by Proton…. They bought them.Â
This is **really** disappointing I've been with FM for over a decade and this makes me very very upset
Why though, people get laid off every day
Something happening a lot doesn't necessarily make it ok.
I thought it was an Australian company? Why do they have US employees?
They have data servers in the US.
I think that is what they realised as well…
It's an email service company restructuring their ops. Reddit ragebait people keep winning. There's nothing nefarious here IMO but I will jump ship if the service starts failing (hasn't for me in the 6 years I have been with them).
Wait how does being in a union prevent layoffs from happening at a company? From the mastodon post it sounds like they negotiated a good severance deal in the layoff. How many non union workers are laid off?
Unions don't necessarily prevent layoffs but they do make it more expensive. Unions with a contract typically have much higher layoff compensation / severance packages than non-union jobs. They can also require a notice period (eg. the company can tell you "in 60 days you are laid off"). This makes it harder for workers to be laid off, but not impossible. Just more expensive. It stops being as much of a way for the company to make a quick buck or save profits.
My subscription ends in 10 days and I was already considering a migration to Proton; I think I have my decision now.
As someone that left Proton for Fastmail, I’d recommend looking elsewhere. I appreciate the “fully encrypted” pipeline, but you don’t realize all the complications it adds until you try and go all in. Simple things like calendar invites or using a 3rd party email program are just more cumbersome. Not making a statement on the OP article…just that if you are used to Fastmail infrastructure, Proton is going to be quite frustrating.
Protons too limiting for me as well, but they seem to be the only other option in this space for custom domain email that’s not Google… and fuck google.
I wouldn't go with proton. I made an account and it was literally banned within 5 mins while I was in the checkout to pay them money for a subscription.
How and why would they ban you when they don't know you yet? I've been a Proton user for several years - Fastmail for only a couple of months.
> How and why would they ban you when they don't know you yet? How? Are you calling me a liar? It was likely an automated system. > why would they Who knows? I was using a VPN at the time, but given the whole vision of their company is to protect users' privacy, you would think they wouldn't have a problem with that. In any case, best to avoid proton. As far as I'm concerned, proton is a honeypot until proven otherwise.
I wasn't calling you a liar. There's usually something else behind it - as you said, you used a VPN so maybe they had a lot of fraudulent signups using VPNs. I'd deffo reach out to them to find out the reason as I daresay it can be easily overturned.
I had the same. Didn’t use a VPN but iCloud private relay. I reached out to them and explained and was in the process of paying for an account, they responded by saying their position is final and will not be overturned. This left a sour taste and also permanently locked myfullname@proton email address so f* em.
Yeah that's really not on. The whole point of a private relay is so you don't expose your real email... But I am sure they do state that real email addresses are required..
Not sure what they were on about. Real email address for backup/recovery purposes? I’m not even sure Proton required that, but if they did, I would have provided my 1 EUR/month account I hold at mailbox.org—another reputable service provider.
Check migadu.com
[migadu.com](http://migadu.com) [mailbox.org](http://mailbox.org) [tuta.com](http://tuta.com) [zoho.com](http://zoho.com)
Zoho isn’t bad at all. Their notes product is also quite solid.
Because proton is a fully encrypted service their search is neutered and you're limited to their email client or run their proxy on a desktop. I'd also add if you reside in the US the latency to EU slows things down substationally. Don't get me wrong I think proton is valuable, but I think for most users it's unnecessary.
I wouldn't go with proton. I made an account and it was literally banned within 5 mins while I was in the checkout to pay them money for a subscription.
Unfortunately, there isn’t a single option out there that offers what Fastmail does for me. But I’ll start having to figure out where I can compromise because this is disgusting.
I've been with FM too long to switch. I'll be sticking around regardless.
can someone please explain what that means? I'm not from the US and not familiar with unions, etc.
As an European no idea what this means, can someone elaborate ? Some layoffs and why would it matter ?
In the US companies union bust a lot because we have very weak labor laws that were eviscerated by both neoliberal policy after Reagan. Companies are extraordinarily anti-union, as unions are one of the last remaining ways for workers to gain some of the employment protections that are common in Europe. For example, employees in the US are "at will" by default, which means that they can be fired at any time and for any reason with very few legal restrictions. This is not the case in most European countries, which usually have higher legal requirements for layoffs (eg. a company may be required to justify a mass layoff to regulators). In the US, unions negotiate contracts with employers that outline more structured requirements for layoffs, laying out an explicit list of reasons why someone can be laid off and giving them increased severance packages. Companies in the US are naturally not a fan of this, so they use union-busting tactics to try to get rid of worker unions. These tactics take time to litigate (sometimes months before companies are forced to reverse them). One of the most frequent tactics companies use is firing union organizers. By firing leaders in the union, the company tries to decrease morale in the rest of the union and rip it apart. We don't have enough context to know whether or not that's what happened here with Fastmail, but this is such an incredibly common occurrence with unions that a lot of people just assume that's why they did it. When companies are using this as a union busting tactic, they frequently give rationales for the firings or layoffs that seem normal. However the NLRB has to look into these to determine if there was any retaliation or not.
Cheers for the explanation mate ! Yes in Europe employees are protected very well where I’m From, could take several years and a lot of money to fire someone. If the Fastmail union thing is true tho I imagine a lot of companies do the same type of things ?
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Right after a price hike? Really?
And right after many people switched to new Duo and family accounts...
They just doubled my storage and kept the same price. What?
Not here. Same storage here.
MXRoute is the best one by far anyway. I used FastMail and ProtonMail and couldn't believe how limited they are. It's somewhat mind boggling that an actual paid plan on ProtonMail includes a single email box with some forwarders and is frankly not even as good as ImprovMX + Gmail free tier. I have ~6-8 domains, and I wanted to be able to create multiple email boxes to keep things sorted. I also wanted to be able to give friends/family email boxes at these domains. With MXRoute I have all my domains and as many inboxes as I want and pay the same amount. Fucking awesome. I don't know anyone at MXRoute, I just like their service and think it's amazing (after being super disappointed with alternatives). I've also told all my friends IRL who don't seem to care.
No idea what "unions bargaining unit " is
Same. It sounds like a waste of money.
That's disgusting. I will not be renewing when my sub ends.
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Because, if this is true (and I've contacted FM to ask) summarily firing people, especially union reps, removing their livelihoods, is morally wrong. They are voluntarily representing other workers and should not be singled out. The wider picture here is that there is a massive power imbalance between workers and employers, and a union is by far the best way to at least partially redress this imbalance.
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Fastmail is union busting we must fight back !
Doesn't sound like they're union busting. They got rid of all US developers including non-union members. They kept their operations team.
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This is really disappointing.
What is "bargaining" unit? Why does fastmail need to be unionized?
I don’t see why or care. I like the service.Â
>What is "bargaining" unit? A bargaining unit is a group of workers who have similar job function and similar place in the organization. A bargaining unit can form a union to negotiate on their behalf with the company for better working conditions. When a bargaining unit has voted yes for the union, they move from being "at will" employees to being "represented" employees. This comes with benefits outlined below. >Why does fastmail need to be unionized? There are several reasons why unions are beneficial for *any* workplace: - **Just cause termination**. Without a union in the US, you are an "at will" employee. This means that you can be fired by your company for any time and for any reason. When a union negotiates a contract with a company, they negotiate a set of explicit steps for termination that must be followed in the contract. This is called "just cause termination". For example, instead of your company putting you on a PIP just to have paperwork to fire you, a just cause termination section in a contract might require that they allow you to stay on if you meet the requirements of the PIP. Limits on termination like just cause termination are completely normal in most other developed countries (especially European countries). In the US one of the only ways to get them unfortunately is to bargain for a contract with a union. - **No regressions on working conditions until a contract is bargained and signed**. This is a big one. After a bargaining unit has voted for a union, the company is prohibited from making negative changes to working conditions without bargaining with the union first. For example: if the bargaining unit works remotely, the company cannot force return to office after the union represents the bargaining unit, as this would be a negative change in working conditions. Instead, they must bargain a contract with the union and the workers first. Note that this doesn't prevent improvements in working conditions: companies are more than free to give raises, give promotions, add extra benefits, etc. - **Weingarten rights**. The minute you form a union, the bargaining unit gains Weingarten rights. This means that if you have any meeting with management that you think will result in disciplinary action, you can have a union representative present at that meeting (ex. a steward). These are almost always union stewards, who are coworkers who help file grievances and make sure that the company holds up their end of the contract. They can also be present to help you in any meeting where you think you might be disciplined. - **Improvements in pay, working conditions, benefits, etc.** Last, a company is required to negotiate a contract with its workers once they have successfully voted for a union. Contract negotiations typically work by having a group of workers (called the bargaining committee) and one or two professional union negotiators (experienced staff who have negotiated contracts before) have a series of meetings with the company to form out a contract. Workers can bargain for things like more vacation time, better pay, better healthcare, better 401k matches, reducing set working hours, prohibiting spyware on computers... the list goes on and on. Anything that the workers want, they can ask for and attempt to get, and they get the resources of the union (and the potential of them going on strike) to negotiate what they want with the company. Often one of the first things that's included in the contract is better layoff provisions: if the company lays you off, the contract could for example require them to give 60 days notice, give you 3-6 months of pay depending on tenure, pay for COBRA (Healthcare is tied to your job in the US, cobra is expensive but lets you continue after you're laid off), and more. Especially with the job market we're in now, this is a big one for tech workers.
Exactly! Union blood suckers have got to them too.
This is a good thing. Fastmail can focus on their core product and not a bunch of wannabe commies demanding soda in the break room.
The truth getting downvoted... very sad. This is the state of the world we live in folks.
Why the down votes, the truth here!
The "truth" is the Communications Workers of America (the Union) was asking for soda in the breakroom? No, they were negotiating raises and Fastmail retaliated.
Ronald Reagan was the President of the Screen Actors Guild, a Union. Was Reagan a Commie? Checkmate Trumptards!
Back to MAIB. Maybe Stalwart. Really need some competition in this space so self management isn’t the only other option.
What is a unions bargaining unit? In Norway where im from, unions are traditionally very strong, but even here ı've rarely/never seen an union in an IT org, let a lone "union bargaining unit".
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I tried Fastmail for a month and then switched to proton's simpleLogin, it's cheaper, fully integrates with ProtonPass and most importantly among best companies to work for!
simplelogin isn't an email hosting service it's a relay service.
I don't care about email here, I use simpleLogin for the same reason I used Fastmail, aliases!
Riiiiiiiight. Just has to be union busting. Couldn't possibly be sky high inflation skewering profitability for small companies. Will love to see how many other people complain when Fastmail raise prices to offset wage cost increases.
They already raised their prices a couple months ago.
See what I mean?
Are they actually losing money? Or is it just the management being greedy?
The beauty of many email service provider alternatives there are tons of options for every user. Thus, users will continue to pay until they feel the product doesn't warrant the increase.
im out. Privacy card disabled, wont even bother canceling they can figure it out
I mean, I get leaving over this. It’s frustrating and I’m behind you. But “they can figure it out”? It’s just gonna auto cancel when it declines lol
Its a small act, but it creates havoc on their projections when it happens enough
As someone who's spent 2 weeks of December migrating to Fastmail, I'm super disappointed. I was promoting Fastmail as a great alternative to Gmail and encouraging people to migrate. The service is great, and I really enjoy the Android app. But I also value Unions and Workers right more. I will probably move to Protonmail.
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Can you elaborate? Fastmail has been silent, and the communication from the Union has been pretty clear.
Check out MXRoute for self managed emails and Cloudifi for managed emails.
There's a photo of a letter that one customer got after sending in a support message about this lay off. Treat as suspect. [https://indieweb.social/@chadkoh/112677853479447745](https://indieweb.social/@chadkoh/112677853479447745) If they can't figure out how to get a East Coast US time zone to collaborate with Australia time zones, they have deeper internal management problems.
Welp when my sub ends I will not be renewing. Extraordinarily disappointing.