A tale of a few Caviars
By: Ilya Katz
Tags: Labor, Workplace, Organizing

I joined Caviar in March of 2019 when it was still part of Square. After a several month’s long job search, I liked the interview process at Square so it felt like a natural stopping point. Following a few startup gigs, I figured a larger, more established company would provide a bit more stability. My intention was primarily to join Square, a publicly traded company, but I wanted to work in a more nimble team so I chose Caviar over another team that was more core to the business. For a brief second, I even thought that I may stay at Square for a few years. That plan fell apart pretty quickly when the news broke that DoorDash was acquiring Caviar from Square.

What followed was the most interesting part of my tenure at Square — an organized effort by Caviar employees standing up to the news and letting their voices be heard.

Below is my take on events that took place after the acquisition was announced, retelling of what steps we took to organize and some ideas and links to articles and resources that you can use for your own organization efforts. I try to convey the essence of the events as they happened. However, to protect people involved in the effort, and in some ways myself, I do not mention any names and some details that I believe could violate my employment agreement. Unfortunately, this includes responses from the management. But, in all honesty, that is the least interesting part of the effort.

I’m going to follow This American Life format and this story will be in five acts.

Stay with me …

Act 1 — The News

On Aug 1, 2019, Square town hall overlapped an all-hands at Caviar. If I was paying attention, that should have raised some questions. However, I was deep in a project when I got a calendar notification. All-hands are usually interesting events to attend so I closed my laptop and made my way to the conference room. As people gathered and quieted down, the Caviar Lead (Square speak for a VP-like role) stood in front of us and without beating around the bush, made a statement. It was very brief, basically something like “DoorDash bought Caviar”. It was too brief. I thought it was a joke. I felt that my body was about to express a smirk and start a smile. However, reaction around the room wasn’t very festive. There were a few gasps, uncomfortable shifting around, and one person quickly walked out of the room. My half smirk disappeared as I realized it was not a joke.

We stayed in the room for what seemed to be a very long time, there were speeches and explanations of how great of an opportunity this was. The management was quick to point out that everyone at Caviar would be getting an offer from DoorDash. I didn’t quite know what to think of this news. I joined Square about 6 months earlier, so I didn’t have as much tribal knowledge to totally make sense of the news. After the meeting was over, it became clear that everyone else knew about the sale. It was announced at the town hall as well as to the world. So you, the reader, found out about this news at pretty much the same time as I did.

Clearly, I didn’t open my code editor again that day. Everyone was discussing the news. Some people were very excited, some were upset. Some very neutral and just wanted to understand what that meant. As a bunch of us decided that it was time to get some beers across the street, one of my coworkers sent a message saying that he would not be joining us for beverages but sent out a link to a Discord channel and anyone who wanted to vent was free to join him. I didn’t join. I figured that I preferred to vent in person. Next couple of days were very similar to each other — we kept getting snippets of information, our offers would be arriving via emails so we were nervously waiting for offers to come in while trying to understand what it all meant for us personally and as a team.

My offer email came in after 7PM to my personal email. However, not everyone was as lucky. Some people didn’t get their emails until midnight or later. To be honest, I wasn’t that stressed out. Worst case, I would start what I was doing just 6 months earlier — interviewing. I didn’t have visa issues. I had savings and wouldn’t need to take the first offer I get. I had a good resume. But it wasn’t the same for everyone. People were starting to seriously stress out. We talked individually, we had small team meetings, we had large meetings and many opinions started spilling out. The most common rhetoric from management was that very little was changing. “Business as usual” was a theme that we heard over and over again. Basically, we were led to think that nothing was changing. We would still do the same jobs, have the same coworkers, a comparable (or, supposedly, better) compensation and over time it would become more clear what, if anything, was transitioning to DoorDash. However, it was obvious, folks were not buying this.

Over time some of the concerns that came out were:

Loyalty to Square (for some people, Square was their first employer and they loved working there)

Differences in cultures between the two companies

No longer possible to do internal transfer within Square — several people were in the process of transitioning to other teams, this process never completed

Compensation structure that was not equivalent to existing compensation

Worries about immigration visas

Loss of stability of a more established company

Liquidity of RSU’s

Loss of unvested equity/ESPP grants

Leaving a group of friends — some people literally worked their whole careers in different groups at Square

No say in negotiation in getting a new employer

As these discussions were happening, both in private and in public, a common thought arose: Can we do anything about this? From what I understood, it is common for workers to have no say in mergers and acquisitions matters. When I talked to my friends about this, a common phrase was “well, at least you’re not getting fired”. But is that really a good way to look at it? Yes, it’s true, many acquisitions in the past ended up in layoffs. And people have gotten used to it by now. But what if that wasn’t the norm? Wouldn’t it be great if there were protections against that, just like there are protections regulating minimum wage and employee conditions? I think it would be. But our current society doesn’t have that so we were given two choices 1) sign new offer 2) resign. Increasingly we started searching for a third option. What if we banded together? What if we organized?

That evening I received a text message from a coworker that said something like “Login to Discord. There is a discussion about what we talked about”. That’s where the fun starts.

Act 2 — The Discussion

By the time I signed up for our private Discord channel, many people in the chat room were expressing their gripes. There were several channels for different purposes. Of course, there was a meme channel. No productive environment is complete without pictures of cats. But there was nothing juicy going on. At first I was a bit confused but it quickly became apparent that I was missing permissions. I asked to be added to a “verified” channel. I was asked to verify myself. At that stage, verification was done by proving that you were who you said you were by answering very specific questions. Over time, the verification process evolved to be more precise.

First thing I noticed was that this channel only contained individual contributors, no managers. It will become clear later on why this was important. Sneak peak is that it’s not because we were mad at management. On the contrary, there were some managers who would potentially be interested in this effort. There were legal reasons, interestingly enough, that could hurt the managers.

Because only vetted people were invited to this channel, people were a lot more open about not only their issues with the acquisition but also about their individual deals. The thing was that since everyone got separate offers we had no idea who stood to gain and who stood to lose. Obviously, many details of the acquisition would be common and open (such benefits, vacation policies, etc). However, details such as new salaries, retainer bonuses, RSU grants, all those were private.

I will pause right here and acknowledge that no matter what the numbers were, all of us were still in the privileged situation that our salaries were Bay Area tech salaries, and yes, most people in the world do not even get bonuses or RSU grants. But what’s important to note is that we were comparing apples to apples since Square and DoorDash are in the same world. If one was to apply to either of these companies, expectations would be very similar in terms of compensation packages. We were not changing our expectations as if we were moving to a different industry. And yes, it would be great if other workers in other industries had similar incentives, but that’s a bigger fight.

Now, back to the story. It was important to get comfortable with each other because people opened up and it became apparent that not everyone got the same treatment. To be fair, everyone got a similar percentage salary increase. Yes, you heard it right, we all got a salary increases. At first glance that sounds like an upgrade. However, if you’re not familiar with tech scene salaries, in this world, a big chunk of the compensation package is based on RSU (stocks granted after a worker has been on the job for a certain period of time). After we compared our overall compensation package, it became apparent that some people were treated differently compared to others.

At some point it became clear that we needed to do it the old fashioned way and meet in person to strategize on what to do next. Through a network of connections, one of the participants of the Discord channel was able to get us a conference room in a local community space. Organizers of this community space had connections to other community leaders, such as the organizers of the Google walkouts. As this was close to the weekend and we were being pressured to make decisions, sign DoorDash offers or quit, very quickly, we agreed to meet on Sunday.

Act 3 — The Meetings

Sunday. A bunch of us came to the community space. Those who could not come in person, dialed into the conference via Discord feature that allowed to host audio conferences. I guess Discord is not just for gaming.

This turned out to be a very crucial meeting that would set the tone of what happened next. In this meeting, we discussed a few things.

One of the biggest concerns that came up was about the repercussions of this organized effort. What was the worst that could happen if we organized? Could we get fired? To address this situation, we found that there was a law in the United States that protected individual contributors (i.e. people without direct reports) against retaliation from employers for organizing. Specifically Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) guarantees employees “the right to self-organization, … and to engage in other concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection”. See here for a readable guide on the law. That explains why only non-managers were allowed in. Even if we wanted to share this with managers, it could put them in a bad situation so we decided that we didn’t want to take a risk both for our and their sakes.

Certainly, we all acknowledged that there were risks even with the law on our side. As recent cases have shown, some organizers have been fired although allegedly for unrelated reasons. After acknowledging that we were all okay with the risks, we proceeded:

Our grievances about the process — this was the time to get serious and separate our emotional reactions from the facts that could actually be addressed.

How to approach our coworkers who were absent but would be interested in joining the effort

How to express our dissatisfaction — a letter that we would write to the management. However, we also wanted to speak to our co-workers at Square, hence this letter would go to top management AND the whole of Square

We drafted a few ideas on what the letter would look like and what demands we would make. This was the first brainstorming session so some of the suggestions never made it to the final product.

What followed was a roller coaster week. Almost every day before work we would meet to refine our demands, discuss progress, strategize on next steps. Not everyone could make it to all the meetings, so we had a rotation of folks who would come in or join remotely. At work we would continue to get bits and pieces of information. After work, Discord was booming with discussion. The night would end with everyone getting worn out. However, we would not close the discussion without agreeing to meet again. And the cycle would start over.

Over time, more people joined Discord so it became clear that we needed to organize ourselves better. People organically chose roles for themselves. We realized that we need the following roles:

Letter drafters

folks who would primarily work on refining the language and content of the demand letter

Canvassers

people who would meet 1-on-1 with other members

Be an outlet for grievances

Calm people down, especially those affected most by the changes

Gauge their interest in participating in the organized action

And, hopefully, get more people onboard

Logistics

as more people joined in, we need to become better organized

Google docs organization

Notes taking

Proofreaders

it was important that our letter had a professional tone, so we took it very seriously what content we would deliver

To be clear, there were people who were not active in any of the roles but were behind the cause and agreed to sign on to our letter but chose not to participate actively. However, everyone understood the risks of this effort — it was very important to us that we did not sign on anyone who was not comfortable with the effort. We did lose some supporters because not everyone was comfortable taking the risk. This was okay. At the end of the day, our number one goal was to look out for our fellow coworkers and we would not force anyone to take any action they wouldn’t be comfortable doing.

What was even more interesting, we had a few people who were fine with the transition and their offers, but they chose to sign on to the letter just because they wanted to stand with the rest of the team. Now, that’s teamwork!

One of the major problems that was holding us back was the lack of time and expertise. Management had months to prepare for this, armed with lawyers and experts. We had days with no prior experience. So if there is anything that you take away from this is that preparation is key. Now, at least you have some idea about where to start, which will give your cause a boost. Thankfully, with all the latest news about organized efforts, it’s much easier than ever to get information.

As the days went on, our letter started taking shape. Refine, Discuss, Compromise, Repeat.

Eventually, it was time to act.

Act 4 — The Delivery

One of the people involved in the discussion agreed to send out the letter. It was a bold move and we all thank that person for it. The letter went out.

Now that it’s in the past, I can speak with the benefit of hindsight that there was a lot of support for it. Talking to people from the industry revealed that they applauded our efforts. Some people were afraid that their teams could also be axed from their companies.

Some people were under the impression that everyone at Caviar loved the idea of being sold to another company which had a more compatible business model. This spurred a slew of discussions, both in public and private..

There were also opposing points of view. From my discussions with folks and reading teamblind.com and other forums, some people thought we were “entitled” and could jeopardize the deal and possibly the whole company.

There were also people who didn’t have an opinion of whether it was a good idea to rock the boat for this particular case, and potentially, didn’t even care about the actors involved. But they were happy to see this action along with other actions being taken in companies across the tech world (Kickstarter, Github, Microsoft, and numerous others, see https://collectiveactions.tech/ ).

I am not at liberty to discuss what specific actions were taken by the management in response to this organizing effort. I’m sorry for being so anticlimactic, but remember the bit about companies having more lawyers? Well, that still applies now so I don’t want to take risks of accidentally disclosing any NDA-protected information. I will say, our action was not something that anyone expected. Management came at us with renewed threats and an aggressive campaign to get us to sign up as soon as possible. Their reaction indicated some of the power we have as workers when we act together. Our actions were directly impacting a multi-million dollar deal, something workers are typically locked out of having any say in. However, their threats had an effect and management was tiring us out with endless meetings.

Act 5 — The lessons

To me, this was an effort absolutely worth taking. I’ve gained so much out of this that is not measurable in dollars and cents. I have created a strong bond with my coworkers and learned so much. I gained a new perspective on labor movements and issues affecting employer-employee relationships. I loved that it started discussions, not just within our group, but in both companies involved, and hopefully, way beyond that.

Sometimes, I look back and think if we could have pushed it further. And I think the answer to that question is complicated. As I alluded to, our biggest problem was lack of experience and knowledge on how to approach organization. Was this to happen again, I believe I would be willing to take bolder actions because the last few months have demonstrated that there are many folks in similar situations of being unhappy with actions that their employers take and every act of voicing out against those actions makes the next act stronger. The earlier people start talking and building relationships with their coworkers, the stronger they will be when a situation comes up, and a strong minority can have a big effect and make some important changes.

I signed my offer and I am now an employee of DoorDash. As of the day of writing this post, we had a few people who have left Caviar either prior or after the official handover. I have met many people at DoorDash and they are just like me. But this transition into a new company is not anything like my previous job transitions. This past half a year has been very illuminating. More than the experience of changing jobs from one company to another, I’ve become a lot more aware of workplace conditions and dynamics. And that’s why I decided to write this post.

When I tell the story to others, it’s not unusual to hear dismissing responses — “no one got fired”, “you all have jobs”, “you’re all whiners”, “you had a choice”, “you can find other jobs easily”. I acknowledge all these points and fully appreciate that in many ways we were “lucky”. Even so, this is exactly why it was worthwhile to take action. While the economy is doing well, there is a shortage of workers, this is the time to take bolder actions. Would the same story happen in 2008 during a serious recession? May be not. So take action while you can. Learn from other successful and unsuccessful attempts to organize. Proceed with caution (this article can help). Talk to your coworkers. Share your story.

If you happen to be in San Francisco, let’s grab coffee.