When Joe Ricketts suddenly shut down the DNAinfo and Gothamist network of local news sites on November 2, two reporters I know lost their jobs. Ted Cox, who covered City Hall for DNAinfo, had contributed sports essays to the Reader for years; his gifts were no secret to me or longtime readers. But Alisa Hauser didn’t work in editorial for this paper; she was a display ad sales representative. When she joined DNAinfo at its inception, covering Bucktown and Wicker Park, her talent and energy as a reporter were a revelation.
However, Ricketts just dispensed with it. He closed DNAinfo and the Gothamist blogs—among them Chicagoist—without even giving his editors a heads-up, shut down the websites (later restored in archive form), and posted a statement asserting that “businesses need to be economically successful if they are to endure.” He went on, “I’m hopeful that in time, someone can crack the code on a business that can support exceptional neighborhood storytelling.”
I believe unions promote a corrosive us-against-them dynamic that destroys the esprit de corps businesses need to succeed. And that corrosive dynamic makes no sense in my mind where an entrepreneur is staking his capital on a business that is providing jobs and promoting innovation.
That’s why the type of company that interests me is one where ownership and the employees are truly in it together, without interference from a third-party union that has its own agenda and priorities. I’m not interested in any agenda at any company I start, other than working together to deliver something exceptional to consumers and doing it as everyone pulls shoulder-to-shoulder tackling whatever the marketplace throws at us.
It is my observation that unions exert efforts that tend to destroy the Free Enterprise system.
But America is full of people who don’t see it this way at all.
