Fundamentally, everyone involved in this effort wants Paizo to succeed, and we are hopeful that this success can be more effectively accomplished with better organization and representation. Unionizing does not need to be adversarial, and we would prefer for it not to be. We recognize that Paizo has experienced some growing pains in transitioning from a handful of people making magazines to an industry leader, and a large proportion of those difficulties stem from management not always being able or willing to listen to the workers, delegate, or trust the experts they hired to do the correct things. If Paizo leadership is as reasonable and cooperative as we hope they will be, then union representation will be able to ensure the commitments that management is theoretically already prepared to make, as well as to safeguard them in the future.
We believe that management is willing and able to make the changes we believe to be necessary, and one of our goals in unionizing is to ensure that they don’t have to make those decisions alone. With union representation included in the discussions, middle management no longer has to shoulder the burden of conveying the needs of their reports to the executives, and communication between upper management and the Paizo workforce at large can become both clearer and more direct.