备受争议的实时犯罪警报初创公司 Citizen 的一群员工投票赞成组建工会

据其发言人贝丝艾伦称，美国通信工人协会证实，在全国劳工关系委员会选举中，大约 70 名符合条件的工人中“绝大多数”投票加入其工会。结果，首先由彭博新闻报道，尚未得到 NLRB 的认证——这是工会与公民谈判合同之前的下一步。

根据向 NLRB 提交的文件，公司中央运营部门的全职和正式兼职员工有资格投票。该部门负责将警察和其他调度提炼为实时警报，并与靠近这些事件的用户共享。

劳工斗争是在西铁城及其首席执行官安德鲁·弗姆（Andrew Frame）获得一波负面头条新闻之后发生的。今年早些时候，该公司首次悬赏 30,000 美元悬赏导致逮捕一名涉嫌纵火嫌疑人的信息。不过，此人对火灾概不负责。这家成立四年的初创公司曾在其应用程序中使用一种名为 OnAir 的新产品来传播有关嫌疑人的信息，但表示在传播信息之前未能遵循自己的验证协议。

据报道，对于工人来说，加入工会的决定是因为害怕将工作外包给承包商而导致失业。工人们于 9 月首次向 NLRB 提交了一份请愿书，表明他们希望加入工会。 CWA 工会代表着包括 CNN 母公司 AT&T 在内的公共和私营公司的数十万工人。

“公民将继续我们的使命，让我们的用户世界变得更安全，”公民在一份声明中说。 “虽然我们正在评估初步统计的后续步骤，但我们现在知道的是，我们已经在这个过程中成长，学习如何更好地合作为我们的用户提供服务。”

Citizen 已经从包括 Peter Thiel 的创始人基金和红杉资本在内的知名风险投资公司筹集了 1.32 亿美元，该公司表示它拥有大约 200 名员工。

Group of workers at Citizen, the controversial real-time crime alert app, vote to unionize

(CNN Business)A group of employees at the controversial real-time crime alert startup, Citizen, voted in favor of forming a union.

The Communications Workers of America confirmed that "a strong majority" of roughly 70 eligible workers voted to join its union in a National Labor Relations Board election, according to its spokesperson Beth Allen. The results, first reported by Bloomberg News, are yet to be certified by the NLRB — that's the next step before the union negotiates a contract with Citizen.

According to a filing with the NLRB, full-time and regular part-time employees within the company's central operations department were eligible to cast votes. The department is responsible for distilling police and other dispatches into real-time alerts and sharing them with users near those incidents.

The labor fight comes on the heels of a wave of negative headlines garnered by Citizen and its CEO, Andrew Frame. Earlier this year, the company, for the first time, put a $30,000 bounty on information leading to the arrest of an alleged arson suspect. However, the person was not responsible for the fire. The four-year-old startup had used a new product in its app called OnAir to broadcast the information about the suspect, but said it failed to follow its own verification protocols before circulating the information.

For the workers, the decision to unionize was reportedly out of fear of job loss in response to outsourced work to contractors. The workers first filed a petition with the NLRB in September indicating their desire to unionize. The CWA union represents hundreds of thousands of workers at public and private companies including CNN's parent company AT&T.

"Citizen will move forward in our mission of making our users' world a safer place," Citizen said in a statement. "While we are assessing next steps on this initial tally, what we know now is that we've grown through this process, learning how we can better work together to deliver for our users."

Citizen, which has raised $132 million from well-known venture capital firms including Peter Thiel's Founders Fund and Sequoia Capital, said it has roughly 200 employees.