Haul away, you rolling king

[sovay]

So the first pieces of news that greeted me when I woke up were the death of Jeffrey Epstein and the punishment of Arisia for supporting a strike, neither of which was a great chaser to the realization that yesterday's excruciating headache did not have the decency to buzz off overnight, but I also saw via spatch this wonderful production still of The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984):



It is so effectively in character and outside the plot that it looks like fanfic. Have some links.

1. Elie Mystal and Ken White, "Should the North Carolina Gun Store Billboard Targeting 'The Squad' Be Unconstitutional?"

2. Ethan Siegel, "Astronomy Faces a Field-Defining Choice in Choosing the Next Steps for the TMT."

3. Philip Miller, "Biennale." The magazine is dedicated to islands, which I love.

I was supposed to spend the day with my niece, but the current circumstances are looking like spending the evening with her. She wants to watch Ponyo (2008), which I haven't seen in almost a decade. I think I can manage to do that.

Comments

[rosefox]

The decisions against Arisia seem pretty clear-cut based on the terms of their contract: the force majeure clause applied if the Westin and Aloft were unable to provide services (they were open, with non-union workers) and had to be invoked within 5 days (Westin) or 10 days (Aloft) of Arisia learning of the strike (Arisia sent notice 44 days later). Arisia claims that the use of non-union labor made it impossible or impracticable to provide attendees with the event they expected, but there's no evidence to support that (such as a petition signed by a large number of attendees saying they'd cancel their Arisia memberships in the event of Arisia crossing picket lines, or a mass cancellation of reservations). So Arisia's on the hook for cancellation fees as set out in the contract.

I think Arisia tried to minimize the risk of having to cancel the convention altogether by waiting to cancel the contract until there was a backup plan with the Park Plaza in place, but they could not then minimize the risk of paying cancellation fees, and they chose the lesser evil.

IANAL, but it looks to me like the lessons here for conventions that care about not crossing picket lines is that they should negotiate non-liability cancellation clauses regarding strikes that have longer lead times, because strikes are rarely resolved within 10 days, and stating that the use of non-union labor will constitute making the hotel unusable for the convention's purposes.

[rosefox]

(Also, reading the Westin decision, it helps if you don't have emails from board members saying "Whew, the hotel going on strike gives us a great opportunity to cancel our convention for what looks like a noble reason rather than have everyone flee the sinking ship while we deal with our massive scandal around harassment!".)

[sovay]

it helps if you don't have emails from board members saying "Whew, the hotel going on strike gives us a great opportunity to cancel our convention for what looks like a noble reason rather than have everyone flee the sinking ship while we deal with our massive scandal around harassment!"

I agree that that seems like a sub-optimal thing to put in writing, no matter who's thinking it.

Thank you for the additional read on the situation.

[sara]

it helps if you don't have emails from board members saying "Whew, the hotel going on strike gives us a great opportunity to cancel our convention for what looks like a noble reason rather than have everyone flee the sinking ship while we deal with our massive scandal around harassment!"

*facepalm* Wow that's MAGICAL. People just can't get their heads around not writing things down.

(At work, everyone thinks it's kind of hilarious that my emails are perfectly civil when I have no qualms about wandering around offering frank opinions about various situations and the people who create them. That's because my conversation around the office isn't publicly disclosable and my email is, tyvm....)

[rosefox]

I've been screaming "CONVENTIONS NEED TO BE RUN LIKE BUSINESSES" for something like ten years now, but alas, they are not.

[lemon_badgeress]

which seems reasonable enough but the price tag, to my uneducated eyes, appears WTFedly large?

[rosefox]

When a convention reserves conference space at a hotel, the convention and the hotel agree on expectations for how many room-nights the hotel will sell and how much revenue the hotel will get. If the convention fails to bring in enough people to sell that many room-nights, it's liable for some amount of the shortfall.

Arisia is a very large convention and it runs over a long weekend in an expensive city. That adds up fast. According to the arbitration decisions, the contract with Aloft set out expected minimum revenue of $88,835 from rooms costing $163/night plus other anticipated sales (room service, bar tabs, paid wi-fi, those $8 bottles of water in the mini-fridge) to the people booking those rooms, while the Westin charged between $172 and $350 a night (I assume the higher numbers are for suites) and expected room revenue of $442,566.

The contract with the Aloft specified Arisia would pay half the expected minimum revenue, so, $44,417.50. If there was any such expectation in the Westin contract, the arbitration decision doesn't say; it just says the arbitrator awarded $50,000 in damages, which looks like Arisia getting off real easy given the expected revenue! Imagine if they'd been contracted to pay 50% at the Westin like they were at the Aloft. The total damages of $95k are about 18% of the revenue the hotels collectively anticipated from doing business with Arisia. I'm not well enough versed in these sorts of things to know whether 18% would generally be considered a reasonable penalty for breach of contract, but it doesn't look outlandish to me.

As the loser, Arisia also covers attorney fees, arbitration costs, and interest, which is how we get from $95k in damages to $125k total.

The snag is that volunteer-run nonprofit SF conventions charge so little that Arisia doesn't have anything like that kind of money in the bank. So in the context of Arisia's finances, it's a whole lot of money. But in the context of how much a couple of Boston hotels expect to make over a holiday weekend, it's not all that much.

[sara]

*googles things* Hunh. Looks like the directors may be personally liable since it's breach of contract and there aren't any limits on liability in that situation. There are some other categories in which you're limited to $20k, which in the grand scheme of things is relatively minor.

I mean, personally, I carry a million dollar umbrella liability policy because I do a lot of nonprofit work and I don't want to lose my damn house over something like this, so if I were an Arisia director I'd call my lawyer and my insurance company and assume I was going to have to eat it (and have a bear of a time renewing my umbrella next year). But I think I'm relatively unusual in that, and it's 100% an artifact of me having gotten sued over stupid shit during my years in nonprofitland. I hope someone on the board has something like that kind of coverage.

[sara]

As context for those of you reading this and wondering what a million dollars worth of extra liability coverage costs me, the answer is, $12 a month including the extra personal injury coverage I had to tack on to my homeowner's policy...the actual liability is $9/month. This is one of those where it's so cheap to do it and the downside risk is so massive (I am a regular volunteer with an organization with which I regularly put people in my personal car, drive them into wilderness areas, and take them hiking; my potential liability here really doesn't bear thinking about, but I think it's probably smaller than the potential liability of being on the concom for a large event) that even my extremely cheap self just pays the bill.

Mind you, I live a basically dull life, so I'm cheap to insure.

[rosefox]

Hm, I wonder whether I could add that to my renters insurance. Thanks for the info!

[sara]

Yeah, I started doing it because between the nonprofit work and the big dogs (and now the single parenthood and being the sole household income) My Uncle The Lawyer told me I would be very stupid not to.

[rosefox]

That would certainly be a convenient thing for someone on the board to have!

[sara]

I would also hope that the corporation itself is carrying some kind of directors' and officers' liability coverage. Like, this judgment should not be getting paid out of assets or the operating budget. It should be getting paid out of someone's insurance. Unless there's something I don't understand (quite possible, none of my nonprofits have ever fucked it to the tune of 125k), it seems to me like it should be an insurance problem at this point.

[rosefox]

That was my first thought too, but I have no clue what Arisia Inc. does behind the scenes.

[sara]

Nope. I just thought the FB discussion was pretty weird given that my first take would not be that we might need to fundraise, it would be that we were going to need to find a VERY good insurance broker if we didn't want to get the claim paid out and then have to dissolve the corporation because we were subsequently uninsurable.

[lemon_badgeress]

...i think this might be the first time i’ve ever COMPREHENDED how large arisia is.

thank you for the explanations!

[rosefox]

I didn't fully grasp it myself until my partner and I ran the staff den and green room there for a few years. I've been to smaller Worldcons. It's BIG.

Glad to help!