Netflix Campaign

by Reuben “Tihi” Hayslett

When Netflix announced their “unlimited paid family leave” in 2015, they carefully neglected to mention that the people who work in Netflix customer service call centers and Netflix DVD distribution centers (yes they still have DVDs) would NOT eligible. Their “unlimited paid family leave” only applied to the mostly white, already highly paid, software developers and engineers.

Netflix DVD and customer service employees are hourly and make between $12 and $15 an hour and have no paid family leave benefits at all.

While working at the Working Families Party, I joined with Coworker.org, UltraViolet, Democracy for America, and NARAL Pro Choice America to launch a campaign to pressure Netflix into extended paid family leave to ALL their employees.

Our joint-online petition collected signatures from over 108,000 people.

When we delivered the petition to Netflix headquarters, they kicked us out of their office and refused to look at the petition signers and their comments.

But we weren’t ready to give up!

I used Points of Intervention to think about how our members interact with Netflix, specifically the Point of Consumption and Point of Production.

How do people “consume” Netflix? How and where does Netflix begin to produce their “product”? From there, I developed a new Cornerstones for our campaign:

Cornerstones

GOAL

Pressure Netflix to extend paid family leave to customer service and DVD division employees

AUDIENCE

Netflix employees

TARGET

Netflix corporate/management

CONSTITUENCY

108k petition signers, WFP email list, Coalition partner’s email list

We decided to deliver the petition again, but this time through Netflix’s own DVD envelopes.
We found out that the extra weight of the paper forces Netflix’s machines to stop and a DVD center employee will have to manually open the envelope to remove the extra paper.

We identified about 20,000 people who both signed the petition and had Netflix DVD service (we asked them via surveys).

These people were sent this file along with some instructions.

Most of our members had never taken an action like this before. Mostly people sign our petitions, attend rallies, phone-bank for candidates and donate money. Sending a direct message to a Netflix DVD employee that you’ll never hear back from was a lot to ask.

I personally followed up with over 200 highly-active supporters via email and phone calls to explain the campaign tactic and remind them to send in their DVD flyers.

In total 187 confirmed, self-reported DVD inserts were sent from WFP mailers (the other orgs in our coalition did not share their numbers with us).

After seeing the flyers, Netflix DVD center workers began to explore forming a union -- knowing they had organizational support from us and our coalition allies.

Rather than have their workers organize a union, Netflix conceded to give 3 months family leave at full pay for DVD workers and 3½ months full pay for customer service workers.

“‘Netflix and chill’ shouldn’t ever mean leaving workers out in the cold when they most need to spend time with their families,” Reuben Hayslett, a campaigner for the Working Families Party, said in a statement. “That’s why we’re so glad to see Netflix has taken a step in the right direction by extending paid family leave for their hourly employees. That’s more like ‘Netflix and care.’” from an article in The Huffington Post

What I learned

Being creative is sometimes a hard sell! Not just internally, but within the coalition and with our actual members.

Metrics are sometimes about “smoke and mirrors.”

Strategy = think about the “ripple effect.”