Vibe management comes for your golf course

2026-05-08

The Alberni Golf Club just fired six seasonal groundskeepers — most with eight to fourteen years on the crew — because the club is acquiring a robotic lawn mower it hasn’t taken delivery of yet. The new staffing plan is one mechanic and two groundskeepers for an eighteen-hole course in peak season. The robot has not mowed a single fairway. The contract these workers won after a ten-day strike last summer is being voided by a vendor invoice.

Walk back the timeline. The crew won a first contract last July. The employer tried to break it in November and lost — settled in December with seniority, recall rights, and seasonal wage increases explicitly on the record. In February, a robotic mower was announced. In April, every seasonal was fired. The robot is the legal cover for resetting the workforce to year zero. Anyone hired this season comes in without the contract anyone bargained for.

So vibe governing has a sibling. Call it vibe management: fire fast in advance of a machine that doesn’t exist yet, and figure out whether the course can actually be maintained later. Whether the contract holds, later. Whether the rough is playable in July, later. The equipment is doing political work it has not earned through any kind of performance — and the people who will catch the failure modes, the workers and the golfers and the membership, find out the hard way.

A quiet electric mower replacing a guy on a gas one in 35°C heat is genuinely better. You should all want that. A quiet electric mower deployed to launder a union-busting layoff past a freshly signed contract is not the same machine. Same metal on the truck, completely different deal — and the fight is the same fight as the sidewalk, the same fight as everywhere: who owns the productivity gain, who eats the risk, who keeps the job.

“The robot did it” is the new “the algorithm decided.” Figure-it-out-later is the connective tissue: an elected body and a country club are running the same play because the play works. It will keep working until we make it embarrassing.