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Comment by ergothus | Hacker News Reader

> collective employee action can be used to force an employer to stop exploitative behaviors?

I'm all for balancing the employer<->employee interaction, but is this truly something that works for most industries? Google cares about it's reputation among potential tech employees. Other areas (say, Amazon warehouses) probably have a lot less trouble finding people desperate for work and willing to put up with crap because they need the jobs.

As good as this news is, is this really a template that we can expect much to build from? (as opposed to organized unions with legally protected ability to strike, for example)

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Unions and their actions are collective employee action, I'm not sure what you're saying won't work?

I'm not saying unions won't work...I'm saying they weren't involved in this case. This case doesn't look particularly repeatable WITHOUT unions.

I think that was the point. The original parent was making a tongue-in-cheek reference to how tech workers seem to resist the idea of forming a union, but occasionally band together to do union-like things informally, in an ad-hoc, not-particularly-reliable fashion.

I read it as "see, didn't require forming a union to get something done in the tech industry"

Do unions allow competition among union members? It’s always seemed to me that they work in jobs where the people are replaceable.

In Google one could work to make 2x to 3x more than the next person - is that will possible with a union?

Seems like in jobs where individual talent / skills matter, a union is by definition harmful (unless you’re in the lower 50%).

Collective action / protest works fine, though, for establishing baselines. If giving employees what they want is cheaper than firing all of them and hiring a fresh batch, it should always work fine.

> Seems like in jobs where individual talent / skills matter, a union is by definition harmful (unless you’re in the lower 50%).

Professional athlete unions would be a counterexample, I believe. It really depends on how the union is structured. I doubt a union for high paid tech workers would be structured the same way as one for blue collar labourers.

That is a pretty naive view of our industry.

Personally I find us far more alike other industries than unlike.

We're a new industry but we're still full of people of all types sizes and emotional colours.

Nothing in the notion of union stops competition or talent/skill expression.

A lot of people only associate unions with factory workers kind of jobs, it’s not. Think of journalists or performing actors unions for instance.

Correct. To the point: https://www.local817.com/about-us

https://www.dga.org/resources/additional/guilds-and-unions.a...

Unions allow whatever they want to allow, and block whatever they want to block. So if Google employees wanted to form a very light touch union they could do exactly that.

I took a glance at the constitution of the Screen Actors Guild recently as part of a discussion on this topic elsewhere. It's interesting how it features very strong supermajority requirements for going on strike, for imposing a salary cap, and for amending the constitution to remove the supermajority condition.

I wouldn't be surprised to see similar clauses in other union constitutions for fields in which, like tech, there's a large and obvious talent dispersion. I think a majority-rule approach would inevitably lead to the anti-meritocratic policies you're imagining.

[1] https://www.sagaftra.org/files/2015_1002_sag-aftra_constitut...

It walks like a union, talks like a union, and quacks like a union.

It's the same idea. Workers doing things collectively.

Perhaps they can get the best of unions without getting the worst of unions with this behavior.

The worst of unions being?

Can you not think of any negative aspects of unions?

From what I recall unions were involved in this case. Organizers of the mass protests explicitly cited receiving the advisement of union activists.

Why doesn't it look repeatable?

Rephrasing from my original comment: Because Google worried about a very supply-limited audience (tech workers, including related non-programmers). Most fields, the ones paying their employees far less and with far fewer perks, don't share that restraint. If these other fields had their current crop of (non-unionized) workers get disgusted, the companies would just get different employees.

There's no shortage of companies with various abusive practices that remain in business. Arbitration agreements, micro-management, strict controls over things as simple as bathroom breaks, even riding the line on wage-theft. I'm very glad to see this particular change, but to say "Google's programmers demanded change and got it, why don't you get with it, un-unionized cashiers at S-Mart!" overestimates the influence of those workers.

So, would you say it is particularly repeatable in this industry? I.e. that while those other industries need unions due to lack of leverage, this one may be different?

(of course one instance is too small of a sample size to support either direction on its own)

I'm hardly qualified to have anything but the most grossly informed of opinions, but yeah, I'd expect that in the current environment most tech-area (i.e. Seattle, SF, etc) devs can and should demand improvements and be able to get them without requiring unions (which is not the same as saying unions aren't needed. Look to games dev for examples).

Reputation has a lot of hidden costs. Simply having a smaller pool of applicants means they need to either pay more or accept what they consider worse employees. Similarly, high turnover means the loss of skills and the inability to underpay highly valued workers.

Both of these directly impact the bottom line and in competitive markets can and has killed companies.

From what I understand, Amazon actually has trouble recruiting and retaining enough warehouse workers (especially during peak seasons). This is evident by them having a starting wage ($15/hr) that is more than double the minimum wage in many parts of the country

Glassdoor says the average was only $12 but in October they raised it to $15 minimum. Walmart’s low end is about $13 but the average is $17 an hour. Walmart has 1.5 million workers in the US, over 2 million worldwide.

The goods news is Amazon’s pay raise has made Walmart and Target increase their minimum wages as well.

Reminder that the Amazon pay raise occurred because Bernie Sanders shamed them into it. Disney as well.

And they lowered stock benefits a few weeks later

Average pay is a meaningless statistic unless combined with a number of other statistics. What would be interesting is knowing the mean pay.

Ummm... you probably meant "median". Note, "average" is just "arithmetic mean".

I guess we mean different things with "trouble".

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