Anti-union activity is heating up ahead of Google contractor's vote to unionize | Hacker News Reader

Anti-union activity is heating up ahead of Google contractor's vote to unionize

m.pghcitypaper.com

358 pointsclaudeganon416 comments

I always wonder about these ham-handed anti-union efforts. I assume they must work to some degree, or they wouldn't do it. But it seems like the sudden escalation of anti-union arguments would only end up working in favor of the union. Because it betrays how against it they are. It confirms that yes, this union will have an effect, and not in management's favor. Like "Clearly we're onto something here if they oppose it this much."

I think their angle is that it’s not in anyone’s favour to unionise.

It's hard to pinpoint where it originated but anti-union sentiment existed conversationally my entire life. The view being that union's are big inefficient bureaucracies of lazy people who get nothing done.

It parallels the view of government I grew up with.

Never really questioned where this view came from though, but my guess would be persistent long term marketing by interested parties. "Nudging" if you will.

That's what socialism, union's, and co-ops are up against. A sentiment that's been groomed over a long time, that makes you feel like a Commie or a conspirator if you question it.

It's lead me to think that capitalism has become a religion. If you question it you get labeled subconsciously by otherwise reasonable peers.

You forgot corruption. In the US at least, unions can't seem to stay clean.

Now, do the benefits to the workers in a dirty union outweigh the benefits to working for an abusive corporation? I have no idea.

I always find this an odd thing to say... as if corporations and states have less corruption...

> I always find this an odd thing to say... as if corporations and states have less corruption...

If there are two corrupt things, why add a third one to increase the misery?

Are you asking for the purpose of a labor union and insinuating that all labor unions are corrupt?

I lived in the Michigan for a couple of decades and observed the behavior of the Teamsters and UAW firsthand so insinuation is not even necessary.

The Teamesters and UAW [1] are not all unions. It's a big world out there, so don't insinuate things about unions that you don't even know exist.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anecdotal_evidence

Nor should you pretend you know whether a future union at HCL is going to be one of the good ones or one of the corrupt ones.

If you pay closer attention, you'll notice that I made no such claim.

If you're an auto worker, how easy is it to get completely get away from UAW?

Because the third 'corrupt thing' operates in favor of the employee.

Instead of the corrupt company doing everything it can to exploit employee labor, it has to fight the corrupt union doing everything it can to exploit the corporation. Otherwise if you want to argue that we should remove all corporations like we do unions because of their corruption, then I'd be all for that.

While I’m opposed to corruption in unions, according to the BLS, workers are better off with unions than without them:

https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2013/04/art2full.pdf

"workers are better off" is a statistical nonsense regardless of what's written in that pdf. This type of arguments can convince only non technical or not very smart people. A proper analysis would split workers into subgroups and give specific numbers for each subgroup. A proper analysis would use words like percentiles, median and distribution. When I see that "something is better on average" I always think that I'm being lied to.

That's just his/her paraphrasing of the complete source - if you actually had read that one you would see that it does give specific numbers for subgroups.

It is interesting that to most "Made in Germany" is a sign of high quality and that most think Germans have the best work ethic in the world despite also having the strongest labor unions.

If anyone has read a critical piece of work on what constraints in Germany allowed unions and companies to co-evolve instead of adopt the adversarial position that characterizes the American interactions, please share.

There is something categorically different and I'm not sure how that came to be.

Edit: I'm rate limited for comments. Thank you, my dude, for the recommendation.

I'm glad you asked! Can't recommend this book enough; it's beautifully written and also short - in matters of philosophy, less is most definitely more. It's a general work on the adversarial legal tradition and while it doesn't touch on German labor unions specifically it does go into some detail about the differences between the (Anglo-)American and continental European approaches.

Adversarial Legalism by Robert Kagan. https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674012417

Live through the 1970s when unions became far too political, there was the oil crisis, out of control inflation (in part from abandonment of Bretton Woods. p.s. this is where moves to the Euro originated) and most economies suffering badly and you start to understand.

Strikes and disruption with unions using the tactics of previous decades - when they had fought for and won sorely needed rights, was no longer fit for purpose. They'd achieved the hard part now were fighting battles fewer and fewer outside the union cared for. When your refuse, electricity, heat or bank is disrupted for a lengthy period, while everyone is struggling, sympathy dwindles quickly. Resentment sets in, even for a fair and deserved pay rise, if it triggers yet another strike.

What does surprise me somewhat, is the complete lack of resurgence, or even much recovery, in US and UK after being effectively neutered during the Reagan/Thatcher years. Europe seemed to fair better, so they have kept more union presence than the Anglosphere. Yet it's pretty clear we need something sticking up for worker rights once again.

Coops are a completely different animal, and I've never encountered or heard of objection or resentment to those across my life. Capitalism, and most especially the modern neoliberal variant are indeed religions, with just as much dogma.

I think it has to be framed against the baseline of pervasive anti-union ideology in the US. When people have been inculcated all their lives with the idea that labor organizing is bad, they’re all just temporarily embarrassed corporate execs, it doesn’t take too much to push them back towards this baseline. Or at least enough to quash the union.

What percentage of your life have you been being inculcated with the idea that your political opponents believe themselves to be temporarily embarrassed millionaires?

Opponents?

My political opponents are actual, non-embarrassed millionaires and billionaires from families of millionaires and billionaires.

My political allies are temporarily embarrassed millionaires, from the folks accepting below-market salaries to work at a potential unicorn to the folks buying literal lotto tickets at the corner store. A few of them are no longer temporarily embarrassed, having joined the right startup, which only goes to demonstrate that the worldview is correct. Things worked out for them without unionizing, clearly things will work out for me too one day.

It sounds like you're counting your opponents as politicians and allies as the people whom you personally associate with politically.

If you were referring to only politicians, they're basically all millionaires.

That seems like a decent definition, if oversimplified. What's wrong with it?

(And I think you'll find that I disproportionately support the non-millionare politicians.)

I know people personally on both the right and the left that aren't millionaires but (nearly) all of the public and influential political actors I know are at least millionaires, regardless of affiliation.

You're counting your opponents as the second group and your allies as the first group. Someone on your opposing side could make the _exact_ argument by reversing the groups. It's telling that your statement does nothing to show what your actual politics are.

The people I support politically are generally wealthy. I am also fairly confident that the ones who aren't probably will be if they are in politics long enough and not necessarily through corrupt means. Anyone of that stature can, at the very least, sell quite a few books on their name alone for instance. It goes hand in hand that influential people can more easily amass wealth.

Sure, politicians can become wealthy after holding office. I'm more talking about where people were situated before they entered politics, and in particular the people who are not politicians - donors, influencers (for lack of a better term), etc.

And I think my politics are more accurately represented by normal people vs. career politicians than by donkey mascot vs. elephant mascot. I vote Democrat as a matter of lesser-of-two-evils, but I yearn desperately for a world in which no one who's involved in any way with DCCC can have influence in politics ever again. If you find me someone who votes Republican who says the like AOC and hate Trump, I'd probably agree with them on a lot of things.

Your politics are mostly irrelevant although it does help with examples...

What you said paints your political allies as people you know personally who are essentially "down on their luck" people who are trying to make it while your political opponents are millionaires the likes of Mitch McConnell or a Lindsay Graham.

Someone with the opposite political leanings as you could say that their political allies are the steel workers in Pittsburgh and the auto workers in Detroit who's job were lost to globalization and free trade (and they vote Republican as a lesser of two evils) while their political opponents are millionaires like Nancy Pelosi and Diane Feinstein.

You're using two different categories of people as allies and opponents.

If you cast your argument using the same categories, it doesn't make sense. Your allies, Pelosi and Feinstein are just as wealthy as your opponents, McConnell and Graham. Or inversely, your allies, the folks buying lotto tickets accepting below market salaries who just haven't joined the right startup are just as poor as your opponents, the factory workers and coal miners who've lost their jobs to globalization and technology.

I think you're trying to say your allies are both groups from the second example and your opponents are both groups from the first example but that doesn't really work because you're actively supporting half of each and actively working against the other half. You've chosen a side that you believe will help both sides, even though they are your opponents but I don't think that's a unique position to your side.

is this not just survivorship bias? What about the countless of people who did not make it into a successful startup, or all those people who bought lottery tickets without winning anything?

becoming a millionaire is statistically highly unlikely, and why would such an unlikely event warrant anti-union sentiment?

Yeah, my point is that this isn't actually a rational way to think. That is what the "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" concept is about. For the vast majority of those people, it isn't temporary at all.

The “temporarily embarrassed millionaire” is a trope of the left. It constructs a strawman argument of how people on the right think to discount the reasons they actually vote against entitlements and anti-business legislature.

I know of nobody on the right that has voted with that mindset.

The only convincing alternative that I've heard from someone in that world is that conservatives are so afraid of getting screwed over by the rich and powerful that they'll do whatever they can to placate them while scraping to themselves what they need to survive. A, "Pray I don't alter it any further," situation.

Of course, this "TEM" thing is partly a face-saving move for our white, right neighbors by progressives who don't want to point to the racism/classism and a willingness to accept Pyhric victories that really drives a lot of anti-union sentiment. Why, not wanting the "undeserving" to receive undo benefits is the crux of several arguments on this very page.

No offense, but you’ve clearly never talked to a conservative to ask them why they support policies good for business. It has nothing to do with being afraid of rich people.

I have, and that is what he said. I'll be happy to hear another basis for anti-union sentiment that is not inclusive of being afraid of the rich or spiteful of some perceived outgroup. I'd actually wager that that covers the bases.

There are 14 million millionaire households in the US, about 11% of all households. You are more likely to be part of a millionaire household than be left handed. A million dollars is not a lot of money in 2019.

Yes, but if you aren't a millionaire now, you are unlikely to become one.

Less unlikely than 3 decades ago, but the chance of a (lower) middle class person becoming a millionaire, and especially a liquid (non-retirement+primary home) millionaire, which is the kind of thing we think of when we say millionaire, is exceedingly low.

That's a Steinbeck quote[1]. It's surely being used, just as it was originally, as a fun way to describe the somewhat banal point that people in demographics relevant to organized labor often hold opinions about public policy that are contrary to their personal interest. It's not a literal statement about what's in a republican voter's head.

That said: how many posters here consider themselves just One Great Idea away from being the next Zuckerberg, and thus tend to view discussions on, I dunno, work/life balance or engineers' unions from an employer's perspective instead of their own? Seems like more than a few to me.

[1] OK, I checked wikipedia, turns out that the original phrase was "temporarily embarrassed capitalists", but this is the variant that stuck.

That quote isn't being used how it was originally intended. It's referring to capitalists that fell on hard times, so they started supporting communism because they believed that they'd have everything they need. They're called "temporarily embarassed capitalists" because they only support communism if it benefits them and they don't have to work hard for it, not because they actually believe in it.

I know, that it's a well known quote is essentially my point. They frame their personal politics as some well-earned enlightenment, far from the ignorant anti-union baseline, while quoting a Nobel prize winning author whose works most people are forced to read as teenagers.

So your main objection is that the quote betrays its speaker as uppity?

No, it betrays that they're, at best, equally guilty of sitting on a pro-union baseline themselves.

They're not equal if the baselines built on greater or lesser degrees of correctness or ignorance.

One can be pro-organizing but not pro-union.

Not sure how you square those two. Could you elaborate? Any less durable form of organizing seems likely to have its work undone by the very well-organized and durable cadre of owners/management

Many professions that tend to be highly individualistic and require complex mastery have historically been represented by a Guild. While Guilds these days are sometimes a specialized form of union, the distinctions are often significant. A couple examples that come to mind are the American Bar Association, the American Medical Association, the Screen Actors Guild, and the Writers Guild of America.

Well, at least in the case of SAG and the WGA, those are essentially just white-collar unions. Neither of those groups would describe themselves as pro-organizing, but opposed to unions.

To characterize unions-- especially contemporary unions in the United States-- as limited strictly to collective action functions, is factually incomplete and wrong. That unions perform other functions and aim to protect workers in other ways beyond collective action should be a totally uncontroversial statement.

Although unions proximately came into existence for the purpose of taking collective action against oppressive employers, it's equally true, and at least as important, to understand that they came into existence in order to fill a regulatory vacuum in labor law.

This should prompt some important questions:

1. Should the job of protecting workers from employers properly belong to any entity other than the government?

2. Is filling the regulatory vacuum with regulation theoretically or empirically insufficient to protect workers?

3. Are unions the only means of collective action?

4. Are the functions that unions serve beyond coordinating collective action actually necessary in order to protect workers? Would they still be necessary even if labor law was sufficiently well regulated?

My position is this: We should dramatically expand and increase labor regulation and enforcement actions, and we should allow employees to take collective action. Then we should ask ourselves whether unions are still necessary.

California already has laws that protect employees. Google and other tech companies are abusing loop holes in these laws by calling would-be employees "contractors" to get out of paying them benefits and providing job security.

One should be both, with a careful eye towards aggressive governance and transparency of your union. No different than if you have equity ownership in a startup, the only difference is that you’re selling your time collectively instead of a product.

Unions are just corporations for labor sales. If you don’t like your management, replace them with your vote.

> Unions are just corporations for labor.

Not necessarily, some are democratic, like some in Sweden. The IWW is an example of an alternative to the centralized unions [1].

1. https://www.iww.org/about/official/OBU

My point is that unions only suck if you let them suck. The devil is in the implementation details, and the effort put forth by members.

Certainly.

> My point is that unions only suck if you let them suck. The devil is in the implementation details, and the effort put forth by members.

But that's the problem. The employee faces the same asymmetry when dealing with the union as dealing with the employer -- a single individual has difficulty driving a change in organizational behavior.

It's harder for an individual to fix a bad union than to leave the company for one without that union, so that's what many people will do. Which makes it even harder for anyone to do it your way, because many of the people who agree that there is a problem will have left.

> It's harder for an individual to fix a bad union than to leave the company for one without that union

Is that accurate?

Maybe? But it's like saying that it's harder to fix a bad country than to leave for another country, so its accuracy is possibly less important than its rationality.

It's a lot easier to switch employers than switch countries. Most people in fact do switch employers multiple times throughout their lives, whereas most people don't ever move to a different country from where they were born.

That's especially true when there are other jobs in the same industry and the same city but at a different company.

That depends on which country you are born into. There are several million South American immigrants living undocumented in the US who would beg to differ with that statement. Likewise, there are many expats who've chosen staying with a company over staying in their country. Finding an employer that treats you well may be harder than finding a country that treats you well in many instances.

Corporations are democratic too. Board meetings are all about voting.

Emoloyees aren't part of the corporation any more than the widgets they make are.

> Emoloyees aren't part of the corporation any more than the widgets they make are.

Which is why they're not democratic, opposed to say cooperatives.

Unions are monopolies on labor. Any competition could help to damp their excesses.

Have you ever worked in a company where a significant number of people had morale-oriented complaints? IME it does not have an effect.

>One can be pro-organizing but not pro-union.

Agree 100%.

Im the United States most local and state ballots have measures on them generated by petition drives. Get X number of registered voters to sign a petition and it is on the ballot.

I always signs these when the someone approaches me. I may not agree with the cause or be a proponent of the goal, but the group organizing should have the right to appear on the ballot and have citizens votes on it.

Few if any are trying to eliminate the ability to have ballot initiatives, whereas plenty of moneyed individuals are trying to eliminate unions.

I don't think it's a fair comparison.

I think you may have taken my comment out of context. I was replying to the OP when they said:

"One can be pro-organizing but not pro-union."

My understanding is the OP Was looking at it through the lens of a worker.

My comparison was meant to say I support someone's initiative to have something put up for a vote, but that doesn't mean I will vote for it. I could have been plainer in the explanation.

Do Google and other big companies make the same distinction between labor organizing and unions? Or do they quash it just the same?

Or the unions are composed of reprehensible bigots who support the Vietnam war and are bad on race

The unions are democratic institutions that represent the self-organization of working people. If the current leadership of a union is bad (and in many cases it is) it should be campaigned against, voted out, and replaced. Giving up on the idea of a union because you don't like who's been elected to run it is self-defeating.

> unions are democratic institutions

Not necessarily, some are quite centralized. For example, LO in Sweden. The US has plenty of examples. Look at Harlan County for an extreme example.

One of the major differences between US unions and the rest of the world is a ~50 year old legal hangover related to racism. US unions used to be allowed to moderate their support for members (as in “Joe Bag-O-Donuts is a detriment to the company and should never have been hired”). Unfortunately, many unions used that discretionary capacity to refuse to support their African-American members. It went all the way to the USSC, but the upshot is that US unions are required to have a more antagonistic relationship with management because they can’t endorse throwing out dues paying members.

I'm curious, which case are you referring to?

Ok, now what if that is not possible, and the rest of the workers have extremely bad positions, and it is not possible to convince them to change their mind?

Do you understand now why decentralization of power can have its uses?

I’ve spent 30 years in the US, many of those in red states, and I’ve heard the “temporarily embarrassed millionaire” canard way more often than I’ve heard anti-union rhetoric. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever heard anti- (private sector) union rhetoric.

Have you considered that maybe peoples’ reactions are based on bad experiences with unions? In particular, public sector unions. Even liberal areas are pretty anti-union, and with things like the DC and NYC Subways falling apart despite massive funding, who can blame them? With police unions protecting crooked cops and teachers unions protecting bad teachers, who can blame them?

(I think it’s also fair to say that the sheer rapaciousness of American public sector unions is the result of an anti-union war that has otherwise receded from the public consciousness. They fight everything tooth and nail, even reasonable reforms, because they’re the outnumbered survivors of anti-union movements.)

Unions for employees paid by taxpayers are not comparable to unions in non taxpayer funded organizations.

There’s a serious problem with incentives in the taxpayer funded space due to every union member voting in political elections, whereas the non union public is not involved, resulting in the politicians and unions being able to strike deals and no one really representing taxpayers.

"I’ve spent 30 years in the US, many of those in red states, and I’ve heard the “temporarily embarrassed millionaire” canard way more often than I’ve heard anti-union rhetoric. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever heard anti-(private sector) union rhetoric."

That's because union organizing campaigns are so rare. Usually, the organizers get fired. WalMart has closed entire stores that voted for a union.

Some anti-union resources for employers.[1][2][3] [3] advertises a "95% win rate".

[1] http://www.unionproof.com/ [2] https://lrionline.com/fighting-a-union-3/ [3] https://anh.com/

I heard anti-union rhetoric in college when people were wondering why it cost so much to set up A/V in a lecture hall. If you haven't heard any, I'm not sure whether to tell you that you've lived a sheltered life or you've so internalized the anti-union rhetoric (like your comment, right here!) that it doesn't register when you hear it.

Also, I'm very confused about your "liberal areas" comment. My impression as a regular NYC subway rider is that the subway doesn't have massive funding, and what little funding it has is being spent poorly because of decisions by politicians, not because any union has asked for anything or is getting paid too much. I've heard a lot of anger at service cuts, at our governor, at the recent fare enforcement crackdown. I've heard zero anger about the salaries paid to unionized employees.

(I have, in fairness, heard the fairly inside-baseball complaint that the unions are pushing back against extending one-person operation to more train lines, for fears of more job cuts. I don't know anyone who thinks that's the biggest problem facing the subway, and I think the vast majority of the ridership, even the politically-active ridership with opinions about the merits of unions, has very little idea that this debate even exists.)

I do agree that people in liberal areas are unhappy about police unions. I think that's its own, special thing (among other things, in NYC the Second Amendment applies more to cops and retired cops than it does to civilians), and I don't get the sense that people are unhappy about teachers' unions in the same way.

subway doesn't have massive funding

If I remember correctly, NYC Subway budget is about 10bn.

London tube is about 2bn.

It's not a money problem.

Can you cite your sources? I don't think you're comparing like to like.

These costs also need to be normalized for ridership figures (NYC has higher ridership). And don't forget that most of the figures you're going to see for NYC are for the entire MTA, which runs a lot more than just the subway.

And it's important to distinguish the cost per ride vs the subsidy per ride. Fare revenue shouldn't count "against" a transit system.

For some figures, the total budget of the London Underground is £10.3B (inclusive of fares): http://content.tfl.gov.uk/tfl-budget-2019-20.pdf [pg 10]

The total budget of the MTA (inclusive of fares) is $16.3B: http://web.mta.info/news/pdf/MTA-2019-Prelim-Budget-July-Fin... [pg 14]

Normalize those figures to dollar amounts and account for ridership, and it appears that the MTA is cheaper per ride than TfL.

Yup, the same exact document, page 78.

10.3bn number is for TFL combined, which includes buses, DLR, overground, tram and other.

1. That doesn't seem right to me? http://web.mta.info/news/pdf/MTA-2019-Prelim-Budget-July-Fin... says the MTA budget is $16.6B, of which $8.7B is to NYCT (subway + bus + Staten Island Railroad). http://content.tfl.gov.uk/transport-for-london-budget-2018-1... says the TfL budget is £9.8B (about $12.2B), of which the Underground alone has a budget of £2.5B (about $3.1B), buses are almost as much, and then there's the Overground and a few others. I don't think the distinction in budget is anywhere near 5 to 1.

2. My argument is not so much whether it has massive funding or not, my argument is that riders have the impression that it has insufficient funding - i.e., riders do not have the impression that the problem with the subway is union salaries and benefits. I'm (obviously) happy to get into transit geekery, but this discussion is about whether people have a positive or negative view of unions.

Ever since The Most Expensive Mile of Subway Track in the World, the view of NYC's unions isn't really that positive. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyre...

Trillions of dollars change hands every day in New York. How much should the infrastructure for a place like that cost?

The same as in any other major city?

I mean I think most of us are much happier with the Second Avenue Subway existing at too high a cost than not existing, and I think we primarily blame government for dragging their feet, there's no evidence they were ready to build it at a normal cost but prudently pushing back on greedy unions.

Are you aware that costs of everything can vary wildly between major cities?

Wow, just like housing, right?

The NYT, a fairly left-leaning paper in a left-leaning city, wrote about how the union is causing cost explosion building the second avenue subway. As to the funding—New York’s MTA has a significantly larger budget than London’s very similar system. London, meanwhile, covers 100% of its operating costs from fares, while New York covers just half.

However London's underground system also has unions, so if the suggestion is that it's more efficient than New York, the implication is that it's unlikely to be the presence of a union causing the issues.

You are probably correct, it’s not unions per se, it’s that particular union. I doubt that the US public would make such a distinction.

European unions in general actually work, for some reason unknown to me. I've never seen, in the modern era, a union in the US do anything but harm its members in general.

The rhetoric goes that the union is enforcing expensive outdated work to be kept to keeps their members employed. However I don’t buy that rhetoric. If that is the case, it is not the union’s fault, but the governments fault for hiring a corrupt contractor.

So if an employee steals from their employer, is it the employers fault for hiring them?

Unions always enforce expensive, outdated work. The taxi cab unions fought Uber and Lyft, a vastly superior taxi system, all to prop up an existing outdated system.

"* The taxi cab unions fought Uber and Lyft, a vastly superior taxi system...*"

Vastly superior for who?

Uber and Lyft are vastly superior than the existing taxi system and better for everyone. It got rid of the medallian system that prevented many people from driving a cab and used technology to make it very convenient to find a ride at any time.

Good things won't last forever. The taxi cab unions are already fighting these companies back in many cities.

They kind of remind me of the record industry and file sharing in the 90s: fighting technology, so they can keep their outdated and expensive system in place.

Most unions are like this. As another example, they will fight automation and force companies to hire multiple, overpaid workers, for a job that can be done by a single person. This only holds companies back and puts them at a disadvantage.

The New York Times is decidedly not left-leaning on economic issues.

> The NYT, a fairly left-leaning paper in a left-leaning city

I think American "left" and the Left everywhere else are entirely different things. As a leftie in the UK, I do not recognise the NYT as left at all.

I used to regularly see one MTA employee hosing down the platform while 3-4 others watched. I always assumed that that was the result of a union negotiation, since it was pretty consistent, but could be wrong.

I’ve heard anti union rhetoric several times a year for 15 or so years and I don’t even watch the news.

As part of a company all of whose employees were fired as a result of trying to unionize, last year, your experiences are pretty limited.

Count me in. Inculcated into the backwards ideas that free markets are good and monopolies are their enemy.

I'm fine with unions if they are voluntary, but not if I'm forced to join, forced to strike, forced to pay dues even if I'm not involved, and forced to not seek employment at a place under strike through threats of violence.

Just to clarify, are you saying, "I would like the collective to bargain on my behalf, but I just don't want to be part of that collective"?

Isn't mandatory membership a simple corollary of unionization efforts?

I'm not in favor of mandatory membership, but on the other hand if someone chooses not to be a member and is subsequently mistreated by management, there's no reason for the union to assist them and they shouldn't receive any benefits established through collective bargaining agreements.

> they shouldn't receive any benefits established through collective bargaining agreements.

Why not? I can just demand that my contract looks the same as the unions, anything wrong with that?

You can demand all you want, and your manager can respond with 'LOL no you're not worth that much'.

Then if you think you are worth that much, you can call their bluff and go somewhere else. And what happens in the union scenario? The manager hires an unproductive person for exactly the same wages?

Maybe you can, maybe you can't. If you don't want to support the people you work with then they have little motivation to support you in return if you find yourself treated poorly by the firm or a bad manager. I suggest you revisit the context in which the question was asked in the first place.

What would you do if you don't get your demands? Strike as an individual?

> I would like the collective to bargain on my behalf

No, What I would like is that other people are free to collectively bargain on their own behalf, and their own behalf alone, and I am free to bargain individually for myself, without their "help" or obligations.

> When people have been inculcated all their lives with the idea that labor organizing is bad, they’re all just temporarily embarrassed corporate execs, it doesn’t take too much to push them back towards this baseline.

Okay, everyone, think carefully about what the trite "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" quote implies. The underlying meaning is "These people are too ignorant/foolish/some other pejorative to recognize that they are not, in fact, 'temporarily embarrassed millionaires', LOL." It also has a implication of "I, however, do recognize this because I am wiser/smarter/etc. than them and I know what's good for them better than they do themselves."

If the people who repeat these kinds of things think that ordinary folk are not bright enough to pick up on these subtexts and resent the hell out of them for it, maybe they are not a tenth as smart as they think they are. Maybe it's time to stop parroting Wright's stupid quote and stop looking down on these people if you all actually want to, like, win elections or something.

> they’re all just temporarily embarrassed corporate execs

I've always found this condemnation odd given how often it's actually true.

If you break down salaries by demographics, one of the biggest correlations with salary is age. Senior positions pay more than junior ones. It's an extremely common career path to start off in an entry level job and ultimately end up in management by the end of your career.

So the reason people think they'll be making more money in ten years is that most of them will be. You may not be Warren Buffet but you could easily be the manager of your branch office and making two or three times your current entry-level compensation.

How does it work for a 10 people team for instance ?

One of them will be a team leader at some point. A second one might follow and become a team leader while the firth one goes higher.

Will they go up one more level ? let’s say yes. That makes e of them climbing the ladder.

Will there be a fourth ? probably not. That leaves 6 people not going up, and only earning marginally more. That’s less than half will see significant change in their 10 yers next.

This seems okay to me. What’s wrong with this? Not everyone deserves further compensation. And others value the work of these employees only so much, so rewards have to be distributed either those bounds.

> How does it work for a 10 people team for instance ?

Large organization graphs are shaped like pyramids, but the thing about a pyramid is that the combination of the top and the middle is as big as the bottom. The organizations large enough for unions to come into play have multiple layers of middle management.

But let's suppose the company is less than 50% managers. That still doesn't mean the typical person won't ever be a manager, it only means they're an employee for more time than they are a manager.

Also remember that small businesses employ the most people and don't have that sort of tree structure. In that case you typically have the owner and the apprentice who is expected to buy out the owner when they retire and ten person teams are not a thing. And you will often have some workers in larger organizations who don't move into management in the same company they started in but who do leave to strike out on their own, i.e. become a founder/manager of a new small business once they have sufficient industry experience.

Extremely common from the perspective of HN commentators but not actually extremely common in reality.

Most people do not have a managerial position their entire lives - period.

Actually extremely common in reality. If you're a landscaper, you don't typically go from there to being the CEO of Facebook, but after a few years you may end up in a supervisory position managing other workers. Or you save up enough money for a down payment on some equipment to start your own landscaping company.

There are indeed people who stay in dead end jobs indefinitely, but such people are not the majority of people.

The most common jobs in the US are largely, indeed, roles that would call “dead-end jobs”:

https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/area_emp_chart/area_emp_char...

What makes you think most of those have no career path? The number one, Retail Salespersons, have the obvious path into becoming sales managers for the local office, then the region etc. Even fast food workers can become the store manager.

And those jobs often have less competition for those management positions because they're so often held by college students who go on to jobs in the industry they've studied rather than competing with other salespersons or fast food workers for the office manager position.

I would say that there is a pervasive anti-free-market ideology in the US. Otherwise there's no way the laws that blatantly violate people's contract rights in order to empower union action would be tolerated by society.

But the view you’re espousing is basically propaganda as well. Corporate execs + all of the management layers below them are frequently promoted from within.

Viewing employment as a collaborative endeavor rather than a hostile negotiation goes a long ways towards improving both sides.

Finally, part of the issue is that basically none of the innovative companies in the US are union shops. Because of the ham-fisted salary control most US unions are known for, they are just seen as a way to get a company to pay more than the market price for a skill by forming a cartel.

Right now workers often put in more "give back" than they get paid I often had to work 20 hours to get paid for 8, forcing workers to do 12 hours a day for free is a great deal even if it mentally and physically breaks them who cares they're just temporary. I didn't work for Google but I assume the culture is the same as those places who forced me to work that hard.

FWIW, in the US, the Department of Labor takes wage theft complaints very seriously in the event that you or anybody else submits a complaint about that kind of working situation.

the unions tend to have an effect in favor of union’s leadership

Yup. Often forming a union just replaces self-serving management with self-serving union leadership.

Nothing like those union leaders making $300k per year!

$300k a year doesn't seem like much to pay for union leadership if it covered a large enough number of workers. It might be expensive on first glance, but it might be more expensive to not negotiate collectively.

Yeah, but unlike management, you can start an opposition caucus in your union, do organizing, win an election, and reform bad union leadership.

We just have such low awareness in the US about what unions are and how they work that we take self-serving, collaborationist, timid union leadership as a fact instead of something we can and should urgently struggle to change.

my parents had to be part of the union (USSR, so no choice). Union leaders decide who goes on vacation, when and where (e.g. paid trips to beautiful Crimea). Also, of course, who is paid what amount. Of course, if you aren’t relative/friend of union leaders you get none of the perks. f@&&k that

Oh well, it worked out badly in one context so that means it can never work in any context. On the other hand, when capitalism works out badly for people that's just how things are and nobody is to blame.

They're nominated, voted as reps. Shouldn't be extra money in it.

>It confirms that yes, this union will have an effect, and not in management's favor

If you're in California right now and watch enough TV to see anti-vaping commercials, you'll relate to the idea that hammering a message into a viewer's head as if with an adze is seen as a useful strategy, regardless (or maybe because) of the quality and integrity of the message itself.

This is also of a piece with the generally constant push for employees to identify with the company's interests over their (and their colleagues') own. I think that finding Google's moves here as ridiculous is not something that can be counted on to be common sense. It sure feels like a material if-this-then-that relationship, but a lot of times people (you know...them ;) will only remember the last and/or loudest message they heard about something.

It's about putting fear into the workers. I recently watched 'American Factory' on Netflix and this is what a union avoidance consultant says to the workers:

Good afternoon. I want to thank you so much for coming. I know you didn't have a choice. The union will go out of their way to try to convince you that it's a good thing for you and that it is in your best interest. The contract that you get, if you get one, might include better wages and benefits. That contract might include the same wages and benefits you have today. And that contract finally might include less wages and less benefits. And the threat of a strike is no longer scary to employers, because today if you go on strike, while you can't get fired, the employer has the right to permanently replace you. I'll let that sink in.

Intimidation doesn't work by changing someone's rational opinion... it's enough for management to have employees afraid of unionization, even if they think it would probably help them. Their mind will come round to rationalizing the action-out-of-fear.

Well, it's like looking at marketing/advertising and thinking ' nobody could fall for that, and certainly not me', but if it wasn't so effective firms wouldn't keep paying for it.

They are always in response to ham handed pro union efforts.

I live in SC and the volume of pro union propaganda that gets put out every time there’s an upcoming vote for Boeing is mind blowing. It’s not something you see often around here so when it suddenly appears it’s very out of place and noticeable.

It’s a vote. People are going to campaign for their interests.

> It confirms that yes, this union will have an effect, and not in management's favor. Like "Clearly we're onto something here if they oppose it this much."

I think it's important to note here that "bad for management" doesn't necessarily mean "good for employees". It is possible that unions are bad for both, by gumming up the negotiating process, and insulating low performing employees at the expense of high performing employees. It may or may not be the case that this is what happens, but it does not follow from the fact that management opposes it, therefore it is good for employees.

well, USPS has an IT union and I can tell you first hand it is no good for employees, the things you mentioned happening absolutely happen and the place is just a disaster

We have a contract with the USPS IT department and let me tell you, it is absolutely awesome for their employees. They do about half the work we do in twice the amount of time, get paid more, have more holidays (2 weeks + every single federal holiday) and have pensions. Every worker there clocks in at 9, and clocks out at exactly 5, not a single minute past. If you want a meeting or them to get you something, it needs to be scheduled before 4 otherwise there's a good chance people have already started leaving the office for the day.

Sometimes I wonder where did I go wrong?

I don't know if I'd like to work in a place like that. Wouldn't you get lazy after a couple of years? Doesn't this create incentives to deliberately work more slowly?

After a couple of more years like that wouldn't you get used to not doing much and then get slaughtered when inevitable change came around?

My friend referred to this kind of situation as "being in an ass" ;) Yeah, from time to time there's a smell but it's always warm, comfy and soft ;P

This seems like a masochistic justification for being exploited by employers

Yeah, well, you might be onto something here. I've been told I've not acted in my own self interest a couple of times before :P

You would get lazy having a 40 hour work week and 2 weeks paid vacation?

No way. Unpaid overtime sucks. Burnout sucks. What I meant was that that USPS job description sounded to me like a cushy, untouchable asshole replying to emails passive aggressively every other day from 1200-1235hrs.

I'm not for exploiting people if that's what you mean. Sorry if that wasn't clear.

Assuming someone's job is easy, without knowing much about it, and therefore believing they must lazy isn't a good look.

Well, I'm just drawing from my own experience here. Usually when I worked with people that behaved that way it turned out that that behaviour steemed from their untouchable-ish status.

Is it possible that someone behaving that way has legitimate reasons to do so? Sure. I mean I've been wrong before :P It's that I (personal experience, anecdata) didn't encounter many situations like that is all.

Idk about you, but I don’t work hard out of fear of losing my job. I do it for the respect of my coworkers more than anything. It’s totally viable to be lazy in a non-union job too.

Sure thing. It's just that that USPS job performance description didn't really sound all that respectful of your coworkers is what I'm sayin'.

If some employer is taking advantage of you you should quit. I do understand that not everyone is in a position to say 'fuck you' to a person/entity that's taking advantage of him/her and that that's a situation a union can help in.

> Wouldn't you get lazy after a couple of years? Doesn't this create incentives to deliberately work more slowly?

Maybe without unpaid overtime and burnout, developers will finally have the chance to contribute to open source and side projects that recruiters are always looking for.

I guess we can test that. How many USPS developers are open source mavens?

EDIT: Did I misunderstand a joke or something? Doesn't seem like I said anything particularly controversial.

Several are unpaid Linux kernel contributors.

And many thanks to those guys for their work!

Whoa whoa I'm not sayin people should be treated like shit. Just that that USPS example didn't really look all that good.

Burnout sucks and being exploited sucks. I'm all for unlimited sick days, being compensated for all the work and time you put in, getting the benefits that you're guaranteed by law etc. In exchange for that I sure would expect the employer to expect me performing well. Quid pro quo. The USPS example didn't imply that imho.

It enforces the 40 hours a week. That's the job you are paid for. Working 16 hours a day..7 days a week is not lazy. It's a recipe for burn out. Working hard for the 40 is what is expected and should be exactly that.

You pay me for 40 I'll give you 40 You want 80 then you pay me for 80

Facebook and Google certainly pay for 80 then. The average senior engineer there definitely makes at least double what someone at USPS IT does...

I don't think working 80 is either sustainable or even possible for that matter.

My wife was on an assignment in South Korea and she experienced the 16 hour work days there. No one even blinked when you tried calling your colleagues at 11:00pm.

However, what my wife noticed is that most of the people working those hours seemd drousy, unfocused and inattentive. It boggles my mind how either of the sides of that work contract can think that that kind of situation is beneficial for either of the sides in any imaginable way...

You get lazy when you get so tired you can't work anymore.

Even sled dogs owners give them plenty of rest or they stop doing a good job and you think it would hurt human performances?

Don't you guys have families over there? How do you raise your children if you enjoy those crazy hours? Even 40 is too much, I actually want to see, enjoy and teach my children while they grow up. Time goes by incredibly fast.

If everyone is happier, less stressed, and as a result less productive, then isn’t that a good trade off? Shouldn’t we all strive to work less hours if it means better mental health? That’s what I would wonder.

There's tons of evidence that for most people working more than 40 hours actually results in a fall in productivity (that's 9-5).

More hours are for show.

As I understand it, it's diminishing returns for a while past 40. Putting in more than 40 hours does get more done, just not as much per hour as the earlier hours.

At a point the negative impact takes a toll on your productivity all week long.

We aren't robots. Having a late night today effects my work tomorrow.

Nope, that's wrong. You get falling OVERALL productivity.

I think mental health is key in this situation.

There's a reason that what we now call "mass shootings" used to be called "going postal."

Is something keeping you back from working for USPS IT?

Pension, more then two weeks holiday, and 9am-5pm workdays sounds like a normal working conditions for an employee?

For many Americans, they are not.

It used to be. There are a ton of popular songs from the 60s, 70s and 80s, especially in country music, about "9 to 5" jobs being the gold standard and basically how you had it made if you got one.

>> Pension

>> Normal working conditions for an employee

Basically not anywhere except government-related positions.

Normal for Europe, well almost. Make it a 4 week vacation and we are almost there.

There was an example from UK, now for Poland:

* 40 hour week (anything above is overtime paid +50% more for first 8 hours during week and day, in weekends or night it is +100%)

* 20 or 26 (depending how many years you have worked in your life, usually after 2 years you get 26) + 13 public holidays.

* women after birth get 52 weeks off (plus their usual vacation), dads get 2 weeks off to be used during 2 years (the 52 weeks can be split between parents, so a mom can go to work and dad can stay with child for 32 weeks)

* on top of that when you are sick and go to doctor he/she can prescribe you a time off (sick off?), which is additional to your normal vacation (this is not limited to any number of days, e.g. when you break your leg you can be a year sick/unable to work), but pays 80% your salary

I'd never take a job with that little holiday. I'll never understand US attitudes on that matter - on most of Europe only two weeks would be unthinkable.

> it is absolutely awesome for their employees. They do about half the work we do in twice the amount of time

how is that awesome? the productive output of the most productive time of their lives is 4 times less. It would be truly awesome of course if they productively worked only 25% of the time with your efficiency and spent the rest 75% on say education, new tech learning, skills improvement, side projects... Unfortunately, i suspect, their time is simply wasted 4 times less efficiently than yours - may be using less efficient tools, processes, nobody cares about anything in particular because there is no point in improvement, etc...

I myself work in a very similar environment, a non-FAANG BigCo, my effective productivity is order of magnitude less than it was at previous jobs in particular because we're moving with the speed of midday sleeping flies, and moving any faster would create huge impedance mismatch causing systemic structural stress painfully affecting everybody. Such slowdown isn't good even in the short term as it makes your mind into a mushy soup zen-like diffusing through your skull and merging with the swamp around.

Those conditions would actually be illegally poor in the UK for a full time employee. Minimum paid holiday is 22 + 8 days (8 are the public holidays) and everyone must have an employer matched contribution pension of at least 2% of gross salary. Hours are not regulated here but generally 8 per day.

> Hours are not regulated here but generally 8 per day

Whilst a lot of employers will have you opt out of the working time directive as part of an employment contract, you can opt back in at any time, limiting your max hours to 48 a week on average:

https://www.gov.uk/maximum-weekly-working-hours/weekly-maxim...

In addition you have the right to opt out of working on Sunday - which obviously has its religious roots.

> Every worker there clocks in at 9, and clocks out at exactly 5

LUL! Those are amateur numbers, buddy. I do 11-6 maybe, and work at a big 5 tech company making big 5 tech company salaries. And frankly, we aren't working a lot of the time during the day either.

And yes, we have the "unlimited" vacation, which usually results in people taking about 4 weeks a year, on average.

I think people underestimate how easy it is to work at some of the big tech companies.

Do you have to go into the office or do you work remote?

I live a couple blocks from the office, so I go in. There are a couple people on the team who work remote, though.

Big 5 tech companies are pretty great.

> Big 5 tech companies are pretty great.

Out of curiosity - any downsides to your working conditions? You seem pretty happy about everything.

That's cool, I don't make a lot of money at the moment, but I do have nearly unlimited personal freedom working remotely.

There is no “Big 5” in tech

FANNG?

Those are not the “big 5” in tech by any measure. FANG was an acronym that specifically related to stock returns at the time.

Then what measure would you propose? I'd definitely say these companies are an outlier in the amount of influence they wield.*

* Admittedly would swap Netflix with Microsoft in the FAANG acronym.

And yet people know exactly what I mean when I say "big 5" tech company.

How is it that everyone that I talk to, knows what I am talking about when I say those words, but apparently you don't?

I don’t know. I don’t see how anybody could know which companies you mean when you say big 5 tech companies. Which ones did you mean?

It is a short hand for the major/prestigious tech companies.

So it would be Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and maybe Netflix depending on who you ask.

And yes, I know that is more than 5 companies. It is a shorthand for "those prestigious, large tech companies that new grads apply to, and hire lots of people, and have large market caps".

If I talk to any new grad who is applying to companies these day, they will know what I mean when I say "big 5 tech companies".

This is a very common term in the interview/tech market and discussions.

Yeah, new grads being confused doesn’t surprise me. We don’t call that big 5 in the real world ;)

Language is defined by how it is used.

The fact that this is how people use these words, makes it the definition.

Lots of people in the real world know exactly what it means when people say "big 5 tech companies".

You'd have to be extremely obtuse to not know what people mean when they say those words.

You obviously know what I meant.

Are those conditions not normal? 2 weeks vacation plus holidays seems very average.

I have 28 days of holidays + national holidays in Italy, plus paid sick leave, plus 8 hour of permits a month, plus of course pension, which is a legal obligation.

And I'm thinking of leaving because as a new company in a larger group they still don't give us meal vouchers like the rest of the companies in the group.

I had several like that. They were at tech and defense BigCo's. You don't need a union to be like that.

> I think it's important to note here that "bad for management" doesn't necessarily mean "good for employees". It is possible that unions are bad for both

It's become clear in the past few years that a lot of people care less about winning than they do about their "enemies" losing. To them, it doesn't matter if you hurt yourself, as long as you hurt the people who disagree with you as well.

What are you referring to?

"It's become clear", could you please follow up with some examples so that what you are saying become more clear?

It’s how politics in the US currently work. Liberals vote for “anything not conservative” and conservatives vote for “anything not liberal”.

Most of the people I know that voted for Trump don’t even like him. It was just more important to keep Clinton out of office. Most of the people I know that voted for Clinton didn’t even like her, but she wasn’t Trump so she got the vote.

In a system dominated by two parties the only voting choice you have that is worth anything at all is the less-detested one

Well, people voting for republican party are a good example... When you observe their policies, always intended to help corporate interests, you understand their voters are more interested in pissing of black people and the poors than improve their own condition.

Not exactly a recent development, though.

On average unions work better for the most people. People on the upper end will not stop contributing or trying, people on the lower end don't matter much anyway. It's the middle that provides most of the advancement.

Source?

At least two other data points - I have a friend who worked in a govt agency - doing cool and important work - she left because of the unfirable lifers - while the stories are funny you can’t go to work and perform well in that situation.

In high school teacher X was notorious for giving no work and no s*its. He missed lots of his classes so always subs. We thought it was cool (usually easy A). He was there years but my senior year he must have done something way over the line because he was fired midday. Amazingly the gossip never figured out what he did (despite kids w parents on school board)

Those are nice anecdotes, the data says otherwise. There will always be slackers, they exist in every job and industry.

I’ll admit there’s always slackers in any workplace, but what data are you referring to?

[citation needed]

Eliminating any motivation to perform well is of course going to discourage people who try harder for rewards. That’s basic economics.

Claiming that the top performers will continue to innovate and lead when they are compensated the same as the bare minimum clock punchers is extraordinary and requires evidence.

About the only place where unions are better (at least the salary negotiating US style ones) are jobs where innovation and efficiency are irrelevant.

With UBI that should remove the lazy ones who are stuck in those type of positions.

Society pays for those who won't work? Nice promo material!

We pay for them in some way or the other... they either are on public assistance or end up in jail. We pay either way.

You have a preference?

I prefer a basic income.

Pay criminals not to work? Somehow I don't think this is good PR...

I don't disagree, but I don't know know if this is how the case needs to be made...

No, UBI is paying for people who already work and receive nothing. We’re not “paying either way”.

Probably better that society pays them to sit on the couch at home than that we force them to pollute workplaces that would otherwise get more and higher quality work done.

Why? When they can pocket the UBI and also get paid to fuck around and be protected from getting fired?

More generally, UBI cannot possibly solve for a scenario where people are being dramatically overpaid and there’s no way to correct it.

There's already no motivation to 'perform well' because promotions don't mean shit nowadays. You can perform better than the rest of your entire company and get a 1% raise as a show of kindness along with maybe a new $50 coffee machine gift.

It's common knowledge in the software industry that the best way to advance is to hop jobs every two or so years. Do you think it's because of the non-existent unions, or because of corporations underpaying employees because they know they can get away with it?

You know this is about Google right?

No, you're wrong on two accounts.

First, this argument chain is about unions in general. Please read up on the full response chain to understand the context of my response, starting with stjohnswarts.

Second, this thread and story is not about Google. It's about Google's contractors. There's a very important distinction there, because contractors are often treated worse both by the companies they're working under as well as the contracted companies they're working with. Google might treat its own employees better (although the jury is still out on that with many stories alleging discrimination in terms of pay and what not) but this story is obstensibly about the anti-union behavior occurring at companies Google is partnered with.

False.

There are contractors to google making a killing - seriously - if you own your own business or provide a service to google you can make bank.

One example -> some of the employee / teambuilding / staff appreciation stuff. If the google FTE's like doing your teambuilding program google is absolutely happy to pay for it.

I know some other direct contract work with google - generally don't fight on price but their focus was on quality.

I'd like to hear some firsthand experiences of direct contractors working for google (ie, google 1099's) getting badly treated because that wasn't what I saw.

The examples are literally in the article we're discussing, complete with salary information and reason why they're unionizing.

>HCL employee and union organizer Ben Gwin says HCL workers make between $30,000-60,000 a year, and it varies widely. According to Glassdoor, a site that collected salary information from 73 people, Google software engineers in Pittsburgh earn on average $121,000 a year, ranging from $88,000-171,000 a year.

If you're going to make claims like that, please read the actual article we're discussing before jumping into the conversation. I've been a contractor before (albeit in different circumstances and not for google), I am very familiar with how the system can work and how contractors can be generally treated.

Ummm. HCL (google contractor) is making a ton of money... they did 1.4 BILLION in net income. Stock price from 76 to 1,000 INR. They are doing fine working for google.

I'm not aware of almost anyone (network infra contractors / team build soft touch providers) who historically haven't been paid very reasonably for their work working for google.

And Google does business with contractors who have unionized employees. I'm not aware of them caring too much about that either.

Google does thousands of H1bs and has something like a 99% approval rate even under trump so they don't mind working with international folks.

Okay, on your first point: You're comparing two very, very different things. For the sake of assuming you're not the one trolling here: Employee salary is different from company income. A company can be paid very well for their work, and then not properly compensate their workforce for that work. Hence, unionization.

For your second point: The intent of this article, which I hope you have read by now, specifically talks with people who say they are not being paid well working for Google as a contractor. They directly quote people who say they are not being paid reasonably for their work.

For your third point: Yes, I'm sure Google does business with unionized employees. This article is about a contractor, which is working for Google, using anti-union practices to prevent their workforce from unionizing because according to the workers they are underpaid.

And your final point has literally nothing to do with the article we're discussing or the entire argument chain we're in right now.

fzero: I know people who work for google as contractors - they are paid VERY WELL.

This constant insistence that google contractors are being paid $30K to do work that $171K engineers are doing in the same geo area is totally false. That does not happen. I am open to a specific example, but I'm not aware of one.

To be a google contractor you need a contract that has google's name on it (or Google LLC etc). That is the literal definition of being a google contractor. You get a 1099 from google. If this describes you - you are, on average, paid well.

Google flies on US airlines with highly paid and unionized pilots - I don't think they care.

Are you confusing google contractors with employees of a large non-google business?

Regardless of intent, the result is the same... Troll.

Is this a trolling comment?

Just one quick example for company we are talking about.

https://www.levels.fyi/salary/Google/

You go from level 3 at $150K to level 6 at $500K.

Bonuses for top performers where I am are very high (40% of salary) vs 5% of salary avg.

This story is not about Google. It's about Google's contractors. Please reread the story and the article title.

You said "It's common knowledge in the software industry that the best way to advance is to hop jobs every two or so years".

That works out when you start for startups, but if you want to make more than 250k, you're going to need to get promotions. The companies that pay more than that like google aren't going to hire someone into a L5 or above role that has jobbed hopped every two years without getting any promotions to an L5 or above level role at similar companies who also won't hire you at that level. There are routinely stories about people with 15+ years of experience getting hired as L4s because of this.

There are obviously exceptions especially if you write a really popular open source library but this generally holds.

> That’s basic economics.

Oh really. Because to me it sounds like a statement about human motivation patterns, and some huge assumptions about it that are, quite often, wrong. Just like cats, humans can be motivated by:

* food (or food-equivalents in the form of flipping some bits in a bank) * social interaction (60% of cats as long as not starved!)

...also, unlike cats (AFAIK), but very frequently (also AFAIK) humans can be motivated by:

* self-expression * perceived benefit to society.

If not for the need for self-expression, there would be barely anyone working in the games industry. And pretty much every company's internal relations spew more-or-less thinly veiled nonsense about how spying on customers is good - or at least acceptable - actually. That's because the last part is an _enormous_ part of motivation for many.

> Claiming that the top performers will continue to innovate and lead when they are compensated the same as the bare minimum clock punchers is extraordinary and requires evidence.

...except non-unionised companies often tolerate bare minimum clock punchers, and, conversely, unions often penalise those. Good relationship with management can easily allow slacking, and unions have more interest in company's survival than some nomadic C-level.

You're making things up and then demanding others to provide evidence. Some of us actually worked in an office for more than a day, you know.

>Because to me it sounds like a statement about human motivation patterns

Lol. I think you need to look up what the study of economics is.

I'd be interested in that data - I have colleagues with wives / husbands doing union shift work - even if you are 100% gung-ho it seems to be 100% seniority based still or has that changed?

Things like UBI, higher minimum wage, reduce exempt classification loopholes etc all seem like ways that rules could change to benefit everyone.

I would LOVE to see the data that says a seniority based union system results in better retention of high performers and their continued push to perform well.

Unions aren't perfect, so take care to not scrap your car because it has a dent.

https://www.google.com/search?q=do+unions+benefit+employees+...

First two links have loads of commentary with citations. There's plenty of books on the subject, as well, if you're interested. Amazon is a good place to look for them.

The union I have experience with (Sound Engineers union in Burbank) was nothing but a complete pain. The union admits members based on nepotism (friends and family only essentially) and the work they did was always second tier in comparison to the non covered studio engineering team.

I was on a systems engineering team at this studio, and our union counter parts were nothing but incompetent pains in the ass.

Unions don’t have to be this way, and I think they serve an important roll, but people should really be careful what they are asking for as the results might not be what are expected.

there will be way more slackers in a job-secure environment, where workers have 0 motivation to do anything.

Anecdotes don't gain rhetorical force by calling them "data points"

Meanwhile things like the 8 hour working day was a result of decades of union efforts - much of which was met with open violence.

Unions can go too far in supporting people who should not be protected,but a large part of the reason they do is that they came into existence at a time when employers literally were prepared to see workers die to protect their ability to mistreat people.

Unions tends to take softer stances e.g. in parts of Europe where their level of involvement in decision-making means the hard-line stances are no longer seen as necessary.

Cool, you have two stories of slackers on a job. What relevance does that have to the discussion?

I was responding to this claim about seniority based unionized workforces

"People on the upper end will not stop contributing or trying".

I was interested in the citation for this given the anecdotal info I had which involved high performing folks trying to find more rewarding work elsewhere.

What about the people who won't be hired at all because of a union? How does the union work out for them?

The primary mechanism of power used by unions to keep wages high is by reducing the available work force. This is done by lobbying for things like requiring certifications to be legally allowed to perform work and lobbying/negotiating for disallowing non-union members from accepting work. This has the net effect of increasing the wages of the high paid workers while reducing the wages of the low paid workers who could do the higher paid work but aren't allowed to.

Here's Nobel economist Milton Friedman discussing it in more detail. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzYgiOC9cj4

> I think it's important to note here that "bad for management" doesn't necessarily mean "good for employees"

Also important to note there is a difference between "bad for employees" and "bad for employees because we're going to retaliate".

Your just repeating some of the anti union messages the union busters hired to oppose organising campaigns.

> gumming up the negotiating process

The negotiation process is the workers trying to keep more of the wealth they themselves create. "Gumming up" is when the people parasitically appropriating surplus labor time from those workers demand more.

> insulating low performing employees at the expense of high performing employees

Who will insulate us from the heirs expropiating dividend profits from high (and low) performing employees? What hubris that the heirs who do not work want those of us who do work in some Hunger Games competition against one another.

Yep I agree, and just to be thorough, it's also possible that unions are good for management and bad for employees (let's say the mgt and the union bosses collude to split the difference and shaft the workers), or good for both management and employees (for example better health plan, lower turnover, lower absenteeism, better morale & customer/client service and ultimately greater market success & higher profits).

There's no particular reason to assume out-of-hand without further information that the interests of employees and management are intertwined (basically my earlier point), nor that they're separate & opposed (basically your point). But management by opposing the union so strongly is implicitly asserting that at a minimum they believe it'll be bad for management. They can also be wrong vs. right in that prediction. They may also explicitly assert it'll be bad for workers, and be wrong or right in that. Seems like there's a lot of game theory happening here and I bet there's some concise notation for all this. (Not my strong suit.)

> I think it's important to note here that "bad for management" doesn't necessarily mean "good for employees"

What is “good for employees” or “bad for employees” may not be the same for all employees. A policy which favours the interests of one group of employees may disadvantage another. Which group of employees’ interests will a union prioritise?

For example, suppose management has budgeted enough for a 2% across the board pay rise. Management has two basic choices about how to distribute this:

Option 1) Everyone gets 2%

Option 2) Above-average performers get more than 2%, every one else gets 0%

If you are an above-average performer, Option 2 is best for you, whereas if you are not, then you will be better off with Option 1. Which of those two options will the union advocate for?

Why reduce it to terms of bad or good of relation, there is also an element of a union of contractors gaining greater degree self determination instead of management being in a stronger position to dictate terms of employment.

What if, I know i know this is crazy, but it isn't a zero sum game?

What if both could benefit? What could a modern union look like today?

We think in terms of unions = bad, but union is simply employees organizing and negotiating as a group.

Wow, looks like anti union activity is heating up right here in the comment section

“Bad for the company” doesn’t mean “good for employees”. If the employees were planning on burning the office down, management would pretty obviously voice dissent but that doesn’t mean the employees are “onto something”.

Unions have been have been suppressed for over 150 years. At least they have stopped killing unionist.

Over the course of the early 20th century, unions got laws passed that violate the rights of employers, in order to give themselves enormous leverage over every capital-intensive work site where a large number of workers concentrate, and they attained a complete stranglehold over all major industries by the 1950s, and all the while, they've had the public at large convinced that they're the underdog.

>unions got laws passed that violate the rights of employers

lol this is precious

I think you should do a little research to get a basic familiarity with what labor laws relating to union action prohibit. You'll find that they blatantly violate the contracting rights of employers.

Snickering at me while being unaware of such a basic fact is deplorable.

What is a "contracting right"? A quick search doesn't bring it up as legal terminology, so I'm thinking it's somewhere between generic libertarian and freeman-of-the-land level nonsense, but I welcome a less ridiculous explanation.

If you aren't far libertarian, the government exists specifically to limit what people can contract to do. Unless you consider a government to be nothing more than a contract-enforcement entity (and even then, it is in some sense implied by there being contracts that the government would refuse to enforce).

Further, describing a constitutional law as a violation of rights is in a sense a reverse tautology. It is by definition not a violation of anyone's rights, unless you believe that the US legal system is in some sense unjust, in which case I'm very, very curious to know in what way US law is unfair to employers.

The term of art is freedom of contract:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_contract

Freedom of contract is a basic prequisite of a free society. It's a subset of free association.

>Unless you consider a government to be nothing more than a contract-enforcement entity

In a free society the government exists only to restrict action in order to protect rights, which extends to the rights one gains through contracts, and to administer public goods for the public benefit.

In a free society the government does not restrict the right of two consenting adults to engage in a mutually voluntary interaction.

There's absolutely no excuse for laws that restrict the right of someone to offer employment terms that reserve the right to fire someone for unionizing or going on a strike.

>Further, describing a constitutional law as a violation of rights is in a sense a reverse tautology.

That's a disingenuous appeal to legality. Law does not confer moral legitimacy.

There absolutely is: an imbalance of power between the two groups contracting. There are practically no situations where contracts are unrestricted. Healthcare, labor, and housing (rentals) all restrict what the provider can do.

Freedom to contract that you describe is not commonly considered ethical. While you're correct that law does not on its own confer moral legitimacy, you can usually find some jurisdiction that does something. There aren't any that provide complete freedom to contract. It's a highly fringe anarcho-liberetarian position vthat leads to exploration.

Existing violations of the freedom of contract are due to popular misconceptions and common tropes like the idea that two people of unequal power cannot arrived at a genuinely consensual agreement. First of all a court will throw out any contract which is not genuinely consensual. Second, balance of power is irrelevant for a mutually agreed contract. Powerful companies compete with each just as much as they compete with workers.

Powerful employers therefore neutralize each other's power because they are competing for the same pool of workers.

A powerful corporation has no power to compel someone to agree to an employment contract that is not the best one on the market just as a powerful corporation has no power to compel someone to buy a product that is not the best one on the market.

>>There aren't any that provide complete freedom to contract.

That's an appeal to popularism. 300 years ago a slavery supporter could say the same about slavery.

>>It's a highly fringe anarcho-liberetarian position vthat leads to exploration.

There is no evidence at all that it leads to exploitation and name-calling basic principles of justice doesn't make them go away. Two consenting adults have every right in the world to enter into any agreement they want as long as it is mutually voluntary as judged by a competent court. Cookie cutter rules that generalize entire classes of interaction as non-consensual don't cut it. They are crude interventions that are based on popular misconceptions.

> First of all a court will throw out any contract which is not genuinely consensual.

Sure, and minimum wage and fair housing laws are simply legal shortcuts to abbreviate arguments about non-genuinely-consentual contracts.

> Second, balance of power is irrelevant for a mutually agreed contract. Powerful companies compete with each just as much as they compete with workers.

This is naive. Certainly in markets where demand outstrips supply this is true, but for markets where supply is smaller than the demand (housing, jobs, healthcare, you see a pattern?) there's little need for suppliers to compete with each other, except at the very top of the market.

Put it simply, if I can pay you $3.00 or $15.00, and make a profit either way, I'll choose to pay you $3.00, and there are markets where that is absolutely possible.

> That's an appeal to popularism. 300 years ago a slavery supporter could say the same about slavery.

No, there have always been some jurisdictions where slavery was outlawed. I'm saying that there are zero jurisdictions with an unrestricted "freedom of contract". In other words, literally no governing body recognizes such a freedom, anywhere in the world.

> There is no evidence at all that it leads to exploitation and name-calling basic principles of justice

Calling a position fringe has exactly as much merit (actually more, since its based on evidence that no one recognizes it) than calling it a "basic principle of justice". You're essentially claiming that there are no just governments anywhere, which is indeed your prerogative (and I might be inclined to agree although for vastly different reasons), but you have yet to justify why your world is more just. Below I outline why why I believe your world would increase homelessness and exploitation of lower class working people at the hands of employers and landlords, as one example. I claim that is less just than the world we currently inhabit. The onus is now on you to either explain why more exploitation is more just, or why it won't occur.

> Two consenting adults have every right in the world to enter into any agreement they want as long as it is mutually voluntary as judged by a competent court.

The assumption here is that the person with the lesser power will be able to successfully win in court quickly and cheaply enough to make a court case worth it. That's an assumption that doesn't hold out in practice and makes these legal shortcuts necessary to prevent. It relies on a basic level of safety: an income to sustain yourself, a place to live, at a minimum. When adjudicating a contract with the provider of your income or your home, you risk abuse at the hand of them. You also need to know your rights and responsibilities, and have some way of ensuring your continued safety in the meantime. That's not possible when you're taking an adversarial relationship with someone who could make you homeless. Even if (and that's an if) a court eventually finds them to have acted in bad faith, you're still homeless. You lose relatively more.

>>to abbreviate arguments about non-genuinely-consentual contracts.

They're over-generalizations. There is no way all work arrangements that pay below the mandated minimum would be thrown out by a court as non-consensual for example. Same with tenancy agreements that don't meet so-called fair standards.

>>Certainly in markets where demand outstrips supply this is true, but for markets where supply is smaller than the demand (housing, jobs, healthcare, you see a pattern?) there's little need for suppliers to compete with each other, except at the very top of the market.

That's not how supply and demand works. There is always demand for labor at a low enough price point. That's why minimum wage increases unemployment and reduces employment growth when it rises above market wages. It makes it illegal to satisfy demand that what otherwise exist at certain price points.

No economist worth their salt would claim that at certain supply demand ratios, competition doesn't exist.

>>Put it simply, if I can pay you $3.00 or $15.00, and make a profit either way, I'll choose to pay you $3.00, and there are markets where that is absolutely possible.

Of course.. But that in no way implies employers aren't in competition with each other. You're just naively assuming that low wages is an indication of employers having no competition, when in reality means the level of capital is low.

If in your scenario, I can pay you $3, it's in society's interest I do that and reinvest the rest to increase capital concentrations that are the source of all wage growth, or to hire 5 workers instead of one.

And this isn't merely theoretical. If in Bangladesh, a minimum wage of $15/hour were instituted, it would outlaw huge swathes of voluntary employment contracts, and would devastate people's economic lives.

Again, basic economics.

>>No, there have always been some jurisdictions where slavery was outlawed.

No there hasn't. Slavery was a universal institution for much of human history.

>>Below I outline why why I believe your world would increase homelessness and exploitation of lower class working people at the hands of employers and landlords, as one example.

Your exploitation arguments are basic on common fallacies held by those without an understanding of economics.

>>Calling a position fringe has exactly as much merit (actually more, since its based on evidence that no one recognizes it) than calling it a "basic principle of justice".

It's a basic principle of justice because once you strip away ideological rationalizations and appeals to legal conventions, almost anyone would acknowledge that forbidding two adults from partaking in an interaction they both genuinely consent to a totalitarian infringement of their rights.

>>The assumption here is that the person with the lesser power will be able to successfully win in court quickly and cheaply enough to make a court case worth it.

First of all, that's something the government can directly address, rather than social activists using it as an excuse to institute cookie cutter rules, and second litigation naturally balance is this because the more powerful party has more assets that can be confiscated by courts. Lawyers will represent under resourced parties for free because they can earn a commission on whatever the suit wins.

> If in your scenario, I can pay you $3, it's in society's interest I do that and reinvest the rest to increase capital concentrations that are the source of all wage growth, or to hire 5 workers instead of one.

You're assumption is that I'll reinvest the rest into the company, instead of just pocketing the difference myself. If I can sustain myself comfortably pocketing the difference, why re-invest the rest. You're assuming certain incentive structures that don't always exist in the real world.

> No there hasn't. Slavery was a universal institution for much of human history.

Near universal, not universal.

> And this isn't merely theoretical. If in Bangladesh, a minimum wage of $15/hour were instituted, it would outlaw huge swathes of voluntary employment contracts, and would devastate people's economic lives.

Yes and? That isn't relevant to any argument I'm making. I agree that the specific regulations of what contracts can/cannot permit may not all be universal. That doesn't mean that some provisions cannot be universal. As a simple example, a contract between two consenting parties that contracts one to commit a crime on behalf of the other in return for some payment should be universally void, despite both parties consenting. That doesn't require that the list of crimes be universal across jurisdictions. Only that the principle: "A contract between two consenting groups that requires one to act criminally is invalid."

> almost anyone would acknowledge that forbidding two adults from partaking in an interaction they both genuinely consent to a totalitarian infringement of their rights.

Leaving aside my personal opinions on any of these issues, I disagree that this opinion is anywhere near common. There are acts that society considers it okay (and perhaps ethical) to prevent a single person from doing (suicide), and where it is often criminal to help someone (physician-assisted suicide). There are all sorts of acts that all kinds of people want to have the government prevent two consenting people from partaking in (marriage if you're not straight, all kinds of kinks). Currently, some of these things are legal and some are not. "Once you strip away ideological rationalizations" is doing a lot of work for you there. What you're claiming is that "once you strip away <ideological systems with which I disagree> almost anyone would acknowledge <the validity of my preferred ideological system>." Which is vacuous. You have to justify why your system is superior to the others, you can't do that by ignoring them. What makes the world better if we replace a "totalitarian" government, over which I maintain the ability to influence, with a totalitarian corporation whom I can exert no control over? Either explain why that is more just, or why it won't happen.

> Your exploitation arguments are basic on common fallacies held by those without an understanding of economics.

Yet you've not actually addressed them. If you understanding of economics is superior, it should be straightforward to correct me.

> First of all, that's something the government can directly address

They do, by streamlining certain court cases and making particular contract provisions explicitly illegal. You just dislike their solution.

> Lawyers will represent under resourced parties for free because they can earn a commission on whatever the suit wins.

Sometimes, the law isn't perfect. This is especially true if you allow the empowered group to write contracts which include stipulations to, for example, cap their own liability, or require arbitration outside of the court. Things that the empowered group is more free to do under your proposal.

To circle back to the beginning of this conversation, in the US, the freedom of contract you describe is not recognized. So your original claim, that "unions got laws passed that violate the rights of employers" is untrue: the right is not and has not ever been recognized. It is not enshrined anywhere, it cannot be violated because it does not, within our jurisdiction, exist. You can argue that it perhaps should be a right, but it is not widely recognized as one.

>>You're assumption is that I'll reinvest the rest into the company, instead of just pocketing the difference myself. If I can sustain myself comfortably pocketing the difference, why re-invest the rest.

And that's fine too. The $12 profit is appropriate compensation for the person investing their capital into a capital starved sector of the economy. That compensation is incentive for others to invest in that sector.

Self-interest will drive many to reinvest that profit, because profit margins that good are hard to pass up, and don't last forever.

>>Near universal, not universal.

You are idealizing the past. Slavery was totally and utterly commonplace before the emergence of humanistic theological traditions.

>>That doesn't mean that some provisions cannot be universal. As a simple example, a contract between two consenting parties that contracts one to commit a crime on behalf of the other in return for some payment should be universally void, despite both parties consenting.

That is not consensual. Just as you cannot personally violate someone else's rights by depriving them of their property or damaging their person without their consent, you cannot collaborate with someone else to do so. Any contract formed toward that end is an act toward a commission of a violation of someone's rights, and thus appropriately prohibited.

No mutually voluntary contract falls in this category, and thus your example is inapplicable.

>>Leaving aside my personal opinions on any of these issues, I disagree that this opinion is anywhere near common.

I think anyone who's grown up with Western ideals would consider a third party interfering with a consensual interaction between two adults to infantilize and patronize one or both counter-parties and to be a totalitarian imposition.

That's why courts would rule all such contracts valid in the absence of legislative limitations on the freedom of contract. Courts with juries of one's peers which get an opportunity to deliberate on issues are the best arbitrator of justice and most accurate reflection of people's genuine beliefs on the issues.

>>Yet you've not actually addressed them

I have, a number of times. See my point about the 'fair' wage level and the existence of competition at any capital to labor ratio.

The fact that you're making these assertions at all, when they are so unscientific, is irresponsible.

>>They do, by streamlining certain court cases and making particular contract provisions explicitly illegal.

Blanket judgements based on crude generalization are not directly addressing the issue of less resourced parties being at a disadvantage in legal battles.

The issue is the legal disadvantage that less resourced parties face, which has to be addressed by more resources going towards legal counselling and representation for less resourced parties.

>>This is especially true if you allow the empowered group to write contracts which include stipulations to, for example, cap their own liability, or require arbitration outside of the court. Things that the empowered group is more free to do under your proposal.

If the less powerful party provides genuine consent to such a provision, then it's no one else's business. They agreed to those circumstances.

>To circle back to the beginning of this conversation, in the US, the freedom of contract you describe is not recognized

And to circle back to my first point, anti-free-market pro-union ideology is pervasive in the US.

Arguing with libertarians and showing how naive and simplistic their assumptions are is sport for intellectual types in the US.

>>So your original claim, that "unions got laws passed that violate the rights of employers" is untrue: the right is not and has not ever been recognized.

Just like slavery didn't violate anyone's rights 300 years? Just because something isn't recognized by the law doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

> And that's fine too. The $12 profit is appropriate compensation for the person investing their capital into a capital starved sector of the economy. That compensation is incentive for others to invest in that sector.

This doesn't address the imbalance of power between the job seeker and the job provider. The job seeker is still at a disadvantage in the relationship. We're talking externalities, not the efficiency of supply and demand in a perfectly efficient market. I reject the notion that such a market exists.

> Any contract formed toward that end is an act toward a commission of a violation of someone's rights, and thus appropriately prohibited.

There are crimes that don't involve the violation of anyone's rights. Such contracts should still be invalid.

> If the less powerful party provides genuine consent to such a provision, then it's no one else's business. They agreed to those circumstances.

And are now unable to seek retribution for additional damages. You're arguing for the ability to sign legal protections away.

> Blanket judgements based on crude generalization are not directly addressing the issue of less resourced parties being at a disadvantage in legal battles.

Then provide a more direct solution.

> The issue is the legal disadvantage that less resourced parties face, which has to be addressed by more resources going towards legal representation for less resourced parties.

This is a start, but doesn't address the potential loss of livelyhood. It also doesn't address the potential for abuse at the contract negotiation process. If you're going to propose something like everyone getting free, government provided legal aid and some form of basic income, sure that might address all of my issues, but I have a feeling you wouldn't appreciate the taxes required to maintain such a system.

> I think anyone who's grown up with Western ideals would consider a third party interfering with a consensual interaction between two adults to be a totalitarian imposition that infantilizes and patronizes one or both counter-parties.

And yet I just gave a laundry list of counterexamples. Repeating utterly untrue statements doesn't lend them more legitimacy, it just makes you look out of touch. Which, to be clear, you are.

The US is, compared to most of the western world, far more anti-union, and anti-union ideology is more pervasive here than in most western nations. The right to act without government intervention to the extent you hold it is a fringe view, and is not something that most people support. And there's good reason for that:

> Just like slavery didn't violate anyone's rights 300 years?

> If the less powerful party provides genuine consent to such a provision, then it's no one else's business. They agreed to those circumstances.

Your proposed system would allow people to sign themselves into slavery. Stop trying to argue that slavery was some unjust evil, when you're simultaneously arguing for a system that would allow slavery. You can't have it both ways. Either slavery (or perhaps indentured servitude, since that was often consensual) didn't violate people's rights back in the day, or your proposed legal framework, which would allow people to sign themselves over as slaves, would! Which is it?

>>The job seeker is still at a disadvantage in the relationship.

They are not at a disadvantage. Whether the job seeker is dealing with a small business looking to hire someone, or a large corporation looking to hire someone, they have the same power to walk away if the job offerer doesn't offer the best terms on the market.

It's as simple as that. You're getting stuck on some trope about "imbalance of power" and are not dealing with the simple reality that in a free market, the only power someone has over another is to offer them a better deal than the next best offer on the market.

That is not exploitation, or abuse or anything else that we need to violate the freedom of contract for.

>>There are crimes that don't involve the violation of anyone's rights.

Nothing that doesn't involve the violation of anyone's rights should be a crime.

>>You're arguing for the ability to sign legal protections away.

Yes I'm arguing that people should be free to make their judgments on what offer to accept. We don't need to deny people the right to offer terms because we assume that others lack the judgment to decide for themselves whether those terms are in their interest.

>>Then provide a more direct solution.

I did: provide more resources for legal representation for less-resourced parties.

>>This is a start, but doesn't address the potential loss of livelyhood.

It does, because a strong enough case of contract violation will allow legal firms to pay the wronged party living costs on the expectation that the defendant will need to cover those costs at a later date.

>>It also doesn't address the potential for abuse at the contract negotiation process.

And your solution doesn't address the vast swathes of mutually beneficial contracts that are prohibited by your cookie-cutter restrictions.

Problems should be addressed on a case-by-case basis, through court proceedings that weigh the facts of each case. Cookie cutter rules that generalize entire classes of ostensibly mutually voluntary interactions as "involuntary", based on ridiculuos equations like "unequal power leads to unfair contracts" are not justice. They are not good government. They are not reasonable laws.

>> some form of basic income

No thank you. No universal welfare extracted through pain of imprisonment from those producing value.

>>And yet I just gave a laundry list of counterexamples.

I refuted every one of your examples.

>>Repeating utterly untrue statements doesn't lend them more legitimacy, it just makes you look out of touch. Which, to be clear, you are.

Any reasonable person would view a third party forcibly interfering and preventing a mutually voluntary interaction between two consenting adults as patronizing, and totalitarian. That's a fact that's clear once you strip away political partisanship, appeals to legality and ideological rationalizations.

You're just in denial that the ideology you bet the farm on is, like all ideologies, wrong.

>>Your proposed system would allow people to sign themselves into slavery.

No. No court would allow that under common law. A court would find an argument that what a person agreed to a decade earlier cannot bind the person they are in the present, because the two people are not in effect the same person, as reasonable.

Like I said: arguing with libertarians and showing how naive and simplistic their assumptions are is sport for intellectual types in the US. You're a typical example of that.

> No. No court would allow that under common law. A court would find an argument that what a person agreed to a decade earlier cannot bind the person they are in the present, because the two people are not in effect the same person, as reasonable.

So you're saying that a blanket rule to make contracts that involve selling ones-self into slavery makes sense? Or that there are certain circumstances in which selling oneself into slavery is alright, and so it should be adjudicated by the court on a case by case basis?

How even could someone who is a slave (and therefore likely limited in their movements) petition a court?

> A court would find an argument that what a person agreed to a decade earlier cannot bind the person they are in the present

People sign contracts for more than 10 years all the time (mortgages, as an example). You saying we can just back out of those?

>>So you're saying that a blanket rule to make contracts that involve selling ones-self into slavery makes sense? Or that there are certain circumstances in which selling oneself into slavery is alright, and so it should be adjudicated by the court on a case by case basis?

If courts rule that selling oneself into slavery is in all circumstances non-consensual, then there's no problem at all with codifying that with a statute. This would never be the case with minimum wage or 'fair' housing laws.

Courts would absolutely find numerous if not almost all instances of such interactions as consensual.

>>How even could someone who is a slave (and therefore likely limited in their movements) petition a court?

The slavery is a private relationship, not one that is relevant to the court. The government doesn't deperson someone just because they enter into a slavery agreement with another party. The court would accept petitions from all legal persons.

>>People sign contracts for more than 10 years all the time (mortgages, as an example). You saying we can just back out of those?

Mortgage contracts govern property, not people. One has a right to give property away. One doesn't have a right to give their future self away.

> One doesn't have a right to give their future self away.

This contradicts what you said earlier, which is that you should be able to sign away legal protections in a contact.

It seems we agree on one point: there are some rights you cannot sign away, and it is the government's responsibility to intervene in such a situation. You draw that line at somewhere around slavery. I simply draw the line elsewhere.

We're both willing to violate your previously involiable right to contract. If you truly believed it were involiable, you would respect a person's right to sign themselves into slavery or indentured servitude. There are situations where one might be willing to make such a decision: to save a loved one, perhaps.

But you've said that such a contract could be voided, even if at the time of signing the parties consented.

We both agree that there should be limits on the right to contract, much as there are limits on most other rights. I simply claim that the line should be drawn differently than where you believe it should be.

>>This contradicts what you said earlier, which is that you should be able to sign away legal protections in a contact.

I'm not saying you shouldn't be able to sign away "legal protections", which is a vague term that has a very subjective meaning based on one's perspective on a particular contract.

I said that one shouldn't be able to sign away someone else's rights. I think a court would find that selling one's future self into slavery falls into this category.

You can't just blur the distinction between these two very different things and claim that I'm indirectly supporting one by supporting the other.

>>We're both willing to violate your previously involiable right to contract.

The right to contract doesn't need to be violated to end selling one's self into slavery. All that needs to happen is that a court find that in the future self is not the same person as the present self.

Unlike you I want these determinations to be made by courts of law not by very ill-informed and ideologically motivated social activists who are not carefully weighing the evidence of each case.

Claiming that selling ones self into slavery and accepting a lease agreement that says the property owner is not obligated to keep renting to you at the same price after 1 year are equally easy to make a blanket judgment about not being consensual, is disingenous.

And with regard to the very extreme scenario of the former; I'm not even saying we should make a blanket judgment about that at the legislative level. I'm saying that the courts should judge that and only if they determine that all cases of this situation are non-consensual, should a law be made to ban it.

So we have very differing views on this, despite the superficial similarities you pointed out, and which are only similarities when viewed out of context.

>>We both agree that there should be limits on the right to contract

Wrong, the right to contract does not allow violating other people's rights. Violating someone else's rights is non-contractual. I oppose an agreement to sell oneself into slavery only insofar as a court after careful and considered deliberations has determined that it is a violation of a party's rights, and thus not a fully consensual/contractual interaction.

You are not willing to make that leap and say that only courts should be making these determinations because only courts do the deliberation needed to competently judge these very complex matters. Because if you did make that leap then you would have to admit that you're a Libertarian and that left-wing ideology does not work. And you are not willing to do that.

You're relying on literal freeman-of-the-land nonsense at this point. For a judge to conclude that you-in-a-decade is a different person than you-now, the law would have to allow that possibility. Our current laws don't. Your proposed legal system would.

In other words, your proposed legal system would prevent someone from signing over some rights to their future self. Your ethical reasoning behind this choice is irrelevant. The mechanics of your proposed laws would make certain contracts void.

As I've said before, courts cannot make decisions in a vacuum. They need laws to rule based on. The laws that would need to exist to enable the system you want in practice restrict the freedom to contract that you claim to leave unrestricted.

You try to avoid this contradiction by wrapping it up in the idea that you can be a different person in ten years, but current laws don't recognize that, and the only reason you'd need such a law is to resolve this contradiction without explicitly limiting the contract. It's transparent. I expect I could find more contradictions, but you'd similarly attempt special pleading for those cases.

>>You're relying on literal freeman-of-the-land nonsense at this point. For a judge to conclude that you-in-a-decade is a different person than you-now, the law would have to allow that possibility. Our current laws don't. Your proposed legal system would.

No, that is not how common law works. Common law holds consent as a core principle of contract law. Courts take all manner of factors into consideration in determining whether parties gave consent.

Courts will most certainly consider the genuity of the consent a person gave 10 years prior to being foribly confined and made to labor for another.

You're using ideologically extremism and bigotry with your "free man of the land" nonsense accusation, which is intended to belittle and delegitimize me, and avoid contending with my point on its own merits.

>>They need laws to rule based on.

That is not how commom law works. Commom law is based on existing statutes and legal precedent. In the absence of the former, the latter suffices. Contract law in particular is based almost exclusively on common law.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precedent

>>You try to avoid this contradiction by wrapping it up in the idea that you can be a different person in ten years, but current laws don't recognize that

The argument has never been tested in court. I'm suggesting the argument would be accepted by a court, and you've provided no reason to believe it wouldn't.

Precedent is against you, however: you cannot claim to be a different person under current common law. To overrule the existing precedent, you would need a new law, which is what I said.

> Courts will most certainly consider the genuity of the consent a person gave 10 years prior to being foribly confined and made to labor for another.

In the hypothetical, we've already agreed that the consent given was genuine. The question isn't whether or not the consent was genuine, the answer to that is a resounding "yes". The question is "is the person now, 10 years later, a different person such that their prior genuine consent no longer applies"? This question can be rephrased as "Is there a way to re-invent myself as a new legal being and avoid prior obligations and agreements at no consequence to myself?" They are in fact the same question. And courts time and time again have resoundingly answered that question with a no. A group that consistently tries to argue otherwise is freemen of the land. Hence me throwing you in with them, because you're using their (nonsense) arguments. Thankfully we've seen them try those arguments in court before, and they never win.

> I'm suggesting the argument would be accepted by a court, and you've provided no reason to believe it wouldn't.

Let me just repeat that last bit: these arguments have been tried, by the freemen of the land whose comparison you so resent. They never win. Courts have tested and failed these arguments because they are bad arguments.

You have not shown that precedent is against me. Where has this argument been tested and rejected?

>>The question isn't whether or not the consent was genuine, the answer to that is a resounding "yes". The question is "is the person now, 10 years later, a different person such that their prior genuine consent no longer applies"

That goes to the question of whethee the consent was genuine. Consent is not genuine when it is provided on behalf of another party.

>>This question can be rephrased as "Is there a way to re-invent myself as a new legal being and avoid prior obligations and agreements at no consequence to myself?"

A disingenuous leading construction of the question..

And being considered a different person does not allow one to avoid all obligations and agreements that their pass self entered into. All property bounded by past agreements would still be bound, and the vast majority of agreements use property as collateral to compel compliance.

Only self-imposed slavery would be nullified by such an affirmative response to the question.

This has nothing to do with your "freemen-of-the-land" nonsense accusation.

I'd be open to seeing a single court case where someone used the "they are not their past self" argument to get out of their legal obligations.

> I assume they must work to some degree, or they wouldn't do it.

I wouldn't be so sure. Unionization is usually rare in the US, and combatting it therefore won't have much evidence to go on. So you end up with crazy people making shit up and seeing what sticks. Like the guy working for Oregon's negotiation team who created fake aliases 'Aanus McFadden' and 'Roy Vragina' to post anti-union messages on social media: https://www.wweek.com/news/2019/08/06/oregon-health-and-scie...

I always wonder about ham handed union activities.

Cases like this are just sickening: https://www.illinoispolicy.org/news/seiu-fights-to-force-hom...

Several of my family members have been in unions, and all I can say is no thanks. I cannot imagine working in such an adversarial us vs them environment, where its all about assigning blame and working to rule. I cannot imagine being told I'm not allowed to work when I want to, just because the union boss wants to make a point.

Agreed. Also, if you haven't, watch the documentary American Factory on Netflix.

I assume they must work to some degree, or they wouldn't do it.

The people doing it must believe it works. That's not the same as it actually working. People do things that don't work believing that they do all the time.

You'd think that... but apparently not.

Worked at a factory many years ago (early 90s) where we supplied a union shop with parts. UAW was trying to unionize our plant, and management flipped its shit and went on the warpath. Prior to that I was really not pro-union, despite my father having been a UAW member and drilling into my head the times when the union kept the company from dicking people around.

They showed their true colors loud and clear, but people still voted against the union. Despite all evidence to the contrary, they had people convinced that they were each and every one high performing employees who'd be held back by things like standard pay scales and agreements on overtime, etc.

Sadly by that time I wasn't at the shop to vote anymore, because I was fired for speaking up against random drug testing. (Technically, I was fired for a "willful work stoppage" after coming back from lunch fifteen minutes late despite company policy saying you had 3 strikes in, IIRC, 90 days for being late to or back to work. It just happened to coincide with making noise about the brand new random drug policy introduced right around the time the UAW started trying to organize the shop.)

I get that the UAW and other unions have their problems, but I wish people would work more on fixing those problems than giving up on the idea of unions. The older I get, and the more corporate bullshit I see, the more I believe we need more organized labor and not less.

Should replace Google with HCL. The actual employer and one lobbying against unionization

There's a parallel effort to detangle who employs Google et al's workforce too.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/may/29/california-b...

Well, its Google's responsibility in this to make it clear unlawful anti-union activities are grounds for terminating contracts. They have a lot of the power here and if they set a precedent, a lot of other companies can follow.

That's actually not Google's responsibility. It's the government's. I mean, it would be a nice thing for Google to do, but Google is not law enforcement. It's important not to assign the responsibilities of the state to a private company, as that inevitably leads to disappointment.

I'll also just point out that Google probably lacks a sufficient, just apparatus to evaluate the claims being made. I mean, USW claims that illegal anti-union activities are occurring. HCL would probably deny those claims. Google is not a detective agency, and it shouldn't be. If it observes illegal activities occurring on its own property, or has substantial knowledge of them, that would be one thing, but I imagine that if HCL is doing this dirty stuff they are not going to make it obvious.

Finally, I doubt the unionizing HCL workers would appreciate the remedy that some people here are proposing. People are saying to terminate the contract with HCL. What? What good would that do? Do you think the unionizing workers would appreciate having their positions eliminated? If anything should be considered anti-union, this proposed remedy is it!

I do think it’s Google’s responsibility to ensure their suppliers are adhering to basic standards of decency, whatever Google thinks decency is. The government has nothing to do with that.

I don’t think the government should be adjudicating virtue, nor do I think companies can say “I outsourced that part of my product, so it’s not my concern how it gets made!”

I agree with your broad claim, but the devil is in the details. Google should presumably have an element in their contracts that says that contracting companies should not do anything illegal with respect to their employees. Perhaps there should even be a minimum wage requirement. However, I do not think it is Google's responsibility to adjudicate and investigate whether a particular anti-union activity on the part of a contracting partner crosses the line of legality.

The question is not about whether it crosses the line of legality, but whether it crosses the standards set by Google. Would Google admit to treating their own employees in this way? If not, it's reasonable to demand the same from their suppliers, legality aside.

I don't think Google is particularly pro-union, so Google's standards on this front are probably not very different from expecting that partners remain within the bounds of law. I want to reiterate that it has not been established that any illegal anti-union activity has actually taken place. The only thing that we know for sure is that USW believes it has. I strongly doubt that Google is opposed to HCL being more responsive to workers ahead of a union vote, nor of having a consultant available to speak about unions, as long as the consultant is being honest and factual in the things that they say.

Granted, but then putting Google in the title is still reasonable, since they're abetting the management of HCL.

> Would Google admit to treating their own employees in this way?

Isn't this exactly what companies want to avoid doing? They need to treat employees and contractors differently or risk getting sued.

https://www.reuters.com/article/businesspropicks-us-findlaw-...

I don't think the workers here are contractors; they are employees of a firm contracted Google, which is a different thing.

The only responsibility proposed here is to present obviously illegal union-busting as grounds for terminating a contract.

But there is a precedent here; Apple has even stronger agreements in place with Chinese manufacturers with respect to workplace safety, health and maximum working hours. These are supported both by the public and the government. Why should we be more enthusiastic about policing fair workplace practices in China than the US?

> The only responsibility proposed here is to present obviously illegal union-busting as grounds for terminating a contract.

What of the alleged anti-union activity is "obviously illegal?" As far as I can read, USW accuses HCL of scheduling mandatory meetings where it makes anti-union statements. That is not illegal. USW never in its press release claimed that any of HCL's actions were illegal, nor did the article claim that any illegal conduct had taken place.

No, this is an anti-pattern that appears like a smart idea. The government is where the enforcement of workers' rights needs to happen. The problem with the "pay with your wallet" thing is that there are lots of unscrupulous companies without the public visibility that Google has and all you'll do is push this into the shadows.

Maintaining minimum worker rights is government responsibility because there is no incentive in any direction. It's just the job of government to maintain law.

  I doubt the unionizing HCL workers would appreciate 
  the remedy that some people here are proposing. 
  People are saying to terminate the contract with 
  HCL. What? What good would that do?

If there are no consequences for union-busting then what? This is the same question for US companies that do overseas human rights compliance audits on their supply chains, it is true that if a supplier fails the people being mistreated lose their jobs, but if the threat of losing the contract does not exist the managers have every incentive to simply cheat and lie and then apologize when they get caught.

The willingness to lose your employment in the battle for labour fairness in an important element of organized labour, it is that sort of solidarity that gives you the leverage you need to win.

I 100% guarantee you that if Google were to try to terminate the contract over this, people would be claiming that Google is anti-union and that that itself constituted a form of union-busting. The proper way to handle something like this would be to have penalties in the contract for illegal behavior on the part of the contracting company that reflects poorly on Google.

I 100% guarantee you don't know that this would be the case.

If the correct way is penalties then the correct course of action for the subcontractor would be to try to not get caught, there are penalties for union busting tactics already, and that is not stopping them.

It would be easy for google to do things to make it clear that they do not oppose unions:

Steve Gyrgo has worked with HCL for two years. He says he is not against unions as a whole, but he is worried that after forming a union, Google might want to work with another contracting firm.

Google can just put out a press release that says that union shops are welcome to be google subcontractors and that they as a company will have minimum compensation guidelines for subcontractors to show they are committed to people being fairly compensated for their work.

I am sure anti-union folks would spread that propaganda, yes.

It is Google's, and the government, responsibility. Why not both?

Google contracts a company. Company does shady things. Google should play detective, should make sure its suppliers well behave. Google employees should demand their employer is doing this, consumers should too. Why can't they?

And Google is free to ignore, but then face the consequences - which will be practically none in this case or like any other case from any other company in any other market involving contractors. Nestlé hires companies using slaves, Apple hires Foxconn who drives people to suicide, Zara hires Thai companies using child labour.

The important point here is that it's ok to at least calibrate our expectations: I do expect Google is at least considering, if this is true, to talk with HCL and say "dudes this is bad PR, get your shit together or we're gonna talk about $".

Things aren't either nil responsibility or maximum responsibility, different actors play different roles with different levels - sure, enforcing the law is government's responsibility, but Google can have its own share and we can call it responsibility too.

I'm not of the opinion that we're all helpless children who need to wait for the government to appear and use overwhelming force to correct obvious violations of individual freedom.

> Google is not a detective agency, and it shouldn't be. If it observes illegal activities occurring on its own property, or has substantial knowledge of them, that would be one thing, but I imagine that if HCL is doing this dirty stuff they are not going to make it obvious.

We are discussing well sourced evidence by a reputable news organization organization. This is hardly the domain of rumors and whispers.

> Finally, I doubt the unionizing HCL workers would appreciate the remedy that some people here are proposing.

Well, HCL could choose to discontinue the anti-union activities to make the problems go away, and any sane shareholder in their business has to ask seriously if unionization will cost the company more than losing service contracts with one of the biggest companies in the US.

> If anything should be considered anti-union, this proposed remedy is it!

Do you think anyone finds this line of argument compelling? You're saying, "The only remedy is to do nothing, because any action might change the status quo." But folks aren't unionizing because they like the status quo. If HCL falls apart, so be it. Its not clear why they should be so easily forgiven for obviously violating the law.

Google shouldn't wash their hands of this and claim ignorance. They are the ones contracting a service and should have a share of the moral responsibility. The same goes for Apple and Foxconn, or Facebook and their contractors, etc.

Knowing your partners are breaking the rules should put at least some moral pressure on them, if not legal. This is expected from you even as an individual (in situations like buying stolen items). It makes even more sense for companies since they have the actual power to shift this in any direction.

Many tech companies right now, Amazon and Microsoft included, specifically use contractors in order to deny them benefits their employees are entitled to and provide a level of plausible deniability or reduced liability. It is absolutely accurate to hold the big guys responsible for the ecosystem they're creating.

Good, if unions can make it less appealing for Google to hire less temp, vendors, and contractors, they might hire more full time employees. There's already a chasm forming between TVCs and FTEs. It's only going to grow bigger.

I had a recent request for a HIGH-level position at Google that was not an FTE... they're really pushing it now.

Just remember that if this happens and spreads out the insane software engineer salaries will be gone. Whoever makes a Silicon Valley salary is a benefactor of the current setup (which, I agree, is a little outrageous).

I think it is possible to be a benefactor and also understand that the disparity is insane.

The people that will be most impacted by any sort of equalizing are the people who make like 120-250k per year. Not silly rich, but they have a house or two that they rent out, etc.

This is okay, because everyone is better off, despite the upper-middle-class being knocked down a peg or two.

Yes, they’ll have to sell their 2nd rental because it’s unsustainable.

You think most junior Google programmers own 2 or 3 homes?

"HCL employee and union organizer Ben Gwin says HCL workers make between $30,000-60,000 a year, and it varies widely."

That's really low. I wonder what kind of work they do for Google.

I think the important thing is they contribute to Google's wealth, which includes over $100 billion in savings.

If I recall correctly, generally janitorial, stuff like that now.

EDIT: geez, sorry guys, I already admitted I misremembered down below. Sorry :/

According to their website, they are an India-based IT services contractor. Not janitorial.

Yes, HCL is one of the oldest Indian IT companies, the name stands for Hindustan Computers Limited. It would be very unlikely that they were contracting for janitorial services.

My bad! I got my wires crossed there.

The painfully obvious answer is that the work is low skill. Why? Because the job market in the Bay Area is such that high skilled labor can easily and quickly find more gainful employment.

It doesn’t make it better for them to earn less, and a union is one way to group high and low skill labor pool such as the whole can have a better quality of life.

The painfully obvious answer is that the work is low skill

No, that isn’t obvious at all. Well it probably is relatively low skill for programming - because it’s HCL - but the reason it’s that low because this is indentured labour. Wipro, Tata even IBM are all in the same game.

This is not true. There are a large number of contractors working at Google, Facebook and other companies in engineering and other skilled roles. Their contracts are from 3 to 6 months long.

If you're in a bind and need a job, you get placed quickly by one of the firms supplying contractors to the large companies. Since you're in a bind, you accept making a lower salary, which ends up being around 60-75% of the base salary of a full-time employee without any of the other benefits of being full-time.

There are more than 100k TVCs at Google. I don't think you can speak generally about them, because there is high diversity in their job roles.

I mean this in the least pejorative way possible, but not all software engineering positions are skilled labor, especially at Google’s scale.

Looks like IT analyst work:

https://www.indeed.com/q-Hcl-America-Google-jobs.html

>It doesn’t make it better for them to earn less, and a union is one way to group high and low skill labor pool such as the whole can have a better quality of life.

It is definitely better for some workers to make more than other workers. Is this really part of the argument in favor of unions? I always thought this was an anti-union straw man argument.

For Indian developers that's above average pay, and HCL has a heavy Indian presence.

Prices for developers outside of the US and Europe are actually quite low, and part of the reason is the low costs in other countries that let companies get away with paying less, and another part is that there's a lot of engineers available.

Even if the average engineer is not as good, there's so many engineers in India that companies have a huge candidate pool from just the above average ones.

I'd say it's mainly just the US, from my experience (UK outside of london) developer salaries in Europe are much lower than the US.

For one example https://www.payscale.com/research/UK/Job=Software_Developer/...

This is, in large part, because the cry of "fine I'll go work in silicon valley" doesn't work in Europe (because H1B visas are a bitch to get).

I don't understand how a contractor unionizing gives them any more power over Google. Either which way they are a contractor and have to negotiate a contract. This article seems to imply the workers have an issue with Google, but unionizing just gives them power over HCL. So are they not happy with HCL?

Maybe this is the way it shapes out - the contractors of the new economy are equivalent to the hourly worker in the old economy, the perm people management. The contractors have representation from a union, and the perm people, none.

It probably won’t be that analogous. I suspect that having the parallel, contract labor force is at least somewhat about exerting additional control over those employees that are actually permanent. A kind of implicit threat that your employment status can be downgraded.

I think the threat of firing is more relevant - no one gets downgraded to a contractor, you just get pushed out the door

People get downgraded to contract labor after being fired from FTE jobs all the time. This broader trend of increasing tenuousness of employment is part of what is driving the upswell in labor organizing.

We should all unionize IMHO

We have -- we are all citizens. If you're a citizen of the United States, here is the first sentence of the document that instantiates that union:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

At its core, it is about people agreeing to act together in order to live better lives.

Are H1B workers included in this union?

I have no problem with H1B visas in the union as long as everyone is working for the same entity, why wouldn't they be welcome. Unions are to be inclusive, not exclusive, there are strength in numbers. Sometimes it's the only way to face down the money grubbing people running a company.

Why would they not be as this is HCL a lot of their employees in the US will be H1b's

Nordic social democracy isn’t magic, it’s just what you get when most workers are in a union.

I agree with you. For what it's worth, I work at Intel in Oregon. I would be interested in joining a union if that were an option.

I suspect that tech industry work is sufficiently different from most other kinds of work that the optimal union might be somewhat different than unions that currently exist.

Some questions we would need to work out:

What do we want the union to advocate for? Pay and benefits are the usual ones, but what about cube/office size, cube wall height, noise levels, access to dual monitors, freedom to use any editor, 20% time to work on projects outside your usual scope of work, public credit for work, ability to open-source work, a ban on draconian intellectual property agreements, and so on...

How do we prevent the union from being co-opted by leadership that isn't representing the workers well, or is neglecting the needs/desires of some minority of members?

How do layoffs work? Job security through seniority doesn't seem good for productivity or morale, but if management can lay people off for arbitrary reasons then it can create excuses to lay people off for union organizing.

Well UK unions do represent on minimum office standards and other political things like employment law.

Why?

Is it because of at will employment?

"HCL itself would be violating the National Labor Relations Board law if the company fired workers for forming a union, but Gyrgo is concerned the union can’t protect them from the work they do with Google, since they don’t actually work for Google."

In other words:

Google won't be violating the law if the company fired workers for forming a union because they will be doing so using a proxy organization as a scapegoat. This in effect allows them to circumvent the law referenced above.

Complete horseshit

Labor law in the United States is so obviously broken, I'm sort of amazed that it isn't talked about more.

Even beyond unionization, the fact that I had to waive my right to sue my employer for gender or racial discrimination in the courts (in favor of a private arbitrator they hire) as a condition of getting the job is just bullshit.

I wonder to what extent the the thirst for a union could be quenched if the compensation of all members of a company were to be made public and always updated.

If management wants to maintain direct negotiation with their staff, they must eliminate information asymmetry.

Look at government jobs for this example. Salaries and their limits are public record. The unions can keep them up to market rates.

Unionizing isn’t a thirst that needs to be quenched. It’s simply asking for fair compensation. That’s why the contracts are up after a certain time so everything can be negotiated again.

Is there a good place to learn about what unionizing tech workers will do/is trying to accomplish? Also, isn’t being a contingent worker an implicit contract that you are willing to give up benefits and (in many cases theoretical) stability for a higher hourly rate? Obviously I don’t/can’t speak for everyone but my spouse has the full time job and insurance and I grind it out to pad the bottom line. If widespread unionization happens I don’t see any way that my take home pay will increase.

I think it's a very good question.

Google employees have some of the best salaries, generous benefits, plentiful vacations, massages, psychological help, free food - you name it.

I see how a union can make things worse for googlers. I cannot see how unions can make things better.

The Google employees advocating for unionization are contractors and do not enjoy the benefits you mentioned.

Which again brings to mind the question- if you want those great benefits you could try to get hired as an employee. Or come on as a contractor and prove yourself to the company. If you are a contractor you are trading that for higher per hour wages. In my industry in the Houston area the most I could ever expect to make as a developer a specific niche is roughly 150k plus or minus 30k. As a contractor on a good year I can triple that. Unionizing Would only bring that number down.

This isn’t a hill I am trying to die on. And I would be happy to hear dissenting opinions. From my perspective, a contractor!= to an employee and there are trade offs associated with this difference. If you want benefits and more(again theoretical most of the time) job security then you go the FTE route. I’m not going to use examples of bad unions to argue my point and I even think in some cases they could make sense. I even think employees at google in a union make sense. But contractor? It is a low drag way to get people in and out the door without a bunch of red tape. Unionizing would make this not the case and likely just prevent contractors from being used.

This is a case by case scenario and I think a lot of start ups are using contractors as employees just to try and make their business viable.

Again I would love to hear a different view on this, I don’t know that I’m an expert on this but seeing things from the perspective of being an employee/contractor/business owner is what has informed my point of view here.

they’re not talented enough or worth those benefits. if they were, they’d be full time. unionizing is a good way to get themselves fired

You might be interested in https://www.freelancersunion.org/

You will see steady raises instead of being forced to switch roles to keep pace. For contractors this isn't a concern but should be attractive for someone fulltime.

Setting rates/minimums/standards would help.

Union tech is a very interesting startup idea. How do union organizers keep track of members, handle dues, plan, and communicate?

There are some out there, like nationbuilder.com (not union specific, but used by some)

They use membership systems brought from the usual suppliers of such things and adapted to suit the differences that unions have.

I wouldn't worry too much. Good working conditions are a boon to both the employer and the employee. A good union will negotiate that to the benefit of both. The reason is simple. If union negotiations lead to worse profits, then employees risk the whole business toppling, and then everyone loses. However, too much job security can actually make it harder to get a new job, once you need it, as it makes it harder to fire underperforming employees. The net effect of it, are employers who are extremely picky and careful about hiring anyone new, which is pretty muh bad for the whole economy.

HCL is an Indian outsourcing company and they will do everything in their power (paying off politicians) to quash this.

Really unions for Tech works from IT services companies. God bless tech industry.

Not good for anyone.

To really make a dent, put a stop to H1B. It is an unnecessary program. All people doing work here should be citizens or green card holders. The employer should not have any say about this or sway over the employees about their status. People should be free to choose their employer and change their employer without entanglement of H1B.

Before there were proper labor laws unions served a purpose, now it's more self-serving to the coffers and political power of the union itself. What should be equal is tipped in the unions favor at the detriment of the company. I think that's wrong.

Where are the anti-HR movements I ask, only half jokingly?

I sort of shocked contractors at Google want a union. Typically contractors make more in total comp than full time employees. I suspect this is not the case there, but in general it’s true.

I've never seen that at a job I worked at. While I know other fields where this can be the case (typically housing related), Google's difference was rather extreme

So is "pro-union activity". Of course when an important vote is about to happen, the campaigns on either side of that vote will make their case.

It's funny how progressive everyone is until it impacts their bottom line.

They really only care about the social aspect so they can use it as PR. LGBT & the rainbow flag sell really well. The second anything challenges capital, all gloves are off.

How can you be so sure that every progressive at Google opposes this? Speaking only for myself, I support their unionization bid.

It's funny how everybody covets more power and more money, employers and employees alike, and always want to wrap it all up in a facade of being the moral choice.

Unions are as much about fairness as "more money". People genuinely want better work conditions, better hours, and better benefits just as much as "more money".

USW is completely the wrong union for representing Tech Workers.

This will not turn out well for the Workers. The USW membership dues will start at $100+ per month and go to strike funds, Lawyers, Representatives, and Stewards who have their own self-interests in mind.

This is basically just paying protection money to thugs.

EDIT: For those downvoting, perhaps you'd care to kindly suggest a better union for this cause?

Running a union costs money, it's as simple as that. I often blow $100 bucks on a night out on the town. I would much rather pay that if I can get better hours, vacation, and negotiating power with the guys who just want to maximize quarterly profits at all social and moral costs.

The question is... will the United Steelworkers make the best use of that money?

Traditional Unions haven't evolved into the 21st century. They're still using signup sheets, phone trees, FTP, Fax machines, and Post-It notes to organize.

Sounds like they could use some modernization, if only there was an industry that touts itself as being all about innovation and regularly goes around disrupting traditional ways of doing things.

I mean, it seems like your job to suggest a better one, but how about the (syndicalist) IWW?

IT does depend on how the USW is structured internally but its probably not the best $110 is high I am paying abut $24 for Prospect /BECTU UK as that's the main union for tech.

A more realistic one might be the union that has experience representing people in the federal government organise in the public sector as well or oddly enough IATSE (film and TV non actors union)

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