Google attempted to shut down a unionization meeting in Zurich
vox.com
vox.com
There are a lot of countries in EU which have, IMO, better work culture and fairness of negotiation as the guiding philosophies behind the work.
If Google did this in the USA, it wouldn't be seen as much. However, they have strong laws against this in EU, and this incident would not portray Google in favorable light, IMO.
I also feel that it is high time engineers realized that fairness in work is something we'd all love to have, and historically, skilled people have kept unions to ensure that they don't get screwed over.
I believe that at the end of the day, if you need fairness in negotiation, you need to have a way to express it, especially if it isn't supply driven.
The EU actually enforces it's laws on this subject and they are not as simple to "not technically illegal" them.
Americans criticize their own country more than anyone else.
OP’s post not only misses the fact that Switzerland is not in the EU, but more importantly the spirit of argument is baseless with the general perception that things are better in EU.
There is more that I probably forgot about but this should about cover it. None of these political areas and borders have 100% coverage amongst eachother, they're all different groups.
Are you talking about a different Switzerland than everyone else? A country literally made out of three different cultures (French Swiss, German Swiss and Italian Swiss)?
Percentage wise, the Swiss have more immigrants, more foreigners and more people with immigrant backgrounds. Not to mention the whole "four official languages" thing.
The differences between accepted social behaviour in Britain, Spain and Poland are significant too.
Sure, if you came from Saudi, you'll feel more out of place. But it's not trivial.
The slightly racist assumption in America is that if I as a white Norwegian settle in America I contribute less to diversity than a black American who has lived his whole life in America.
In America diversity is all about what you see on the outside.
Diversity is also language, culture, language, identity etc.
Swiss cities where most of the economic value is being created are far from homogenous.
Not counting the MIT, Stanford, Harvard, UOT etc. that they have to compete with other FAANG for graduates.
This may reduce salaries but oh God most of us make too much money anyhow. Let's have a life now! When are you going to enjoy life, after retirement? Would you wait with sex till after retirement, too, if that offered a salary increase?
Probably doesn't work for all position, and in fact the worse the job the more likely it doesn't work for it, but uh yeah you can totally reduce to 40h...
(France, 35h is the legal work time for a full time contract here, but you can absolutely have a contract with more or less hours, you just pay extra social charges for hours above the 35th)
I wouldn't take a job that pays double what I make now and has half as many hours if those hours were nothing but sitting in a dark room.
You can get a lot of satisfaction from building something meaningful with a team that people enjoy using.
Not that you can't do that in a big company, but all development jobs at big Corp are not that.
I would tear my hair out if my only job every day was figuring out how to get more people to click on sidebar ads.
Nope, that's just in the USA, us in Europe not at all.
And I'm not even comparing EU salaries vs US salaries just tech salaries/property prices ratios for each location.
You're not overpaid, it's us that are severely underpaid in comparison.
If you work for a European company, chances are it won't grow and be successful to the same extent as an American one, and therefore your work has less value.
What's the issue?
It is the US and Anglo-Saxon countries were unions tend to be a binary thing. Germanic countries tend to follow a different union system: sector wise unions rather than company specific unions. Different types of employees will typically join a different union depending on the type of work and interests they have.
If my company goes union, I'll go work somewhere else.
* "Living in Switzerland ruined me for America and its lousy work culture" https://www.vox.com/2015/7/21/8974435/switzerland-work-life-...
I can attest to the European side of comparison, they do value work but they also value the resting and recovering part.
Of course, union members with workplace protections don't usually get stock grants, free food, and a free gym. Google needs to address these problems themselves, but of course it's so hard for big companies not to just try to stop unions.
Instead of stopping unions, work on those workplace protections. Stop hiding problems and paying off executives with tons of sexual harassment claims to go away.
You're delusional if you think these are a "good thing" for the people who are in control of the organization. There's a reason they are anti-unions. Unions are effective and will reduce their profits by enfranchising their workers.
Free food, gym memberships, and stock options have nothing to do with Google workers being unionized. If you believe that you're just eating the propaganda the ownership class is pushing.
Unions work and are desperately needed. Google will never let it happen, and the US government is happy to stand by and let these sorts of blatantly illegal anti-union tactics keep taking place... because surprise, the same ones collecting Google's profits are the same people who control the government. (and yes, I realize this is in Zurich, which is not in the US, but pretty much all western governments bow to the US so it's irrelevant really)
And Google Et Al only give "free" food as the IRS doesn't tax it as a benefit in kind - quite why they don't as it would be an easy tax to collect.
Bummed me out, since I love it as a perk.
hard to tell what's accurate these days
This is why you'll notice all US based offices require you to badge in every meal every time while an office in Canada does not.
The reason Google provides those things is because someone crunched the numbers and determined that it was a cheaper way to get employees to work free overtime compared to higher salaries.
Almost every single company in the country pays less than Google. So you could say the same about any non-unionized company too.
If unions arose out of poor working conditions then it probably follows that salaries for that work were poor.
Just because you make a lot of money, doesn't mean you're not being underpaid or exploited. These software companies aren't some of the most profitable companies in the world for no reason.
If you are a Google engineer, you can go work for literally anyone else if you feel you are underpaid and exploited. It isn’t like Google is the only buyer of labor in that market. Some chicken processing plant in Iowa — that might be a different conversation, but this is Google. If you feel you are underpaid, then leave. Go work for Netflix, I hear they pay a lot. Don’t like Netflix? Try Apple, LinkedIn, or start your own company. Plenty of money out there for an “ex-Google engineer” with an idea.
And, yes, one answer is "if there are no reasonable demands to be made, the union will make unreasonable ones," and sure, that's possible. Maybe newly-unionized employees will suddenly demand double bonuses, three months' paid vacation a year, and free ice cream for life. But I'm not convinced that's the real worry.
Because the point of a union isn't to do what's fair but to extract maximum benefits for the union. What do they have to lose by NOT pushing for every single possible benefit?
>But I'm not convinced that's the real worry.
Why? What incentive does a union member have to not vote in union leadership that promises to give them more?
That's all fine except unions push for these benefits for existing members equally and only existing members. That leads to pushes for things like seniority based pay, indifference to those who are better at their jobs, certifications, pointless bureaucracy to prevent moving jobs away from the union, etc. Personally, I don't like those things.
> Because the point of a union isn't to do what's fair but to extract maximum benefits for the union. What do they have to lose by NOT pushing for every single possible benefit?
By this logic every union pushes for every possible benefit. That doesn't seem to be the reality though (at least in the cases I've read, there are often concessions from both sides of th bargaining table).
Why assume that unions in tech, an industry that has had little to no experience with unions, is composed primarily (at least in Silicon Valley) of those who are often interested in recreating things from first principles, and claims to embody a spirit of invention, will be doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past? I thought our whole shtick was about innovating things for the better?
Well, even though some labor cost-cutting is helpful to them, at some point that stops being the rational choice, right? At some point they're not going to be able to attract talented workers. Likewise, it's not in a union's best interest to demand so much they drive a company into bankruptcy, whether directly or indirectly. They might do it anyway -- just like there are, in fact, examples of companies driving good employees away through bad management practices -- but that's not a rational choice.
Must be a recent development if this[1] story is true. It only took a few lawsuits too and far from the first problematic agreement they had to end, so very employee friendly and free market oriented.
[1] https://news.bloomberglaw.com/daily-labor-report/google-ends...
If the software industry were to unionize, the union would want to collectively bargain for seniority-based job security rules and other schemes to prevent lower-paid new-hires (people not YET in the union) from taking work from existing union members. Other versions of this effect come in the form of union-imposed certification schemes in the trades, "tenure" rules in education, seniority precedence in picking hours in healthcare, etc. The net effect is that the experienced and powerful members make it hard for the young to get into the profession.
I have a problem with that, ideologically. But, in more practical terms: collective bargaining only works to increase wages when the counterparty has no other option. This works when you're talking about workers at the docks: the docks are not going anywhere, the ships need to be unloaded, and you can't exactly bus in some scabs and expect it to work out. With software, what do you think will happen if a union somehow manages, via Swiss law, to unionize one Google office? It's software. Google will leave and hire elsewhere.
This is exactly why Subaru and Toyota builds cars in the southern U.S. while Ford builds in Mexico, and why industries are flocking to non-union states, and why the people are going with them.
Wow, I didn't know the Writer's Guild and Actor's Guild in Hollywood had seniority-based positions.
The Writer’s Guild doesn’t have seniority based positions but it does have seniority based pay. That’s why after you get enough years experience in a writer’s room for tv shows work starts to dry up unless you become a show runner. So after ten or fifteen years of working in tv you have to do something else for many years until your awesome pension kicks in.
The Actor’s Guild does work very hard to dualise acting, black listing anyone who works with non-members. The median member of the SAG doesn’t make much off it but the minimum rates the SAG negotiates mean if you have steady work you’re making a solid living. Without them many more people would be actors and fewer would make decent money at it.
> With software, what do you think will happen if a union somehow manages, via Swiss law, to unionize one Google office? It's software. Google will leave and hire elsewhere.
Does Google hire the best people, or is it a "body shop"? If they just shut down their Swiss office and fire everyone, I'd imagine there would be some impact on whatever projects those people were working on. There's a gradient here... if they demand 10x higher salaries, then yeah it's probably not going to work out. But maybe 10% higher salaries would actually be cheaper for Google than shutting everything down and starting over.
Precisely because unions are set up to treat members equally they negotiate for the benefit of the median member. Individual unions can fight against the incentives for a while, sure, but first in last out, seniority based pat and restricting entry to keep benefits concentrated among current members crop up everywhere. Yugoslav employee owned companies, the kibbutzim and universities all show the same behaviors because they all face the same incentives. If you think some particular union will be different from the norm provide some argument as to why.
A year of qualifying membership in another union, or 1-3 days of work in a movie. The $3,000 initiation fee is mostly to make sure that people are serious about joining and is not inherently required - the union makes almost all of its money from dues. That would also not be a high bar for most Google employees to clear.
> In normal industries you don’t see a bunch of twenty and thirty year olds, many fewer forty and fifty year olds and very, very few people in their sixties.
Isn't that how the tech industry works?
> to make sure people are serious about joining and not inherently required
that rather supports them restricting entry doesn’t it?
The tech industry does have a reasonably similar age structure but it’s because of decades of sustained rapid growth more than pushing people out. If your industry grows 100% a decade in employment in year 30 with perfect retention you have 25% of staff with 20 years experience. That’s quite different from static or falling numbers of jobs and getting priced out of working because you’re too expensive.
The whole contractors vs employee distinction is rather sketchy and I think this is yet another symptom of that problem. Google wants contractors instead of employees (because reasons). They hire a contracting company to get workers. The contracting company treats the workers badly, but Google is legally and contractually bound in how it can interfere with workings of the contracting company. If Google just fires the contracting company, I'm not sure anyone would be better off.
Reminds me of a government job I had. We were required to have contractors for some portion of the workforce. The contracting company some co-workers worked for went bust and they had to shop around to find a new agency to work through. They ended up in a good bargaining position since they effectively already had placement. They ended up better off than the direct employees (stupid government pay grade scale).
They probably could have done better if they were allowed to create their own contacting agency, but they couldn't because it wouldn't have been on the government's whitelist.
https://pando.com/2014/01/23/the-techtopus-how-silicon-valle...
https://pando.com/2014/03/22/revealed-apple-and-googles-wage...
That said, it's still newsworthy. Forming a union is usually a battle of public opinion. As an organizer, it's likely in your best interest to say "hey, look your company only wants to explain unionization if they can help sculpt the message" as exactly the sort of behavior that would drive you towards having a union.
TL;dr- Unionization is frequently about optics, and these aren't great optics for Google.
We are fortunate enough to live in a period that our skills are extremely sought for, we tend to work and specialize in code bases or technologies specific to a company, but we at any time we can take these skills and move away.~
The atmosphere and the general consensus in most companies tends to be that "no one is irreplaceable" which is true but it doesn't seem to take into account the cost to replace someone: You will need to find the right person, which means that some engineers' time will be spent on interviews, either phone ones or face to face, and not delivering "value" for the company; once you find the right person, you will then need to spend at least an extra month where that person is getting up to speed with "how things work" (paired with another person probably, even more time spent not delivering "value"), plus some more time for that person to actually become productive, and eventually after a few months, get in the position of the person that left.
Now, think in your immediate team, what is your bus factor? How many people would need to leave before it's going to be unsustainable for the feature/project/company to continue?
The usual counter-argument is that "it's easy to leave if you're young, but when you have family, you have to think more than just yourself" and I can totally sympathize with this. But as I said in the beginning, especially if you work for in one of the big hubs, and/or in one of the FAANGs, you could probably be in a new place within a week's time.
We don't need to "unionize" in the traditional term. The companies don't even have to "acknowledge" a union. As long as we keep in mind how fortunate we are to working in tech now, and we are determined to just walk away from places that we are not happy at, they will come to us.
My dad made enough to support a family of four as an appliance repair man. He got a new car every so often, built a shop and had a home mostly paid for and we went on vacations. Going to the doctor wasnt a big deal and no one worried about being bankrupt from a hospital stay/
I am supporting a family of four and we get by. My car is 18 years old with 260k miles on it and I am hoping to get another 3-4 years out of it so the kids finish college. (community college, I am not rich and cannot afford anything else). The family is one major medical incident away from bankruptcy and I have good insurance
You tell me how good you have it and I will reply that is because you dont know how good it could be.
Here is a link by no other than the IMF: https://blogs.imf.org/2017/04/12/drivers-of-declining-labor-...
I make 6 figures a year in IT and cant keep up with what he made fixing washers
My wife had a brain surgery few years ago and our insurance company paid around 150k and we paid max OOP and not a cent more.
So this was a meeting organized solely by employees, using company property, on the company campus, on a workday, with the only speakers allowed being the union reps?
I’m not surprised management would try to cancel that, it sounds like a pro-union propaganda party at Google’s expense.
Typically you just say "organizing".
Many countries even mandate that stewards (union representatives) must be allowed to spend part of their working time on union work.
For example, in Italy most people have a contract which follows the collective agreement obtained by the unions for that specific sector (i.e. commerce, textile worker, metal worker etc) even if people are not part of any union. If you are a member of the Union you may get some extra legal help or such, but not a different contract.
From what US people say it seems instead that members of a union live in a separate world.
Not really. Because of the way labor laws work in the US, the unions seek exclusive representation over members within a bargaining unit, which means that all employees within the bargaining unit are members of the union as soon as 51% of the bargaining unit votes in favor of the union. That precludes the possibility of employees having the choice between two different unions to represent them (or none at all), which is common in most European countries.
It's pretty rare to have union and non-union members working in the same role (as opposed to at the same company, or at the same jobsite but under different employers), and even less common to have two people in the same role represented by two different unions.
You know, the kind of thing that lawmakers can do when they're not completely owned by corporate donors and lobbyists.
As others have pointed out, protections for organizing at workplace sites are common through out Europe. Google employees built Google into what it is, not their senior management (especially given what has come to light). And the company would be better off if workers co-determined its future.
I'm sure these sorts of things are more common in Europe, and it's amazing to me how Europeans don't independently realize that it's not a coincidence that the battle lines are about trying to exact concessions from American companies, since there aren't really any relevant European tech companies anyway.
For instance, labor is always a cost center. The argument "I cost X but bring in 10X" is great for you (assuming it's true), but from your accounting department's standpoint, replacing you with two less productive workers is better if it turns out that together they cost 1.6X but bring in 18X. This calculation doesn't change a whit even if all your company's top-level executives started in the mail room.
As required by the law.
I think Google heavily needs to be split up.
Atleast Google somehow competes with the Facebook and Amazon which in my view are "more evil".
My other concern is, big co can resist stupid stuff government agencies want, they failed on PRISM but I feel they might have a better chance next time around as employees unionise and demand the company drop supporting unethical contract such as Googles' search engine for China (Project Dragonfly) case etc.
I think the difference is that Google has a relatively large contingent of "activist" type employees, and they're given a lot of latitude to speak their mind. When something bad happens, everybody hears about it because the employees are the ones shouting it loudest from the rooftops.
Their track record isn't perfect, and Dragonfly particularly strikes a chord with me. But other companies do worse, and you're just much less likely to hear about it.
I have worked there myself in the past and it was very pleasant.
Yes, I believe also this is the case. This is also in my opinion the biggest issue with Google nowadays and what makes it extra garbage. They seem to be caught again and again to use their large size to surpress and censor people and companies.
Further, the larger tech companies already have a concept of "levels" to ensure some sense of pay equality, we already get better benefits than you can get anywhere else in the states.
Realistically, what more will unions accomplish at a place like Google?
I'd love 6 weeks of paid vacation as much as anyone. I don't see us getting that. I'd love to make twice as much money. I don't see that happening. I'd love for promotions and hiring to be more fair / better, but I don't see how this accomplishes that (nor do I know anyway to improve it).
Some people are leery about the possibility of their employer turning into a closed shop. I know I would not be happy if my employer suddenly turned into a union shop in a way that strongly affected me and gave me minimal choice in the matter.
I only ask that you consider why people might choose to sit on the sidelines.
Now, a union election isn't a government election, so that doesn't totally apply. But, for example, the majority has decided to pass legislation that makes my current state a right-to-work state, so a union can't require me to be a member, even if they win the election.
Of course, unions could campaign to change that law. But that's a different set of elections they'd have to win...
Why not? Such a vague claim needs substantiation.
Or not. Curious what others think.
And I'd agree that such a style of union would be antithetical to a company like Google, but its also not the only kind of union.
Yeah, this sounds like more anti-Union FUD than being based in actual data. I'd be happy to be proven wrong though if this can be substantiated through more than just cherry picked examples.
Unions typically (almost always) bargain to improve the compensation of the average employee. Outlier events are flattened by definition, meaning it is harder to be fired, and harder to make outlier money.
This absolutely happens in MLB/MLBPA. Players are not allowed to negotiate most types of incentive-based contracts that would align interests of management and players to give them higher possible pay, amongst other methods of capping pay to improve standards for average professional athletes.
Probably one of the worst examples. The MLBPA is currently the biggest joke regarding negotiating power, and the NFLPA settled a concussion lawsuit where the NFL is lying about player health and got away without admitting guilt about it.
Pro sports unions are inept at battling management and their members are suffering for it - in the case of football, literally dying for it without adequate compensation (if such a thing exists).
https://pando.com/2014/03/22/revealed-apple-and-googles-wage...
Like it does in Hollywood? Oh no wait, everyone from the stars to the extras is in a Union!
Yup. Happened to me. Big corporate decided most of our floor were surplus to requirements. Got an email on Sunday telling us to be in early on Monday for an off-site meeting.
Got handed my redundancy / compromise agreement and told not to return to the office. And, the kicker, told my non-compete meant I couldn't work for a competitor during the redundancy process.
It was devastating and emotionally wrecking. It was like being dumped, out of the blue, from a multi-year relationship. And being told you couldn't see anyone else. I went through all the classic stages of grief.
And then...
I contacted my Trade Union and explained the situation. They took a look at the contract I'd been given, passed it to a very expensive lawyer, who made a couple of phone calls.
The next week I was free to work for whoever I wanted and was paid ~7 months salary (tax free).
Join. A. Union.
Your employer has more lawyers than you do. Pay a couple of quid per month to have decent legal representation on hand when you need it.
That layoff was the best thing to happen to me. Shook me out of my cosy job, forced me into building my own consultancy, and taught me the power of solidarity.
This last part sounds like an argument against unions. One wonders, had the commenter worked in an environment where layoffs/firings aren't worth it due to externalities (and therefore never really happen), whether they'd rethink.
IDK, I'm either reading his statement or yours in a way someone isn't intending.
Also, people who work in non-union jobs often feel that peer complacency and bloat are problems. That's not unique to union shops. Everyone has had a job where there was "that guy" that nobody understood how he kept his job. IDK why people thing unions magically create this problem, or make it worse. Mostly because I haven't seen any studies proving it, it's just a "feeling" people have.
Not at Google so I can't comment about them directly.
Also very neutral on unions, so don't take this comment as my preference.
6 weeks may seem hard to get, but many companies offer only 2 weeks, and 3 weeks seems the norm. 4 weeks seems doable with a union (although it may not be necessary - more and more companies are offering 4 weeks).
Non-compete clauses are something unions can help with (I know they're not allowed in CA, but lots of other states allow them).
The amount of time or how often one is on-call can be something unions can help with.
Conditions for severance can be something unions can help with.
On the flip side, unions can also make things a lot worse. YMMV.
There could be an employee elected board that is able to resolve things like disputes with managers. It's clear that there have been situations where HR is no help here. There could be agitation for greater transparency with perf, especially around things like promo quotas and ratings distributions.
Unions aren't just about pay.
Source, page 11 of https://googlegendercase.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Elli...
I'm also a SWE at Google, and speaking only for myself, I might support efforts to ensure that those great benefits are harder to take away. Does that mean unionization ... I don't know, but there's a big spectrum of possible worker organization.
For those reading if a stat holiday falls on Tuesday or Thursday in Switzerland the Monday or Friday is a bridge day and also a holiday.
It gets fantastic when Thursday and Tuesday are holidays so you get a 6 day weekend.
memes?
I am a fan of unions for blue collar work but unions/labor orgs for higher pay organizations seem to be bad because they prevent foreign workers from entering and they make it harder for young people.
If you're 36, you look around one day and realize you're the "old" dev. That's kind of the reality of the software industry, though. I moved into FAANG from a different engineering discipline, where engineers increase in value as they get older. In software, sadly, age isn't much of an asset. Most of what you spend your time learning today will be irrelevant in a few years.
Kind of—but everything old is new again. I was surprised to find I actually have a pretty good understanding of Babel/typescript/webpack because they’re just reimplementing the c compiler and linker in JavaScript, albeit with very little solid documentation. Most of the interesting language ideas are pretty old—smalltalk still looks futuristic to me. Thinking about systemic failure is really hard and that takes time to develop.