Google fired employees for union activity, says US agency

The Timnit firing is new and significant and wasn't in the previous discussion.

In other countries, employees enjoy different protections in general, and in general Google complies with the regulations of other countries regarding employment.

This doesn't preclude them from making decisions that favor the company over individual employees' best interests if the law allows it, but I can't think of an example of Google breaking employment law in, for example, Germany.

In Zurich it seems that they managed to organize a Workers council: https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/bloomberg/google-agrees-to-work...

Can't seem to find anything else.

They are as friendly as the law makes them, like any other company.

Note also that although France is often cited it actually has a very low unionisation rate, lower than the US, and e.g. the UK is massively more unionised. Unions are mostly active in the public sector. A specificity is that the right to strike is a constitutional right with quite lax requirements and it is a recurring debate that it is abused by unions. Union activity is also extremely protected so if you get elected as union rep it is virtually impossible to fire you for any reason.

In the UK firing someone for being a member of a union is unfair dismissal.

There is a huge difference between unions in the US and Europe. When you organise a union in the US, you often do it in order to have some rights that employees in Europe already have. So normally there is little incentive to form such a union in Europe among white-collar workers.

I may be out of the loop but as I understood it she threatened to resign and they called her bluff.

So it’s a bit disingenuous to say she was fired without mentioning her threat of resignation.

Breaking up Google won't necessarily do anything to end anti-union activity.

Google's pieces could be just as anti-union as Google itself.

Genuinely curious, why?

The worst aspect- the ad network- is also its most profitable. I am sure if search and ads were separated, they would find a way to create some sweetheart deals that keep operations not too terribly changed.

Android would likely become less coupled to various google services, but I don't think most people actually want that- at least, I imagine most Android users would prefer Google maps to whatever else is out there

They make a lot of sense, “employees have more control if they act together”, so I imagine they’re rightly scared of them catching on.

Most Googlers aren't exactly passing around union cards, but a bunch are collaborating and organizing on pushing the company to do what they believe the company should do. It's kinda union-like, but software engineers aren't fighting for higher wages and workplace safety as much as trying to push ethical behavior.

I'd join one if it meant I had more bargaining power and therefore more pay.

Just because I'm being paid outrageously high, doesn't mean I shouldn't also be getting paid more.

Why would a group of employees want to have any collective say in what their company does or how it treats them?

My guess is they are not worried now but they know a strong union may cause problems for them in the future. If there's any kind of trouble in the future, a union will be harder to control.

Today or in a purely hypothetical situation in the future when the management does something that pisses off a majority of employees?

I'm a member of a union in Norway. They have zero to do with my day-to-day. Which is nice. I bargain pay on my own etc., same does everyone else. Don't even think my employer knows I'm a member.

However, the union has pushed for better regulations. When I started my career 5 years ago for instance, I had to sign a non-compete. Almost every offer had one, as an individual I couldn't do much. The union however helped pass legislation so those general non-competes are illegal, and can only be used for very specific purposes. When I got offers, they would also look over the contracts, tell me what I should be expected to be paid etc, giving me more knowledge and backing as a rookie (vs big cos). The yearly salary statistics is detailed and useful for me every year.

The union also collectively bargains for other stuff. For instance my mortgage rate is far lower through their offer than anything else I've found. The member fee (~400 yearly?) pays it self many times over just from this.

So I think this works great. Everyone on here always paints unions as these monoliths, but they don't have to be. I am still valued as a singular, but for the big stuff we're numerous.

Probably a tiny but vocal minority who use internal tools to amplify their message, becoming a nuisance to their colleagues. From the outside, it reads similarly to the recent struggles inside Coinbase. But this being google, the company’s response is more “corporate”.

"Why would serfs want to have say over their activities anyway?"

It really struct me one day at work, as myself and all of my coworkers watched in horror as "leadership" made decisions after decision that we all felt not only made our lives worse, but were fundamentally bad decisions for the health of the company, how powerful the ideological tools are that keep us from questioning who has a say in the future of a company.

One of the key reasons there weren't more peasant revolutions was a combination of violence to suppress this, and, more importantly, ideological tools to keep peasants in line. That we still read our kids stories about how great princesses and kings are is evidence of how strong this feudal propaganda is.

Especially at software companies, the hardworking engineers are why the company can exist at all. How many times have engineers deeply cared about things such as quality of the code base, giving back to open source communities, or even things like ethical treatment of coworkers and users?

But we have been trained to treat CEOs and "leadership" like divinely ordained kings. Sure the VCs and Founders have laid out the capital to run the company, but capital alone does not make the company.

Have you never worked at a company where software engineers are forced by management to make very bad technical choices? Have you never been in a room where everyone working on the project sees clearly it will be a disaster but has absolutely zero say in the decisions around it? Have you never seen your company do questionably illegal or unethical things, where everyone working on the project wishes that they could stop things, but no individual wants to handle the risk of being a whistle-blower and having their career destroyed?

Imagine a startup or large tech company where collectively the engineers had a voice on par with the c-suite. Where they could say "I know that we have quarterly goals to meet, but we refused to ship new product until we have our infra in a least a semi-stable state. This will allow us to ship faster in the future and it's important for the company"

or

"We strongly believe that while this current feature does generate slightly more revenue, it is intentionally deceptive to users and ultimately harmful to them and our product, so we would like to see it changed or removed"

or

"X,Y and Z Open source products have saved us tremendous amount of capital, to continue to keep these ecosystems we depend on healthy, we demand that N hours a month be actively devoted to giving back to these projects"

or

"I know you are unhappy with employee 123, primarily because they have openly questioned the decisions of management. However they have no records of outright insubordination and are considered a valuable member of the technical team, so we will fight your request to fire them."

Labor having a voice is about far more than just salaries and benefits like it is for factory workers. And if you think the solution is just that engineering management needs to better represent their teams, then you likely haven't worked in management.

Thing is Google will eventually get to the stage that the PR of not having a union exceed any downsides of having one.

As for software engineers (apart from SQL ones who would of read your UNION JOIN as a whole different sentence), most grown up in a work environment that has seen the need for Unions moot as tech companies shifted in perks/remunerations that exceeded what many a Union could of dreamed of achieving. That alone seen the driver for Unions moot in many eye's, combined with a lack of tech focused Unions and the shift from lifer work mentality to few years being classed a long time at a company. Times changed and moved faster than many Unions.

However, many tech companies grown to the stage that they ain't all software engineers and the size/scale of them has seen them grow to the stage that some level of check like a Union wouldn't go amiss and opinions about unions as a whole been slowly improving in the past few years after decades of disdain. Thing is, what type of Union and is the need for a larger more tech orientated Union or lots of smaller ones? That's the crux.

Though when I started in tech, the worry about competition bugging the water cooler was the edge-case worry, today it's the company itself that has become that worry and less of an edge-case as well. So clearly the use of Unions does have some safety in voice for employee's.

I would love to join a union!

When was google EVER the hero?

> public forums like memegen

You mean internal-public, I assume. Memegen isn't public AFAIK.

> ... because of their privately-held political views

It's hard to get called out for privately-held political views. Things you do in public, though, have consequences.

> Neither Google nor any other company should tolerate employees using the power of the company to advance their personal ideological beliefs

Is that a constraint we should extend to owners of companies also? Or is flexing muscle to advance personal ideological beliefs something only reserved for Fortune 500 owners? Google was outspokenly gay-friendly before that became a mainstream opinion in the US, to give a concrete example.

I strongly disagree with this view. Companies should do what is right and ethical (beyond just what is legal). And who else than the managers and employees working for the company can determine this? It requires exactly those employees pushing for what is right to move the overall company into the right direction. It was even their job as ethics in AI researchers.

> Neither Google nor any other company should tolerate employees using the power of the company to advance their personal ideological beliefs.

Are you saying that this extreme "personal ideological belief" you just stated is applicable to every single company on the planet?

I don't believe G Suite data is used for advertising. That's just creepy and not something sellable to enterprise.