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Comment by My7thAccount | Hacker News Reader

Because why do some of the smartest and highest paid people on earth need to form a coalition against their highly benevolent employer compared to most. It's hard to feel the plight of a Googler when compared to alternatives. It's not enough to show up and do your job, they want to be able to tell the bosses to fuck off with impunity too. Free speech doesn't apply to the workplace.

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Google has a lot of employees and contractors and the ones trying to unionize are neither the smartest nor the highest paid. That you describe the most profitable monopoly in America as "highly benevolent" from a 48 minute old account is also hilarious.

This is likely a Google PR account. They could act smarter and be less obvious. It is almost insulting.

Calling Google benevolent is laughable, but even if the aren't the most highly paid workers, these still pretty highly paid workers are stretching the original function of a union to my mind.

Its almost like unions are highly politically motivated and only there to feed the pockets of the political parties that run them, and not to protect the stable salary of workers.

If anything, Google's employees are in the best position to unionize. The original concept of organized labour was conceived with skilled tradesmen in mind, since they would be the hardest to replace, and therefore would have the most bargaining power. The concept of the unionized factory floor worker came much later.

From a pure leverage perspective, Google employees, especially in highly specialized areas like ML, are in an excellent position. They are legally entitled to that power, so why shouldn't they wield it?

Where is the point where you should be able to protect your interests against nameless huge entities?

Is it based on your flat income or on how many times the cost of your labor they make off you?

Unions do more than just negotiate wages and benefits. I imagine some of these other functions may be desirable to Google employees

Having sexual harassment allegations against executives taken seriously was an example. Ensuring that you can’t be fired for unionizing is another.

i'm with grumple. over half of Google's CEOs and founders have been charged with sexual misconduct and worse. schmidt should be in jail.

Isn't Google's name Google? I'm not a fan of huge corporate entities as much as the next guy, but none of them are nameless.

Did you mean: Faceless?

Perhaps what you're saying is a better way of expressing it, but I meant nameless as in being able to put a name to a specific form, identifying it. I think most corporations don't even have a name anymore. It's X (Google for example) until it rebrands to Y (Alphabet in that case), then it's one of their acquisitions that you're working for, then it's one of the companies they use to avoid having you be associated with them and demand equal benefits or whatever etc.

Maybe you just don't know? The simple fact that some people want to unionize shows your picture may differ from reality.

I know some people at lower levels (blurring, moderating) being laid off just before one year just because they don't want to consider them as full blown employees.

By that metric no one can in the west, compared to the third world countries we all do well.

"Free speech doesn't apply to the workplace"? What a fascist view. We're supposed to shut up and happily serve our corporate overlords for the majority of our waking lifes?

Funny how it's always brand new throwaway accounts that pop up to do this grovelling corporate apologetics for these poor innocent long-suffering megacorps.

Are all of Google's employees the smartest and the highest paid people on Earth? Wikipedia says that there's about 114 000 Google employees.

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