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Comment by rdgthree | Hacker News Reader

It seems incredibly significant that only 230 people are officially involved with these plans to unionize. As of 2019, Google had nearly 120,000 employees.[0] That seems quite small, relatively speaking.

Legally (I think, just learning about this now), to form a union, a majority of workers must show their willingness to form a union. Alternatively, to choose an existing union to join, an election with 30% of the workers support is required.[1]

So with that said, am I reading this right? Does this group of 230 people need to find at least ~40,000 more people for this to be a valid effort to form/join a legal union?

[0]https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/02/google-employee-growth-2001-...

[1]https://www.legalmatch.com/law-library/article/how-to-form-a...

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They are not trying to form a traditional majority union.

> unlike a traditional union, which demands that an employer come to the bargaining table to agree on a contract, the Alphabet Workers Union is a so-called minority union that represents a fraction of the company’s more than 260,000 full-time employees and contractors. Workers said it was primarily an effort to give structure and longevity to activism at Google, rather than to negotiate for a contract.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/04/technology/google-employe...

This is a very important comment, not sure why it's not higher. This isn't really a union in the traditional sense - it's just a group of hyper liberal Google activist employees who are banding together to try to get institutional change.

"hyper liberal" you say ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

In societies that are not America, unions are traditionally left of center but most definitely still more or less in the center.

It seems that political discussions relating to the US don't have the appropriate vocabulary to discuss political opinions that are positioned to the left of the corporate wing of the Democratic party.

Even among unions, the tone and political messaging from the AWU is particularly left. It's obvious if you contrast the AWU's stated principles and values with a more traditional union.

I think the OP meant liberal in the sense that activism at Google tends to be for liberal causes

no its not. these activists are leftists, not liberals, which is what the parent was trying to point out.

liberalism is not a far left ideology, it is actually pretty centrist. "Hyper-liberal" is more synonymous to libertarian than it is to what these google activists are.

America has a stunted perception of political ideology. This is pretty apparent when you observe far right pundits and politicians refer to democrats as "far left" when the majority are actually right of center and would be considered conservative in most european countries or even by the democratic party of 20 years ago.

This is a good comment. As someone with liberal tendencies it bugs me to see it conflates with leftist politics

Sounds like exactly the type of stuff Coinbase was wise enough to smother recently.

Due to all kinds of reasons people tend to not wanting to be officially associated with an budding union until it becomes reality.

I mean you can guess which 230 people are more likely to lose their job, then they had been before (if the union fails).

(I don't mean Google will target them, but that if Google considers letting them go for whatever other reason it's now more likely that they will let them go.)

Historically Google has targeted people that advocate for unions.

Especially when they abuse internal systems to promote it.

yes, abusing internal systems.

imagine using tools explicitly created to facilitate communication and organization between employees but suddenly its abuse when used for organize something other than a potluck

Defining a 'break room' and legally protected workplace communications wasn't really ready for the internet age when this happened (this is the context behind the above two posts for those out of the loop[0]). Thankfully NLRB weighed in and suggested that this was protected communication [1], or they at least are suing to argue that case[2] (still an open case).

0: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/12/engineer-says-go...

1: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/cpt20...

2: https://www.nlrb.gov/case/20-CA-252802

This was not a chat tool. It was a security extension that one person used as their political soapbox.

it was a good-ass soapbox though

A person on the security team tasked with notifying employees browsing the Web of company guidelines and policies decided to author a policy notification entirely of her own.

That's like the guy hanging up memos from the top floor in the company lunch room one day deciding to slip in a political message, printed on official company stationary to disguise it as an official memo.

It's not about using general-purpose internal communication tools to remind co-workers of their rights, it's abuse of a privileged position involving the power to broadcast official messages.

Whether someone thinks it's justified by the cause is a separate argument.

Google is already being ruined by this tiny minority of sanctimonious blowhards. This is just a move to give more power to themselves to push their own political agenda in Google. Personally I want nothing to do with them, and I'd prefer that they just leave the company if they're unhappy. There's still lots of companies that want to hire software engineers, though of course they may find that nobody else puts up with their nonsense either.

These are the people behind the Google Graveyard, the company's awful track record on UX and product design, and its core business strategy of making you, the user, the product through data monetization?

That's a bit of a reach.

I'm saying that those are major customer-facing reasons for why Google is seen as not good these days, not inside baseball culture wars that could be attributable to a "tiny minority of sanctimonious blowhards".

Oh, I missed the "?", Which completely inverts the meaning of your statement. Sorry.

It’s less of a reach than you think. These people may not be directly responsible for those decisions, but their distractions have allowed a lot of the people responsible for those decisions to bully them through. They’ve also created a climate where the people who push back against those bad decisions are uncomfortable or outright persecuted.

Years ago, my friend was part of a small movement to unionize a certain universally hated company that rhymes with Omfast.

They thought it would be a home run given all of the nonsense that goes on there. As it turns out, selling people on the idea of unionizing is much harder than it sounds. People weren’t even necessarily afraid of the company, they just didn’t want to be in a union.

They, too, gathered a small number of people at first, but the effort fizzled out when the initial enthusiasm didn’t spread beyond those few idealistic people.

In a company the size of Google, it wouldn’t be hard to find 230 people who would claim to be unionizing, but it doesn’t mean much when you’re talking about a tiny fraction of employees.

It's also the case that the leadership of said company communicates (or did 12 years ago) anti-union rhetoric to their employees on a regular basis (starting from orientation) and requests employees to report any unionizing talk from other employees. Always with the same language about how unions are bad for employees, etc.

It's rather unfortunate that any rational counter-argument to unionization is automatically termed rhetoric or propaganda with the implication that it has no validity.

Reading the article, it sounds like they do need to find ~40,000 votes. The article mentions that now they've announced the unionisation attempt, they're gonna starting doing lots of public campaigning to collect the votes they need.

Yeah, they definitely need to gather support of some sort, I'm just curious about the scale. 40,000 people from within the 120,000+ organization seems huge. If that's really the case, the coverage so far would seem fairly sensationalist - 0.25% of employees signing on to unionize is a drop in the bucket next to a required minimum 30% of the workforce signed on.

I think the article is pretty accurate, the title looks pretty spot on

> Google workers announce plans to unionize

I agree that the number involved is quite small at the moment, but given how hostile Google has been to any unisation effort, the fact the 230 people have organised anyway, and now put their jobs on the line, is quite a big thing.

I suspect that there are many at Google that would happily join a union, just look at how high the attendance of Google's walk outs have been. This announcement clearly indicates that union organisers believe they have enough support to come out of the woodwork, and start some serious campaigning.

The title is technically accurate, but I think the omission of scale and any sense of how far along these plans are leaves quite a sensationalist tidbit. "Google workers announce plans to unionize" translated to "the necessary amount of employees at Google to form a union are unionizing" on my first pass. I clicked immediately because that seemed significant. I'm sure this was the intention, though I can only speculate. A clear and less sensationalist (though less click-worthy) title could have been as simple as: "230 Google workers announce plans to unionize"

That being said, I'm not contesting the validity of the movement - it's certainly possible that thousands of Googlers will sign on in support now that the movement is public, and more power to them!

It just seems like the reporting on this should be making it more clear where this effort stands and just how much needs to happen before it's legally viable. Arguably, more honest reporting in that regard would help make clear to potential allies that their support is needed, and this is not a sure thing.

Without defending Google management at all, I'll say that everyone who got fired was not at all careful in their activity. Organizing a union is different from doing intentionally disruptive protest activity, and while one can argue that both are morally correct, one is a lot more job-threatening than the other.

The people who are organization the union and signing petitions, but not hacking employer systems or calling their coworkers "Nazis" are still employed and organizing but also less visible to the public.

Much like cyclists facing cars have to learn that it's better to be alive than claim the right of way and be dead, activists need to be smart about taking calculated risks. (And if people are calculating that getting fired is good for their political cause or future career at a like-minded organization, then good for them!)

Personally I find it more dangerous not to claim the right of way. People try to pass you in all sorts of weird and precarious positions.

> I suspect that there are many at Google that would happily join a union, just look at how high the attendance of Google's walk outs have been.

You're assuming a lot here. The Google Walkout had a huge attendance because it had zero teeth and zero commitment. People took their lunch break outside to say "I don't like sexual harassment". Then they went back to their desks and back to work. Google refused all but one of their demands, fired or drove out all of the organizers, and went on with it's day.

Essentially, very few people who walked out would put their cushy Google job on the line for what they believe in. The organizers did, they're gone. A handful of other people since then have also put their jobs on the line for their principals, they've also now been fired. Every time Google has fired organizers, it has made it much harder for the remaining workers to organize, both because the people who would organize are gone, and those left have a cautionary tale of what happens if they do.

Everyone at Google today is someone who had a chance to stand up for what's right in a manner that risks their employment, and has chosen not to do so.

> I suspect that there are many at Google that would happily join a union, just look at how high the attendance of Google's walk outs have been.

I'm hopeful that you're right, but I also suspect that a lot of engineers will look at the fees and decide "hey, 1% of my total compensation is actually a hefty amount." The walkouts were free.

1% of 100K people making over $100K/yr is an insanely huge amount of money for a union.

This smells like "1% is the smallest positive number" fallacy on behalf of the owners.

(But that 1% is perhaps/likely only salary not equity.)

Blue collar unions need money to pay bills during a strike, but Googlers don't need that.

A big question to ask is whether Googlers need to pay for union or if they should donate to politicians who would regulate Google.

> 1% of 100K people making over $100K/yr is an insanely huge amount of money for a union.

Well, think about it this way. 1% of 200k people making >$50k is the same amount.

There are 775k members of the IBEW, for reference, which charges 2% of base wages in additional to fixed overheads. The SAG charges dues of 1.575% on the first $500k. Writer's Guild charges 1.5% with no cap. So 1% is actually low.

> (But that 1% is perhaps/likely only salary not equity.)

The article stated "compensation", which I suppose could go either way, but I lean toward "total compensation" in my reading. But either way, I'm sure the majority of Google employees do make over $100k in base salary (between those in the Bay Area, New York, Seattle, Boston, London, and more).

> A big question to ask is whether Googlers need to pay for union or if they should donate to politicians who would regulate Google.

How many of those regulations would impact the profitability of Google (e.g. through antitrust enforcement) versus encourage better working conditions?

I mean, I think it is always the case that organizing efforts start with a small number of very activist employees and escalate from there. That has at least been my understanding of organizing MO, so sort of an odd standard to hold.

Huge difference between signing on and voting in a secret ballot - esp. in the context of in a company.

... and likely that this post is part of that attempt to publicize the effort.

It's significant in the sense that it shows google's sucesses in been fighting attempts to unionise. In addition for straight up prohibiting employees to gather in larger groups (no more than 100 per event or 10 rooms at once) they've been reading employee communications and firing people: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/02/google-spied-on-employees-il...

Also bring in consultants known for their "Union vulnerability assesments". i.e. Consultants for dissuading employees from unionizing.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/20/technology/Google-union-c...

Keeping something secret amongst 230 people is not an easy task. At some point the campaign has to become public, and it's better to do that in a planned, coordinated manner, than have it get leaked to the press.

Note that despite their public claims, it seems that non-North American (that is, European, Australian, Asian, African and South American) Google employees aren't allowed to join this union.

So this lowers the pool by quite a bit.

Traditional unions target specific job role at specific locations, where you only need people in that job at that location to vote for unionization. It seems like a lofty goal to try to unionize the whole company in one go, when you don't have a track record of successes at a small scale you can point to as reasons that this union is a good idea on a large scale.

You have to start some where, I was involved in successfully recovering collective representation for senior sales grades in BT a while back.

Also I believe in the USA has structural issues where each location has a union and not a whole company un ion

They formed a Members-only union which can exist absent a majority of employees joining. The terminology is confusing since all unions are member-only.

These minority unions do not have collective bargaining rights unless the employer agrees.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Members-only_unionism

I don’t think this is correct. Maybe that’s for some place where there’s forced union membership?

I’ve worked at places where certain departments were unionized (for example hospitality) but others were not. Far below any such 30% threshold for total employment. Also unions form at individual worksites all the time, so I sincerely doubt there’s any company-wide membership requirements.

Edit: I'm correct. There's this concept of a bargaining unit, so it would only have to be workers doing a certain type of work in a certain place, generally, though it can be just those doing a certain type of work:

https://www.workplacefairness.org/labor-unions#4

A company like google could end up with hundreds of unions.

I think the 30% rule (and even the vote) is only needed for a "traditional" union that seeks exclusive authority to negotiate wages etc.

This is something else.

The 100k+ figure is globally though, correct? I'm assuming there are other countries where white collar workers, Including Google employees, are already commonly unionized.

Smacks of controlled opposition tbh.

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