Will Alphabet’s Unionization Effort Spread to Other Big Tech Companies? | Hacker News Reader

Will Alphabet’s Unionization Effort Spread to Other Big Tech Companies?

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66 pointsteklaperry43 comments

It looks like a lot of people misunderstand that this isn't a union with collective bargaining power over pay.

The union that has been formed is called a minority/members-only union. You can read more about them below.

>> https://workercenters.com/labors-loophole/what-is-a-minority...

The article posted points this out, but unlike most unions this one wasn't formed due to economic reasons. It was formed for social issues that Google isn't addressing or is purporting.

The current HN discussion seems to all veer towards collective bargaining rights, but that's too early to discuss. Don't get me wrong that this is a first step to collective bargaining; however, that will only ever be if current membership gets big enough and they get certified by the NLRB. That isn't an easy feat in the US and will probably take years to happen!

Right now, it would be more interesting to discuss if this type of union will allow employees to have a a real say in Google's direction as a business on what projects they will work on and which clients they will accept.

Google can't do anything about this union because it's considered protected concerted activity.

>> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_concerted_activity

I predict within 5-10 years, any tech company with an activist union will have moved most of their operations to countries where workers don't have rights.

They managed to do this in the manufacturing sector. And a car factory or a steel plant is a lot harder to move than a mere office building filled with developers and sysadmins who all work remotely already.

You mean like how the actors union killed off Hollywood?

After literally decades of outsourcing software development to other counties it isn’t much of a threat to the remaining US jobs at this point. There are various arguments about why this is or what might change over time, but unions aren’t going to change the landscape over a few years. Change like this takes decades.

Let's see in couple of years, I wouldn't be so optimistic. There might be a push back after covid is somehow managed and people start coming back to cities, but maybe not

People working from home due to covid are still operating in the same time zones and culture etc. If you want top talent in India or China they don’t want to work the night shift which means communication with the rest of the organization becomes difficult, even ignoring culture.

The real impact IMO is going to be the erosion of the SV salary premium to other US workers. This might actually raise minimum US salaries due to increased competition with major tech companies in places like Oklahoma without huge tech salaries. However, the real losers from that will be property owners in SV not programmers.

> However, the real losers from that will be property owners in SV not programmers.

Those aren't necessarily exclusive categories.

I'm not sure that's a valid comparison tbh. I assume it'd be rather hard to do Hollywood acting remotely, but remote (even other-country) engineering teams are fairly common.

Broadly I agree / hope so too, but I don't find hollywood to be a convincing example at all.

>it isn’t much of a threat to the remaining US jobs at this point.

There's 12 million US tech jobs currently in the US, and Eric The Executive gets a bonus every quarter for cutting costs (read jobs). I'd say as long as that dynamic holds, it's always a threat. I mean it would be ugly if we only lost 1 million.

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/us-tech-employment-...

I was leaning on your explanation at first, but there is the counter-example in California of the Screen Actors Guild and Writer's Union.

I don't know. Having more organization among workers may be beneficial for the company as well. It creates a shared interface for communication and negotiation, much more efficient than negotiating with employees individually. Besides, Alphabet workers own a large part of the company shares.

Do you realize that most locations where tech companies would seek talent have much better employee protection? No at-will employment, guaranteed annual and parental leave.

Personally looking forward to them opening up for Facebook employees.

It's reassuring to have a team behind you in case the big company turns against you.

As an Intel Jones Farm campus employee: I hope so.

Every company has different problems that employees experience. Making CPUs is inherently less political than web search and ad tech, and so I suspect there's less interest in social justice type protests at Intel than at Google, and maybe more economic concerns or general work environment concerns.

I think there are also a lot of industry common practices that ought to changee but may require not just individual unions at different companies but unions in multiple companies working together.

Examples include: onerous intellectual property agreements, excessive executive compensation tied to short-term stock gains, anti-compete clauses, severance packages with anti-disparagement clauses, and whole-day uncompensated interviews.

There are also rights that I think should be commonplace in the tech industry: certain minimum working conditions, like a minimum cubicle size, high cube walls if you prefer them, and multiple monitors of a reasonable size and resolution, the right to refuse work if documentation required to do one's job correctly is unintelligible or nonexistent, the right to have any question raised by ten or more employees be addressed in a timely fashion by senior management (even if the legitimate answer sometimes is "that's a secret, we can't tell you for strategic or legal reasons"), the right to have your name and contributions to the company listed publicly if you want, the right to (in cases where it doesn't directly undermine the company's ability to collect revenue) publish one's work with an open source license, and so on.

Anyone working in the tech industry could come up with their own list that would be different, but maybe there's enough overlap to make collective action workable.

My guess is that the “unionization effort” will spread to other companies but it won’t get anything more than a few percentage of the workforce to join.

Most workers at the big tech companies are fairly happy and comfortable and not nearly as politically vocal as the organizers of the union. I suspect that it will be limited to a small vocal minority.

Not on a long term scale. Tech's revenue is eventually going to dry up, regulations will become tighter and the low hanging fruit will be picked. They'll be less willing to pay engineers a senator's salary and there will be more engineers to go around too. With this comes discomfort if you're a software engineer. Your job begins to become less thinking and more maintenance. Your salary isn't what it was, or you get outsourced, or you simply get fired because the company doesn't need more than one smart engineer. With this comes politicization. Why does one person get to decide my fate? Why isn't the workplace a democracy?

Then you will see unions in the tech industry.

People have been predicting tech is soon going to dry up for basically the entire industry's history. I'm not gonna say this is an impossible future, but I don't see much reason to expect it.

People wrongly predicted the end of the tech industry (and by tech industry i mostly mean ad-tech like google, since that is the subject of the thread) because they don't understand it, and there was even more reason to misunderstand it when it was in its infancy.

Now, we can see the amount of anti-trust cases against them, the amount of regulation popping up, the overabundance of young compsci students. There are reasons to expect it to burst one day, but I never said that day was soon.

Big companies are already almost entirely maintenance.

This really isn't a union though. I mean even the union expert they interviewed for this article calls it "groundbreaking" in that it looks nothing like a union, since it has no economic goals or worker protections in mind and it's all about social issues.

So it's a charity that you donate 1% of your salary to, with the goal of impacting Google's policies. That's interesting in its own right, and it's not out of the question that this could end up being a good use of donations from an effective altruism perspective depending on what they can accomplish. But this is not unionization in tech.

A union that focuses on social issues would still be a union. What makes this less like a traditional union I think is that it doesn't have the collective bargaining abilities that a normal union does (which would require the employees to vote to form a union).

Is there an actual effort? I thought a few dozen people made announcement. That’s a start. But it’s far from traction.

They have about 300 employees on board. It probably wont get as high as 10 thousand, but it's not insignificant and this is, in my opinion, more of a preparatory organisation for the inevitable tech bubble burst, probably from some regulation.

This is a really interesting experiment. It kind of seems more like an Employee Resource Group than a union, except that the members have to pay dues. ERG's are usually run by volunteers, and often get a nominal budget from the company itself to pay various costs (much less than 1% of each member's salary). Why couldn't this use that structure instead? And why do the dues need to be so high?

Is the idea to have more teeth, i.e. everyone in the union will strike or leave unless Google stops working with the military, or blocks rightwing Youtube videos, or whatever the current cause may be? Although again, I'm not sure that really requires a union, doesn't that already happen with the big walkouts and collective letters to management that go around?

It's also interesting how big of a difference the framing makes here... "Google allows employees to unionize" paints it in a positive light, as opposed to "Google refuses to support a social causes ERG for employees".

Overall I can't say I really get it, and wouldn't expect it to catch on so widely namely because I don't think most people want to pay 1% of their salary and not personally get anything tangible in return. But I'm interested to see how it evolves.

1% yearly income dues... which for a highly payed Alphabet engineer amounts to some significant money.

In USA, ERGs are a management tool to "divide and conquer" and prevent employees from uniting into powerful legally protected groups.

Dues are mostly used to pay members who are fired or striking over union issues.

we've got the fads like open floor offices, puzzle interviews, etc. "because Google". Similarly once the management takes hold of unionization as one of the tool in the management toolbox, the unionization will spread like fire.

Huh? Management almost everywhere opposes unions to the maximum extent permitted by law.

Umm. Once again: will Alphabet's unionization effort spread to Alphabet?

The way the headline is written immediately reminds me of Betteridge's law of headlines [0].

I'm just guessing, but perhaps that led to the initial downvoting.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

I will one day write a piece about how the tech industry accidentally invented the superior business model. Pay workers higher and they're less likely to unionise. They're more productive (lest they lose their jobs). They don't want to leave. This works for the tech industry because technically they're not paying workers higher to be generous, it's just a different way to invest the profits back into the business, like how a car company would invest into steel infrastructure. Software doesn't need to do that, their infrastructure is employee's brains.

As it turns out, the more ethical solution tends to work better for businesses, I think. If CEO's took a cut out of their salary and the profits and reinvested it into worker salaries I am willing to bet this would make any business more productive.

You might say software employees leave and unionise anyway, but they only leave to go to better companies and their unions aren't very popular. Time will tell on that second point though.

I don't think that is the case.

Tech companies engaged in illegal collusion to keep salaries down, as usual the penalty for doing so was far less than their benefit.

What don't you think is the case? I'm reading your sentence and it doesn't contradict anything I've said.

You seem to be saying paying workers more than they are worth is an innovation of tech. They are paying less than they would have without the wage fixing scandal and its ineffective settlement. The union is clearly a result of many abuses of workers by the tech industry.

Now it will be easier to do that. With unions you only need to bribe several people who are already political by nature(who else would want to run the union?).

I'd say dealing with an employer through HR without a union is as stupid as representing yourself because "lawyers are crooks" and then getting advice from the opponent's council.

My comments refer to documented evidence that HR will participate in criminal acts against you and any incentive they were given can be indistinguishable from their legal bonuses.

Ok that’s fair. I take back my comment. I’ve had that happen to me. I was sent offer from one of the major social media companies. I signed the offer. Rejected other offers. We chose the starting date etc and 3 days later they rescinded the offer. HR lied to me etc. Would have been easier to deal if there was union.

I see where you're heading, but I think this is an odd comment.

From a market perspective, the few big companies can afford to pay really high wages because of a monopoly-like situation that they are under investigation for, while still having profit margins that would be deemed absurd in more competitive businesses, like the car business. The lack of competition is hurting the rest of society.

The way you keep your employees is by making sure they're treated well. This includes, but is in no way limited to, salary. Unions are a solution to not being treated well.

Hiring someone is a bit like marrying them, IMHO. Maybe I'm an outlier.

If CEO's took a cut out of their salary and the profits and reinvested it into worker salaries I am willing to bet this would make any business more productive.

Im highly skeptical. Sundar Pichai reportedly earned 280 million in 2019, while google has 100+K employees with a median salary of 260K.[1] IF you took the entire CEO pay and split it up, it would be about a 1% pay bump. I dont think that would make a significant change in your googler's productivity.

https://insights.dice.com/2020/08/28/google-ceo-sundar-picha...

Not sure why this was dead within two minutes of submission. I vouched for it to hopefully allow for discussion on the article to take place. I'm still reading it myself.

Edit: The situation on the whole sounds pretty precarious. I'm particularly worried about the chilling effects mentioned if Alphabet decides to bring down the hammer on the leadership of AWU. These companies already have so much power, I don't think silencing internal dissent will the world any favors in the long run.

Dead? In what sense dead? I found it just fine.

That's because I vouched for it. Before that it was labelled [dead], possibly due to downvoting.

Edit: Thanks for the clarification, dang!

It was killed by new software that tries to detect promotional submissions.

I definitely expect something like the Alphabet union will inevitably happen in other companies. There already are groups like Amazon Employees for Climate Justice; now that the precedent is set, why not rebrand as the Amazon Employees Union to pick up free press and CWA sponsorship? What I'm skeptical of is whether these non-exclusive unions will have more power than the preexisting employee activism groups.

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