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Comment by myWindoonn | Hacker News Reader

Unions are political pressure groups. The entire point of a union is to pressure employers to not shoot their employees, give them fair wages and working hours, and so on; the union is a political actor on par with the employer.

By questioning whether a group of employees really is a union, you are attempting to strip them of federal protection from retaliation.

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Well, by a sufficiently lax definition, any gardening club is a political pressure group, because they are of course interested in their members not getting shot, gardens not being outlawed and fair prices for seeds...

The one thing that makes unions special imho is the focus on workplace issues in a specific industry or company. That is the area where a union also has legal protection. Anything else they do isn't necessarily protected, and I find it very odd that that "union" does everything _but_ the protected stuff.

I don't doubt gardening clubs can and will pressure politicians concerning relevant issues such as local politics about community gardening. A small group of 12-15 people can have large swings on public space usages or lobby a low-paid public official that manages approving public or private gardening law in that county/town.

Well, like you say, that's your opinion. And history has a dim view of your opinion. I am not being facetious about protecting people from violence; unions came about in the USA partially because of the Coal Wars [0], an armed conflict between employers and employees.

Gardening clubs are clearly not political pressure groups. I recommend that you do some reading on the history of unions in the USA; it is written in blood.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_Wars

The question is what the history of unions in the USA has to do with the Alphabet Workers Union. In particular I just don't get what you're trying to say about the Coal Wars; Google employees are not at risk of being gunned down by their management.

The average tenure of a sysadmin at Google is 2yrs. They burn out. In the USA, the shortening of work weeks and work hours, the reduction of unfair responsibilities, and the overall improvement in health and safety for working conditions are all directly attributable to union action.

Googlers suffered Apple's Techtopus salary-fixing collusion. In the USA, collective bargaining is an important component of breaking wage-fixing situations, and "labor union" is legal shorthand for such collective-bargaining groups.

Google routinely appropriates code from its employees using a Microsoft Clause, which reassigns employee-produced code to Google unless the employee can rigorously prove that Google had nothing whatsoever to do with the production of the code. Thousands of commits are appropriated every year, and there is an internal lawyer-driven process for automating the appropriation. Labor unions of artists have successfully attacked such practices in the USA before.

Google owns Youtube and Doubleclick, large advertising systems which both inspire great amounts of abuse and also themselves are abusive tools of user coercion. If Googlers wanted for Google employees to not damage their mental health by working in user moderation for hours on end, or wanted Google to be less of a part of our societal disinformation and spam problem by reforming advertising policies, then a union would be the natural place to start that argument.

It sounds like you've never worked at Google before. Just because Google does not threaten its employees with regular violence, does not mean that Google is a stellar employer above reproach and without need for redress.

Your overall attitude towards unions reminds me of a classic movie scene where disgruntled and confused folks wonder whether the Romans ever did anything for them. Here [0] is but one of many lists enumerating exactly what unions did for us.

[0] https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2012/5/15/1092027/-Thanks-a...

I'm not really sure how to respond. This is a long, passionate argument against things I didn't say and an attitude I don't have. I think unions are a great way for employees to organize against mistreatment; that's exactly why it frustrates me to see the Alphabet Workers Union appropriate the history of union activism to serve partisan goals which have nothing to do with the great things unions have achieved in the past.

The AWU's actions only seem overly partisan to you because you are standing in your current vantage point of history. Once, the idea of a weekend and a 40hr work week were also seen as too partisan and idealistic. And yet, after decades of the victory being forgotten, the weekend has become a sacred social institution.

History doesn't care about your frustration. If you're a member or affiliate of AWU or CWA and you feel like your membership has been appropriated, contact your representative and start a formal appeal for redress. Otherwise, your place in this discussion isn't to have feelings, but to learn some facts and context.

I don't see how we can have a productive conversation if you don't think it's my place to have feelings on the matter. I'd suggest that you should avoid participating in discussion forums on issues you don't think can legitimately be discussed.

Just bring evidence next time. Easy peasy. Otherwise, learn.

I am pretty sure the work environment at Google is extremely oppressive, with low salaries and and top-down evil capitalist only approach. After all how can millionaires Google employees can have their voices heard if they don't unionize? Maybe they will demand better snacks in the cafeteria and a new foosball table at the end of the indoor slide.

Unions are not just for the purpose of getting fair pay, but rather about a broad case of being on equal footing with an employer, as stated in the parent comment. Besides, this union is not just for salaried google employees, but also contractors etc - this will include for example cleaners and cafetaria employees, which are much more likely to be in need of the sort of union support that you mention.

Google was one of the participants in a corporate wage-fixing scandal. Do snacks and foosball tables justify that?

and they got sued for that and lost. No union was involved in holding them accountable

Yeah, they got a small slap on the wrist for that one. My point is the presence of snacks and perks does not preclude the exploitation of labor.

Because there's no union who represents Google, Apple, etc. employees as a single cohesive block, there couldn't have been a union holding folks accountable. You're implying that the courts were successful, but only after Googlers had an employee revolt (read: a non-union-organized strike!) against being taken to forced arbitration.

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