Google union in turmoil following global alliance announcement
theverge.com
theverge.com
> In a statement, AWU executive council member Auni Ahsan said: “We want to honor the concerns that have been raised, but our primary focus as a union isn’t affiliation or disaffiliation.”
> After the article came out, however, multiple AWU members told The Verge they were blindsided by the news. A Google worker in Europe also said they hadn’t known about the announcement, but noted they typically don’t find out about union news before it becomes public.
> Uni told The Verge that McEnany was “very involved” in the alliance, and during the meeting, McEnany acknowledged he was partly to blame — he’d told Uni to attribute the quote to Koul.
So... just your standard communications mixups? I mean, if the journalist has to quote a Googler who didn't know about the announcement but admits they don't typically get non-public union announcements anyways... it tells me there isn't much here.
This doesn't really seem like "turmoil" to me, but more of a journalist trying to create a sensationalistic narrative.
That sounds very much like condescendingly downplaying the seriousness of affiliation as something they should not be worrying about, when in fact it is something that the members are concerned about.
Everyone got so caught up in the unionization narrative that they didn't even read the details of the union in the first place. Specifically, this union isn't the kind of union with collective bargaining rights, which is what most people assume when they see the word "union".
Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/01/04/google-...
> The Alphabet Workers Union will push for change without traditional collective bargaining rights.
This pseudo-union is more like a Discord group of 100-200 Google employees who will try to influence change together, without actually forming a traditional union.
The model of unionism you reference isn't universal or even the most common cross culturally. Even within the US, pre-New Deal minority unionism was the dominant form of worker organization.
I wonder how many people are using this news to say "See, I told you so"
I further wonder how many people are replying to them with some form of "That's a anti-union sterotype, you just don't understand unions."
It's important to choose allies carefully. If you opportunistically work with an individual who's more invested in making scenes and silly sloganeering than using good judgment to accomplish meaningful change, you shouldn't be surprised when it turns out she's not much of a team player. Can't feel too bad for the CWA here.
Sounds like the AWU members need to unionize and form an AWU Members Union to make their voices heard within AWU.
Sarcasm aside, this really is a bad look for a group that needs some non-controversial wins to gain support, rather than focusing on just “gaining turf” as quoted in the article. I get the impression CWA is trying to use this to get a foothold in big tech at all costs, AWU members be damned. Maybe they can call it growth hacking.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teamsters_for_a_Democratic_U...
I don’t understand why they teamed up with CWA in the first place. What possible alignment of incentives were they hoping for? What were they thinking?
Going on their own would probably also be hard, since union laws in the US are complicated.
None of this stuff is taught in engineering courses in college. I think lack of real world experience is a pretty good explanation. Hopefully they can course correct before it snowballs. Finding a trustworthy old-hat union organizer or ten, and having them act as an advisor might help.
A few googlers teaming up can presumably afford to pay some labor lawyers to draw up the paperwork and guide them through the process. It'd also leave googlers' more in control of their destiny than quickly becoming a franchise of a larger union.
With the hundreds of members they now have, they could cover a few staff and/or consultants. Maybe even with some sort of loan to the union for spin-up costs that could be repaid from future dues if successful?
Why work with any of them?
So what makes this different from say forming a Facebook group for like minded employees? Or how is it different from internal affinity groups, most of which are heavily political in US tech companies?
Can someone explain this? What would be the requirement to be non-minority union?
Realistically AWU has to partner with another union initially standing up a brand new stand alone union with all the costs and difficulties is not practicable.
A larger union is likely to bring its own set of office politics and costs.
Just remaining within the absolute letter of the law is complex and panties for failure can be heavy - I know I have dealt with this aspect in the UK.
- Employees are regularly screwed on misrepresented equity compensation
- Employees are expected to work uncompensated on-call shifts which vary from "doesn't affect me" to "impossible to function on" such as being paged once per hour for 1 week with the expectation to do it again in a weeks time.
- Employees are subject to highly opaque performance review processes that take into account employee performance, as well as what work they happened to be assigned - Some assignments may be incompatible with the companies expectation for a given role e.g. Software Engineers assigned to put together excel reports
- Employees may be asked to perform ethically or legally dubious activities where they may be held criminally liable ( see dieselgate, and to a lesser extent the 737 max ).
- Employees may be asked to work 80+ hours to hit goals which were underfunded or poorly planned (see CDPR and every other software project which misses a deadline)
This is a small list of reasons an industry employee group such as a guild/union/certification board/association could be a good idea. However very few of these items relate to traditional union activities. The thought of pulling in specific hires with specific union skills seems like either forcing a square peg through a round hole or just paying to support someone who will fill their time with activities related to "unions" to little employee benefit.
I have seen a lot of cases relating to "PRP" and Performance reviews.
So one of the top priorities of the union is to push the company to cancel more freely, to shrink the overton window, to be more politically partisan and to conceal more from their customers for their own good.
Of course they have every right to do so, but it doesn't give me confidence that this union will be a positive force.
Youtube will filter on some blackbox intersection of heightened speech that has the potential to rile people up on the one hand, and a balance of cases such that Republicans cannot grandstand in Congressional testimony that Google is targeting the right.
So Jimmy Dore-- who generally yells, is unpleasant, and calls people names as he spews truths (mixed with the occasional naive opinion)-- might hit the filter. Or some boring socialist collective that nobody's heard of, like that case that Dorsey clearly used just so he'd have the name of a left-leaning organization that Twitter had banned.
Another way to say this: I do believe in "more speech" as a way to fight "bad speech," but if "more speech" does not include the freedom to read, understand, modify, and publish modifications of the recommendation algos that prime over a hundred million people then it's a dangerously constrained and misleading debate.
Furthermore-- if we depend on the "temporary" solution of trusting the companies to do cherry-picked bans to appease hundreds of millions of users, the companies will use all their data, money, and connections to paint that as a long term solution and leverage it to their bigger fight against monopoly regulation.
That being said, CWU looks to have screwed this up royally, and having a vote on international affiliation surrounded by a bunch of pomp would have been a great way to generate press.
Having Google TC and deciding to unionize and risk it all is certainly a risky choice. Google at E5/E6 is a “comfortable FIRE in 10 years” place if levels.fyi is correct.
And anyone who's been at Google for a few years, even not at L5, will have no trouble finding a job elsewhere that pays as much (or more - last time I had a Google offer they flatly refused to match fintech salaries). Just make sure your name doesn't get into stories like this and resign a bit early if it seems like you're losing.
I thought to myself, "you have no idea what you're getting into, do you?"