A woman who took on Google and won
bbc.com
bbc.com
While they squashed the issue immediately, I suspect this practice is common and bullying people about sharing their wages in this industry is normal.
The story is full of the standard paradoxes: a) She's being paid 'reasonably' but probably not for such a rich company/area b) She's entitled to 'talk about comp' but people slamming the company publicly on Facebook posts are not going to last, it's reasonable that the company wold be upset buy that c) Google is full of actually quite nice people wanting to make a difference, there's a lot of moralizing about 'equity and diversity' but in their relentless pursuit of profit they create a 'tiered class system' of people, of completely secondary status and they grind them with every bit of the massive power they have.
Google is not rich because they 'nickle and dime' people, they're rich because they create a globally useful product, and have enormous market power.
Some things Google could do:
1) They're stinking rich. Pay good wages and give awesome benefit packages.
2) Don't intimate people but let them know if they're leaking information to the press or posting publicly that they're going to be let go.
3) Make every single person from CEO to the servers at lunch 'part of the company' and let them come to company events, and see the 'invited speakers' etc. if they want.
The reason they should do that is because their supposed to be 'good people' i.e. communitarians first. It's hypocritical to virtue signal publicly if they can't make their own beds.
$15/h is unlivable wage in Bay Area or Seattle but actually ok money in many parts of the country.
when I was very young, one could be promoted simply by demonstrating a willingness to learn and be better when others were not. now, if you are not doing at least that, you are not considered for a raise.
last year I got a perfect yearly evaluation, and a 0.6% raise, which equaled inflation for the same year.
a raise is supposed to be a raise. a reward. incentive to continue the good work.
it used to be that if you could perform well that you were rewarded. now, if you perform well, you stay afloat. that's it.
I really hate this planet because of things like this. if humans were a decent species, money would not work it's way toward people who already have more.
honestly, I can't wait to be done with this life. the black abyss is better than working harder than anyone else simply to keep your head above water.
Having said that, historically we're still at a "high point". It's a cold comfort, but still..
Yes, we'd be much better off if we'd just stop progressing at some arbitrary point, and just accepted:
- 35 years of life expectancy
- no running water
- famines every decade
- zero modern technology, like electricity or even healthcare
So? That's still the definition of life expectancy. Moreover, being able to live to 90 if everything went right doesn't mean much when you die at 20 because of a treatable illness/injury, or seeing your wife/kid die in childbirth.
that "law of the jungle" thing is a myth. people believe it because it makes sense, but it isn't real for humans or almost any animal species.
what really exists is that people feel very good when they view themselves as superior to others, and they come up with an insane amount of mental gymnastics to justify what they do to attain that feeling.
one of the great myths of nature is that predators have some sort of instinct to screw over their social group at every opportunity. even most animals know that there is strength in numbers and in fairness. we humans have taught ourselves that fairness and consideration of others are weaknesses and that feeling like a badass at the expense of others is very positive.
humans are literally an irredeemable species at this point, because all of the evidence of what I say is available to anyone with an internet connection, but it's easier and more fun to feel like a badass occasionally than it is to change your view of society, so the facts get ignored and humanity continues to destroy itself over smaller and smaller things.
Citation on this? Your claims are contradicted by wikipedia articles like: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infanticide_(zoology)
Speaking of humans: Their social group, no. Other social groups, absolutely.
We know this as "ingroup bias".
Pre-internet, your ingroups and outgroups were largely restricted by geography. Moreover, you got this sort of "ingroup boosting" effect by being part of a town, county, state, and country, so you had a lot of overlaps with other people.
Interestingly enough, each of those geographic entities actually occupies a "slot" in your social graph -- unconsciously, you think of them as people.
Without a forcing function providing behavioral moderation through discordant groupings, ingroups and outgroups become increasingly monocultural, tribalistic, and behaviorally extreme.
The sobering reality once you understand things is that we are never more than 1 generation away from living in caves and losing all civilization. The delusion of durability of The Cloud (compared to physical books) is one of the saddest things.
I used to be a vendor for both Seagate and WD - and they'd regale us about how NO HDD can store data forever even if it's not running. Everything fails as long as it at 300K rather than 0K. And the lifespan of most electronics and computer is FAR shorter than most people imagine.
We are a decent species, that's why we've survived this long.
There is also more at play than just humans being "decent". I recommend this short (3min) video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-k_FfS1kHfY
TL;DW it's almost a natural law that things accumulate in a pareto distribution.
It has always been a PITA to be the low person on the totem pole, but these days the pay isn't there, the benefits aren't there, and the treatment can be rather appalling.
I think they even used to have a patched kernel that would disable faulty RAM so that they wouldn't have to replace single DIMMs.
I think it follows a common pattern of replacing medium skilled labor with low skilled laborers augmented with very few high skilled laborers.
Also the biggest DCs are in low cost-of-living/cost-of-labor areas. E.g. South Carolina, Iowa, and Oklahoma have the federal minimum wage ($7.25).
It's still unusual to discuss pay in many companies but not because the employer prohibits it.
How much of her direct day to day life is set by Modis? I figure Google pays Modis and Modis pays her? (If so, how much of a cut is Modis keeping?) Did Google directly provide her water bottle, or did it need to go through Modis? It looks like the threatening email she received claiming that she couldn't discuss compensation came from a Modis manager, not a Google one? Which managers were in the room when she was fired for her Facebook post? (I'm assuming Google ones, since they're on-site?)
She wasn't working for Google, she was working for a contractor. Go to a different datacenter and it will be staffed by a different (local) contractor. Same thing for most of the building's maintenance staff. What makes it news-worthy is that the owner of that particular server-rack was a high-profile company. Had the same thing happened at a datacenter owned by a bank, nobody would have reported on it.
So like even at best this is "Google contracted some dc operations to a company that violated labor relations law."
The more newsworthy part is that she was able to get recourse.
Which is exactly by design. They can each blame the other and hope the employee doesn't complain.
I think they should re-target the program and make it mandatory for execs, and make them live on the $15/hr wage that they pay the techs for a few weeks.
Heck, when I was in college, my part-time Starbucks job gave me good health coverage and a bunch of other perks that my first few post-college tech jobs didn't. (This was mid-90's). FWIW.
Seems like it is common enough to have a name.
I might misunderstand you, but progressive tax brackets mean you pay extra money only on money earned after the limit. So if that line is $1000, under which the tax rate is 10%, you pay $100. Then if the tax rate above that is 20%, I pay that much only on the amount above $100. So if I make $1020, I pay 10% * $1000 + 20% * $20 = $102. (Not 20%*1020 = $204)
In other words, you can’t take home less money overall just because you crossed the line into a higher tax bracket. I felt it was worth mentioning because it’s an easy misconception to have.
That complex arrangement has become increasingly common at Google."
This complex arrangement is common in every large corporation. The two layers of contracting companies rarely have any contact with the workers who are fully controlled by managers at the paying company (Google in this case). However, everyone is very careful to officially document that no one at the company is the manager of the contracted employee. But they are.
My point is you can't assume contractors at Google are independent service providers that happen to be working on site like when you call a plumber to your house. They can and do use this arrangement to keep labor costs low even when employees are working on the company's core business. Before it was Waymo I don't think anyone would have called it the Adecco self driving car project.
EDIT: FWIW the relocation package terms were all the same between everyone, so it was a bit ridiculous.
Yes, that's the primary purpose of having contractors -- to slough off legal obligations.
> Google already doesn't have a policy against discussing wages and compensation
This was a hard-fought battle, employee + NLRB vs management.
When I started working at HP, within 1 week we had "Neophytes Training" and that including half a day of a lawyer from corporate legal explaining all the things that needed to be common knowledge about rights, obligations and duties as an employee. That include HR rules, CA and US law, like the ones in this situation.
Who the hell gets into management without knowing the general territory of NLRB and DoL rules and laws?? WHO?? Apparently Google and every one of their contractors!
So how exactly has Google et al. either lost knowledge that was once very common in Silicon Valley in most corporations or never bothered with it? Wouldn't this be part of what "Adults in the Room" from VCs or hired senior managers bring to the table?
The hubris daily demonstrated by "Googlers" seems a likely part of it - they naturally "know better what is what and what is right than anyone else on the planet". That's their modus operandi most of the time. There are SO MANY STORIES about this in Silicon Valley and elsewhere. But their egoes ignore a little thing called the law.
In all this story,there was someone,who had a nerve to tell her that she can't have a bottle of water...
Stuff like this is exactly what unions would accomplish if they became more standard in the industry. The Google union is a couple months old and is already successfully defending their members from violations of labor laws. How many others are there who are working in unsafe conditions and/or illegally fired for "security reasons" and have no one to speak out on their behalf?
A similar analogy is why "no-tipping" restaurants are so rare in the US (or why they go away so quickly when they are tried). While no-tipping may benefit some servers, your good and better servers can easily make more money with tipping, so they don't want it to go away. The same dynamic exists for software developers.
Tipping sucks. The expectation that people work a full time job that does not also carry the expectation of being able to fund them existing and continuing to show up for work sucks too.
You've made the same, "but a few are doing great" argument made above.
Most are not. Minimum wage = struggling overall.
Pointing to a minority making real bank as justification for current policy that leaves a majority struggling does not make sense.
It's incredibly frustrating to hear well-meaning but misinformed progressives argue for policies that would make the lives of people I worked with and respect much harder.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/mcdonalds-workers-denmark/
What is the average wage:tips ratio for US servers?
Maybe if you held different position your point of view on a subject could be different.
Are this person’s experiences not valid on their own somehow?
The core misunderstanding is unions adjust to the conditions of the workers they represent. Collective bargaining is hated by upper management because it shifts more power to the workforce be that someone making minimum wage or millions. People think great healthcare when they should be thinking more worker friendly stock vesting schedules and other issues that impact highly compensated individuals.
The union is basically irrelevant to them.
The various unions and guilds in film/tv production are there to protect the regular workers who operate in often very irregular and ad-hoc circumstances.
Also - acting is a hugely oversubscribed job, most actors don't do acting full time. There are 10 actors for every role. Even good one's.
Even just 'working actor' - let alone 'millions' - is a very lucky position.
'Famous' actors are not helped by the union, they have agents who manage their deals, much like athletes and their comp. is a function of totally different things.
'Athlete's Unions' are actually advantageous to them, because they can leverage power against owners, but in that case it's 'rich' vs. 'rich' entities fighting over surpluses, and nothing is gained or lost for the rest of us, it's not a helpful basis of comparison for working-class unions.
Another benefit that seems minor to multi millionaires but occasion really makes a huge difference in these people’s lives is a significant pension. It’s unfortunately common for very rich actors to end up broke at some point making the security of knowing you’re never going to be poor even if they don’t stay rich a huge deal. That’s something managers can’t negotiate on a film by film basis and it’s an example where minimizing downsides becomes more valuable than maximizing total compensation.
I’ve worked with big tech companies as a customer for a long time on significant projects. Over time, corporate politics is pretty brutal and without representation good people get into lousy situations, even for high performers. Google is no exception.
Sarcasm aside, it's really disturbing to see amazing countries like the USA falling for the same illusions that have kept us poor since forever. What defeats bad bosses is the option for workers to simply walk away, be it because of competitors offering better conditions or because you don't really need the income in the short term.
If your are left wing inclined, I suggest that you lobby UBI instead of unions.
Be better than us.
You should look elsewhere for reasons why Brazil is relatively poor today. I guarantee you unions have very little to do with it.
Just curious, who would that be? I am guessing some Scandinavian countries, maybe?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_agreement_coverage
France, Austria, Belgium, Iceland, and Sweden all have above 90% collective bargaining coverage. Finland, Denmark, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Australia, Luxembourg, Switzerland, and Germany are between 50% and 90%.
You have bigger companies vs many smaller companies. Unions and big companies go hand in hand.
Cherry picking can go both ways. National economies are complex, and what works in one country can fail in another. There is zero point in generalizing.
It’s possible that unions are great for average and below employees, but they appear to be a pretty sour deal for everyone used to big tech income in the US.
If you use the same argument then how do they make the world's top luxury cars with "average and below" union workers?
You can fill the blank with the name of literally any country on earth and the sentence will still be correct. Tech salaries in the US are a huge outlier. There is not a single other country on earth where ICs can earn remotely as much as they do in the US tech hubs. Even US top companies don't pay remotely as much in their non-US offices.
Collective bargaining can be used to make demands about anything really. It doesn’t have to be working conditions for workers. They can even use their power to pressure Google into supporting particular political candidates, etc if they have enough power.
Seems reasonable to me for unions to be involved in lobbying.
There's nothing overtly nefarious about lobbying.
Lobbying is 'telling government about something specific'. Usually in your own interests, but the interests of the people should interest the government.
The problem is the asymmetry of power and access.
https://alphabetworkersunion.org/people/our-union/
We recognize our power as Alphabet workers—full-time employees, temporary employees, vendors, and contractors—comes from our solidarity with one another.[emphasis mine]
Contractors included.
1. They got a suspension for talking about unions overturned, but not her later firing over the Facebook post.
2. Google signed a document saying its employees "have the right to discuss wage rates, bonuses, and working conditions," which is just a restatement of U.S. law.
3. Nobody admitted any wrongdoing and there was no monetary compensation.
If that's what winning looks like, I hate to see what losing is.
Where does it say that? The article doesn't mention a firing at all.
> Nobody admitted any wrongdoing and there was no monetary compensation.
There usually is monetary compensation in settlements like this, they just don't disclose it.
I've never been fired before, but I'm pretty sure when they ask you for your badge and laptop and escort you out the door, you're being fired.
They do usually say “settled for an undisclosed sum”.
erm, doesn't American labor law prohibit retaliatory actions for doing discussing working conditions?
Credit card companies do the same thing. They run ads stating you won’t be held liable for fraud. The implication is that the credit card company does this because it cares about you as a customer. The truth is federal law dictates cardholders can’t be held liable for fraudulent charges.
Teachers unions go further than protecting incompetent staff and actually protect sexual predators [1] [2], just to give you an idea of the morality of the typical union.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10000872396390443437504577547...
[2] https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/education/sex-predators...
Entertainers and sports professionals have unions which do not seem have this problem.
If you support police unions for example, you're inherently supporting the notion that a police officer who is courteous and cares about the community should be paid identically to the Chauvins of the force.
All proposals are the other kind. And none of them encode equal rights for immigrants in their bylaws.
These are the maximums for 2021 28,649,250 (players with less than 6 years experience) $40,108,95 (players with 10 years plus)
The nba was a bad example.
And no, I at least personally think the Chauvins of the force shouldn't be paid at all, because maybe their 18 cases of misconduct should lead them to being removed from the force.
[0]: https://www.npr.org/2020/06/07/871751070/liability-insurance...
Unions have benefits for their employess of course, like making it impossible to fire them among other things, but then you have to work in the type of environment you get when everybody is impossible to fire.
The idea that all teachers and police officers in the US are paid exactly the same is wildly untrue. The pay for both those jobs varies based on all sorts of factors, especially including location and job title.
Planet Money did a great podcast about this last year: https://www.npr.org/2020/06/05/871298161/police-unions-and-p...
Unions are not designed to maximize the effectiveness of each shareholder dollar. They exist to give all employees a safe and fair work environment. That probably means that some 40th %ile performer gets paid the same as an 80th %ile performer. But they both get water bottles when working in a hot datacenter, and they both get their bonus that was promised to them in writing. I don't think that's a bad deal. Without a union, people would be fired for complaining about unsafe working conditions, bonuses that were promised would never come, and people would be working 8 hour shifts in 85 degree datacenters with no water. That doesn't sound that great to me.
If unions are so bad for workers, why do large corporations sink millions of dollars in anti-union ads in newspapers? Probably not because they really want to give their highest performers raises, but are hamstrung by regulation, and need the public to step in and protect them from the big bad union. They do it because they want to lower wages, make the job harder and more dangerous, and go back on promised bonuses when all the employees start asking where they were. The ads work, too. The seeds of doubt have been sown, and whenever Jeff Bezos reads a comment like yours, I'm sure he smiles a little.
This is a false dichotomy, it is possible for unions to be bad for (a majority of) workers and employers at the same time. Employers don't want to be sandbagged with low performing staff any more than their coworkers do.
Imagine no union. Pressure from the mayor or council or the media or a connected criminal will get you fired possibility thrown in jail.
This is exactly the problem with unions. Pay for time under your belt is a stupid idea. Experience isn’t actually worth more to anyone beyond an adequate amount to do the job competently.
A police officer with 10 years of experience is not going to actually prevent more crime than one with 7 years. Additionally, an ambitious officer that takes training seriously, etc can be a much better officer than one with twice the experience.
Rewarding seniority rather than merit is literally an incentive to do the bare minimum for as long as possible.
I think you underestimate what experience gives you in terms of decision making, community contacts and nerves of steel.
The union absolutely could not protect sworn officers who broke the law. And if a member was in legal trouble, the local branch voted on whether to provide legal support ( good lawyers paid by the union for as long as needed). I saw an officer charged with stealing (from a found wallet) where the branch voted not to provide that support.
My advice- pay police more and expect them to behave as professionals.
As a teenager in Thailand I saw police (1990) who didn't get paid enough to live- they relied on local community giving them rice, blankets, weapons.. or they ripped off folks -mostly from outside the community. Speeding tickets for foreigners etc.
I was paid ok to do my digital forensics- but doubled then tripled my wage in 2 years of leaving- doing ~ the same stuff (what people call incident response is built into your blood after a few years of policing).
I would also argue that I was much better as a police officer after 7 years than after 2, and much better at the specialization that I choose in the police- digital forensics- after 9 years, much better... and when i left @15 years I was much, much more valuable to the service than when I joined (skilled in forensics, understood the court process, could well react to emergencies, could write policy not just follow it etc)- but my pay had gone up maybe 30%. But I didn't go up in rank because I didn't want to manage people, so my wage mostly capped.
And if anything- that is the issue with time based seniority- you force people to stop doing what they are good at and make them managers, with predictable results. (ie poor management)
Edited to not be a single wall of text
Entertainment and Sports unions exist for completely different reasons.
Traditional unions exist because of an asymmetric power dynamic between workers and labour, at least, historically.
Sports Unions exist so that fairly highly paid athlete's can squeeze even more money out of their employers by gaining leverage.
Actors work in an aspirational industry that is massively oversubscribed with talent, and wherein the work is generally ad-hoc or contractual and conditions vary greatly.
The vast majority of actors earn very little and probably are not full-time actors. Their Union sets a 'floor' for basic comp and expectations because otherwise there wouldn't be one - but they generally don't get into controlling roles for talent, they don't control job definitions etc..
I have a neighbour who worked at an auto-plant and his job was to sit in a room and does nothing, observing the floor. A role with kafkaesque bureaucracy and roles that simply should not exist. Family members have priority for jobs. In a nutshell - that union has considerable control and influence over the operating nature of the company whereas I don't think that's a long term benefit of unions.
My sister in law works for a government sector union and their hiring practices have almost nothing to do with merit or qualifications, it's shocking. Again, a situation wherein I think the power of the union is a detriment to the system overall.
That said it seems clear that after a wave of 'getting along' in the US, surpluses are not being shared and unions at Wallmart, Google, Amazon etc. seem like a good way to develop better equity. But I suggest it would be better for everyone if those companies just did a better job with their staff and were more gracious and generous.
Why can't tech workers unions do that?
For commodity workers in industry, without unions it's possible they are mistreated, in which case, it's better for everyone if there were to be unions (although I think some kind of agreement would be better than unions). But workers unions can also leverage considerably more power than is better for everyone and make the company and industry struggle.
Unions are a form of power, they work differently in different scenarios, and the scale and relative power matters a lot.
It's just not sufficient to say 'there's a union over there therefore we should have one' or 'unions are all evil' or 'unions are always better than not' etc..
One of the fundamental asymmetries of our corporate age is that employees have ~1 company, but companies have many employees. That gives a company enormous negotiating power: it's easier for them to find another employee than for you to find another job.
Unions act to restore balance so that companies and workers have more equal negotiating power. That doesn't come through supply restriction. E.g., in high school I worked for a grocery store and we were unionized. They could have fired all the stockers at once if they wanted, as it was not particularly hard to learn the job. But what they couldn't do was pressure me into taking less money by threatening to fire me.
The supply of lawyers isn't restricted at all, as shown by stagnant or falling median wages. Almost anyone who wants to become a lawyer can enroll in one of the "third tier toilet" private law schools, and states don't impose any limits on the number of law school graduates allowed to take the Bar exam.
The supply of lawyers is restricted through onerous education and licensing requirements. You could argue that the fall in wages means they are no longer as effective in controlling supply. But if you think the supply "isn't restricted at all" I encourage you to start offering legal advice for money and let me know how that goes for you.
I don't see anything particularly onerous about education and licensing requirements for lawyers. A sufficiently motivated student can complete law school and pass the Bar exam in a few years. So in practice there's no significant restriction on supply.
https://www.ama-assn.org/press-center/press-releases/ama-con...
Again, if you think there are no restrictions, hang out your shingle and start giving legal advice. If you're right, you should be fine.
German labour is heavily unionized, a lot of the workers are lazy and incompetent. A lot of the union leadership is well paid and almost never works. It heavily opposes remote work(for good reason, but with a slightly wrong conclusion).
Their salary negotiations have been a clusterf* in recent years. And in fact I tried them, and contributed. But attempts at protecting employee rights were not only shut down by leadership but also fellow union leadership. They were too busy cozying up to leadership instead of protecting and informing other employees of employee rights. When it comes to employer abuse they will be too "busy" to help you, so realistically you will still need your own private law insurance.
I'm not opposed to unions and I do agree that workers need better protection especially in the US. But we also ought to be able to talk about how these big institutions may no longer protect the interest of those people and at some point exist to feed their own mouths more than the workers they were intended to protect.
Is it better than nothing? Yes, absolutely. But why do man-made structure always end up like that?
SAG doesn't make it's 'wage' because production companies are forced to hire from a smaller pool of SAG workers.
SAG sets prices.
There are actually an 'unlimited number' of SAG workers who would, if it were note for those numbers, also work for $0.
Also - unions don't set their wages by 'restricting labour' - they negotiate directly using the power of being able to shut down production. (Ok, arguably this is 'restricting the labour pool to current workers' but that would mean something different).
For Doctor and Nurses - you could argue that those guilds do actually restrict the number of workers in the field to keep prices up by supply & demand, but that's generally not what unions do.
This is true, but they would slowly lose their leverage if they didn't constrict the labor supply.
In order to join SAG you have meet certain requirements (e.g. speak a certain number of lines). The vast majority of actors in a union production have to SAG members, so this effectively acts as a rate limit to the number of new members.
The same goes for other powerful unions. Ford would love to build a new factory that employs non-union workers, but they aren't allowed to.
There are huge power imbalances at work
Someone better let Lebron James know!
also see messi's contract for an example of what these athletes are worth in an open market: https://www.cbssports.com/soccer/news/lionel-messi-barcelona...
obviously soccer and basketball aren't apples to apples. but look around the nba and you see many salaries across the top of the scale that suggest the top performers are vastly underpaid.
https://www.businessinsider.com/lebron-james-makes-less-than...
2. Does the NBA give LeBron a platform to make 2x more than his NBA salary in endorsements? (Yes.)
as for the second point, not sure what this has to do with the original comment/point, specifically the fact that lebron is proof against the idea that "Unions depress wages for top performers". obviously a lot of complex dynamics here, and one could argue that the nba players union has helped make the nba more successful and all the money that came with that. just pointing out that using lebron as a counterargument to the original comment about wages (ie his nba salary) is a bit ironic.
Which is why your comparison messi isn't very good. In fact if you read past the headline, your link explains why.
Many wealthy business owners have been convicted of all kinds of illegal activities, including child molestation.
What a crap straw man argument.
Somehow people who talk about "child predators" always ignore the fact that a bunch of people who get falsely charged also get protected. That's REALLY important. My anecdata knows far more teachers who were falsely accused than actual child predators (ratio: 12 to 1).
A single teacher can't possibly corral the amount money required for a defense against a school board funded lawyer.
2) Almost all of the "incompetent" teachers left in place are there because the school adminstration won't file the paperwork.
School administrators are politicians. They are always looking for their next job. The one thing administrators hate is bad press because it will dog them when they jump jobs.
Actually firing a teacher is fraught with opportunities for bad press. No matter how distasteful the teacher's behavior--somebody in the community will likely be on their side. If those people are vocal, firing that teacher dooms your political career--probably forever thanks to Google.
Consequently, administrators prefer to simply shunt bad teachers aside rather than risk their career.
So, put the blame for incompetent/horrible teachers where it belongs--square on the shoulders of the school administrators who have made a political calculation and refuse to fire people properly.
Unions have shot themselves in the foot. They only benefit the workers and heavily fuck over customers more than they do companies. Unions were there to improve conditions and give fair wages. Not protect, like you said, incompetent workers. But it turned into that.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26733237.
“First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—Because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—Because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—Because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”
--Pastor Martin Niemöller
I don't see where anything got better for anyone?
2. Children
3. Dignity
4. Character that makes your org great
What about Open Source and Free Software? Is that non-union or is it expected that, in the event of a work stoppage, people who work on, say, nginx as a hobby will stop work, too? Neither of those options even sound possible.
> I'm not sure it would be considered a union if the people involved aren't being paid.
Open Source projects compete directly with closed-source software, sometimes very successfully. It's a big part of the industry.
Reading the story about the founding of the union: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/04/technology/google-employe...
It sounds like the purpose of the union is to create a permanent activist-class of employees, who focus on promoting the union instead of doing their jobs, and are protected from termination by the union (or the NLRB). It’s a far cry from from miners who picketed because they were dying on the job.
I’m not going to cry about the mega-profitable Google having a few hundred less productive employees who spend their time on this, but it doesn’t exactly inspire me either.
If I worked at Google and I had some complaint about my health insurance or something, it doesn’t seem like the union would even be the right people to talk to, because they don’t seem to represent the well-being of the workers like an ordinary union.
AWU does advocate for the interests of workers, as demonstrated by this article. It's just that full-time employees don't tend to have as many issues as the temps do.
These people were offered benefits that never materialized and generally treated unfairly. I don't know why some people instantly assume it's the billion dollar company that's in the right, and the guy or gal making $15/hr who's trying to take advantage of the system.
I don’t have anything against the worker here, I feel for them. It just seems like the union is very ineffective, and it’s goals don’t even seem to be aligned with the workers (other than those who get fired for being in the union).
To put myself in the shoes of management. My company has a class of workers who do activism instead of their job. If one of my employees wants to join that class, I’m probably going to be disappointed - although firing them for this would be idiotic, because it’s illegal and will get me in trouble with the NLRB.
I think the workers here absolutely deserve representation that can get them paid more than $15 an hour, but this union doesn’t seem to be it. It seems more like an institutionalized pissing match between a clique of employees and management. It’s like a hack that exploits labor law to protect workers from the peril of at-will employment. Don’t like the expectations of your job, but still want to get paid? Join the union! Now if they fire you, it’s retaliation!