Walkouts are pointless. True Employee organization and collective bargaining is the only answer to holding execs accountable , whether it’s at Google, Activision, or anywhere else.
I was a "TVC" at Google several times. One of those times was during the walkout period. Even though I had no way of finding out about it until a lucky "right now in 3 minutes" time period, I participated.
Whilst the walkouts may not have changed much on corporate or the outsourced "side-corporates" [the contract companies], it did change myself.
For decades I've heard of strikes, read about walkouts ... stuff in history books ... documentaries on the History Channel back when the History Channel was the History Channel ...
Seeing it live, participating in it live and in person -- added new color to the understanding. The live speakers, the live news cameramen right there, the whole deal.
Consuming ourselves in intra-labor factionalism while the wealthy elites feed anti-union propaganda does everything to reduce our bargaining power and our feeling of love and respect for our fellow human beings. Because at the end of the day it's not how much melanin you have in your skin or how female you feel or what terms you're using at your workplace, it's your humanity and your labor that unites us.
Buddhism, which I often reference, makes much to do over the uselessness and continued suffering we bind ourselves to by the reification of concepts. We need to stop reifying those ideas which divide us and find the common in which to celebrate our closeness.
There is a stark difference between lifting up and listening to women (which I am strongly for) because they are our fellow human beings in labor not because their state of being will never be understood by their male counterparts, which is often the refrain of the new far left.
Class politics not identity politics.
I don't want to give away personal info on this account, but the issue was related to treatment of minorities. At this company I was in a management position in a technical role which put me above the vast majority of employees in both pay and autonomy.
I decided to do the walk out because I'm sure there were people who worked at this company who did not feel comfortable expressing their views publicly because they made just enough to get by and couldn't get a new job in two weeks if they wanted.
I want these people to see that there was someone in a management role that at least gives enough of a shit to visibly make their unhappiness with the decisions and actions of senior management known.
Maybe it's a meaningless gesture politically, it certainly didn't change anything at the company, but for me it was like lighting a candle and placing in with others in honor of someone who has passed. It won't change anything but it helps those who are struggling and grieving feel a bit less isolated. Its nothing to be proud of, it doesn't change the world, but for me it was better than sitting at my desk for a few hours completing ignoring a problem that didn't personally impact me.
You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
We have seen that the only way to get any sort of customer support out of big tech companies is making noise on social media. And it works when enough noise is made. This is the next level of that: making noise in publications with global reach. The management will be wise not to ignore it.
No one seeking change is targeting them as the audience. Though, in their own heads, they probably delude themselves into believing they are.
Did you respond to the wrong comment?
The only solution to that is to engage, and engage with the assumption that change is possible, for both of you. Otherwise you're just lecturing someone, and that's not engagement.
I said, anyone who would tune out The Guardian article as noise because they disagree with the topic is not the target audience of the walkout.
How much someone chooses to spend their personal energy or personal time “debating” contrarians just isn’t relevant to my comment…
You seem determined to change the subject away from who the walkout was for into this boring and repeatedly beat-to-death discussion, so, here’s where I stand: You can say they somehow have an obligation to spend their valuable time and valuable energies engaging with people who would tune it out as “just more SJW noise” or whatever, but I would personally argue, if they’re already tuning out an article because they disagree, rather than wasting time on them, there are thousands of ways to better use one’s time.
The second part of my argument would be, I understand that some of these people who would ignore it as noise have convinced themselves that everything has to do with them. But they should be asking themselves, “Why do I think this walkout was to convince me?” and “Why do I think they would spend their time and energy to do this walkout for me?” and “Why do I think my opinion is even relevant to this company where I don’t work and people I don’t even know?” and then, they if they’re honest with themselves, at least one of the conclusions they’ll come to is, “omg, im so vain that i believe these people i don’t know at a company i don’t work for should be seeking my approval…” which should lead themselves to ask the most important question of all…
But yeah, this topic of “you ought to spend your limited personal time and personal resources convincing contrarians” is boring af. we’ve read it in comment threads tens of thousands of times by now and with people who still can’t figure out how to break out of the elementary level loop they’ve gotten themselves stuck in.
So to sum it up, people who have tuned out the article as noise because they disagree are absolutely not the target audience. And if they find this basic fact troubling, they should reorient themselves to figure out why they would even imagine they are.
No, you said "There is almost nothing which would change the minds of the people who don’t already understand these as problems." That's far more expansive than a statement about the people that read the Guardian that don't agree ignoring it. It's one thing to say people may not trust one source or how it's presented, it's an entirely different thing to say they are unwilling to consider any source or argument. One is stating the people have a bias around a source and/or topic, the other is painting a large group of people themselves as entirely unreasonable, and to me it seemed your statement was conveying the latter.
If that's not your intent, then we can just chalk this up to some combination of poor expression and poor interpretation and call it a day.
> True Employee organization and collective bargaining is the only answer to holding execs accountable , whether it’s at Google, Activision, or anywhere else.
What do you imagine this path to "true employee organization" might look like, if it doesn't involve actions like these along the way?
Over time this leads to increased marginalization and concentration of the vary behavior that provoked the activist response in the first place.
The only thing that actually works is board level action and commitment to following through on the change. Boards can hold execs accountable.
We have to remember how many people still say “Did Occupy really change anything?” —- on its own? Of course not. However “The 99%” is absolutely a concept which every disconnected midwesterner now knows and understands what it means, in two small words. This is a concept which was not previously a dinner table conversation and Occupy flipped that on its head. And when we’re dealing with something that’s as complex and messy as superpowers and their economic systems, that is absolutely not something to hand-wave away and proclaim “it did nothing.”
None of these incredibly ingrained societal problems will be solved from one single instance of a walkout, and frankly, it would be more than a bit myopic to expect they would.
These are complex and messy issues and there isnt one single thing which will address any of them, it’s going to be a lot of single instances that add up to something over time–and I think most people understand this.
Certainly bad press. And I hope it has impact. But I'm not seeing direct lines to it.
https://twitter.com/JeffAHamilton/status/1419115702569472003