Google Had Secret Project to ‘Convince’ Employees ‘That Unions Suck’
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I still was kind of anti-union after that. "Anti Union" is the wrong phrasing, it was more... I was very suspicious of their structure, their own profit motive(s) etc. People working for the union had it so much better than the people actually doing the work, and we were the ones paying for and funding it, right? That aspect of it I never got over, but I now think that it may have been the wrong point of view.
I have recently come around full swing and am 100% pro union. And it is stories like this. Starbucks, Google, Amazon, these companies will spend millions to fight unions. This is prima facie evidence to me that unions benefit workers. These companies all talk the same talk: "we believe companies work best when team members can work directly with the company with no union in the way". As though Amazon warehouse workers have some kind of communication path to improve their working conditions when they are being managed and fired by an AI. What a buncha fkn BS.
Things cost. Good things cost money. You are paying for someone to fight for your interests and not the company's interest. Maybe that is worth paying for. And if you don't pay money to a union to fight you pay with your physical health, your safety, your respect, your mental health. If you work for Amazon you pay with your life when they threaten to fire you if you try to leave in order to hide from a hurricane. We should all be in unions.
Technically, that does not follow. What can be inferred is that companies believe that unions will cost the company money, but this does not necessarily mean that the employees will get any of that money. One could imagine a theoretical evil union which takes all the extracted profit from the company and gives it to themselves, and not to the employees.
But even if we don't look at history, the fact that all companies worldwide consistently unite together against this one issue (unions), as well as spending millions to counter it, should make any employee suspect. In contrast to millions of dollars lost due to bad CEO leadership or fraud, employee attrition/retraining, managers favoring nepotism, etc. Curious how they don't unite to fix that stuff when it plagues all companies just as hard.
Why can't we work for a union that is good? If the answer is that humans are involved and it'll never be possible, then that could be applied to anything and is an absurd answer. This is not a strawman, I've heard that argument many times.
It's a lot harder to get behind unions when they can't really be very strong.
For white collar equivalents with bad unions, consider the teachers unions, and the constant fight over tenure and charter schools. Or the American Medical Association and their successful constriction of supply in the world's most overpriced Healthcare environment.
I expect a Google union to force me to go to some sensitivity training instead of fighting for wages (which to be honest are pretty high as they are). So would it be about workplace safety? Probably not. Military projects? My deepest sympathy to everyone that is critical here, but maybe not really a classical union topic to be honest.
I guess Google also employs low wage workers for some tasks. Maybe they could use a union the most.
A Google union would probably focus on problems that affect most employees:
- Employee compensation (perf) is decided in secret by managers. There is no transparency and therefore no accountability. Getting rewarded for effort is unnecessarily stressful. Some managers are bad and exploit their team members. The lack of accountability creates dysfunction across the entire organization: Google managers reward people for completing projects that make the managers look good on paper. Nobody checks that the projects meet needs for users. The managers do not align incentives with shareholders (long-term profitability), customers, users, or the rest of society. This is the root cause of Google's dysfunction. Many employees feel dissatisfaction with it, even if they don't talk about it.
- The noisy & crowded workspaces. This is a direct result of the first problem of mis-aligned incentives. The office management division (REWS) is not incentivized to make Google offices actually meet the needs of workers.
- Most Google jobs are located in an area with extremely high cost of living and terrible commutes.
I agree on the noisy work spaces. That could be a union issue indeed. Maybe the problem of living costs too, but this has probably numerous reasons and it would be difficult to get everyone behind a common position.
Everyone has biases and it is okay to have some for that matter.
To me, "a good union" is a lot like "a sufficiently smart compiler". It'd be great, and I'd love to have one, but the unions we currently have are the best we've been able to make so far. We can see many cases where we could do better, but theory is significantly ahead of practice, people keep reinventing the wheel, etc.
I'm far from educated about the history of unions, and I'd be glad if anyone could correct me.
The real question is wether in spite of the inefficiencies, as a whole, unionization yields the expected results; and in general it has. Thanks to unionization we've gotten 8-hour workdays, the end of child labour and the weekend, for example. There's also data showing a strong correlation between union membership and the middle class’ overall share of income [1].
[1]: https://www.americanprogressaction.org/issues/economy/news/2...
Problem is when said leadership starts to advertise particular interests instead of focusing on compensation and safety (work place safety, not neurosis compensation). A young union cannot really focus on much more because it is unlikely that it will get the support it needs initially.
Union members comprise union leadership!
For me it's simple: Tech has brought me from near poverty to pretty darn wealthy. Why mess with that?
Could a union help increase wages even more? Maybe. Are we being paid too little compared to our output? Maybe. But at the same time I'm being paid more than I could have possibly imagined before I entered the field.
Though there are some things that are pretty universal and unions would help with. Things like non-compete agreements, ownership of code written in off work hours, collusion across companies to "not poach", and so on.
I imagine some of that might be a lot worse if the state of California didn't happen to take the positions they do. If Texas were instead the hotbed for tech companies, I think unions might be more popular.
Sure, you can also do nothing.
And when the relationship goes bad it also becomes very, very one-sided.
Of course, a union can offer other benefits, but the downside of devaluing good performance seems strikingly not worthwhile.
I don't think that unions like AWU are particularly concerned with the general performance review process.
In the end one of the unions helped me, and collaborated with my manager to push HR to give me an even slightly bigger promotion based on my more recent results.
I drastically changed opinion on the unions after that, and have subscribed ever since. They’re not perfect, but HR can be worse, even if you make them money.
I was an engineer in Europe in a Fortune 500 company, for the record.
Did you really never have a bad manager? Can you truly not believe that bad managers exist? I am really surprised by this comment.
A union isn't just about wages, it's also about being able to speak collectively against decisions that commoditize human lives.
Also everyone seems to forget that the history of unions in the US is inseparable from mafia racketeering.
To the point that the federal government had to break some of the power of unions in order to break up the effectiveness of mafia racketeering.
This is disingenuous, because the sort of unions that were involved with racketeering were manufacturing unions, specifically the Teamsters, and overlapping a period during the late 19th century where corporations often employed actual violence (with paid armed security squads) against workers who attempted to organize.
Both were wrong to engage in criminal behavior, but the incentives to do so were pretty strong. Furthermore, because the workers for these industries were drawn from largely impoverished communities where low-level organized rackets were practically a necessity for survival, it's not at all surprising that the relationships and methods continued into the workplace.
There is, however, no history of mafia racketeering with teachers or nurses unions, and regardless of one's opinion about tech worker unions, there is no reason to think that they would have any affinity for organized crime outfits.
You can even read about the corruption and (non-mafia) racketeering involved in NYC's lifeguard union, which continues literally to this very day.
In most major cities, the mafia controlled a majority of the unions and used them to effectively provide mafia made men and associates with no-show jobs to provide non-earners in their organization with a paycheck -- on top of all of that they would find ways to skim a few percent off any labor being done.
It's also easy for you to bring up teachers and nurses' unions not being mafia controlled -- jobs predominantly staffed with women. The American mafia literally cannot have women members per its own rules, so of course they couldn't influence those unions.
If you do your research though, you'll see that the Russian mafia is heavily skimming from medical services through control of the nurses' union in Germany. There is no reason they couldn't replicate that here.
How about the Aerospace Engineer's union, then: https://www.speea.org/ Pretty sure it's predominately male.
> If you do your research though, you'll see that the Russian mafia is heavily skimming from medical services through control of the nurses' union in Germany. There is no reason they couldn't replicate that here.
Organized crime could get entrenched in any industry given enough incentives and lack of rule of law, and just as much: lack of protection by the law for regular people. I could just as easily say the mafia could start heavily skimming the bagel business.
If you have any evidence that teachers and nurses unions are any more likely to fall into that, or that current manufacturing or professional unions are beholden to organized crime, present it. Otherwise it's just an attempt to smear all industries' organized labor with the past of a very specific sector.
And up until a decade or two ago had maybe a single-digit number of possible employers you could be working for. Also fucking goombahs don't have engineering degrees. Again, you're talking about another field the mafia, largely uneducated street people, could never penetrate.
Let's at least start your argument from a place of intellectual honesty.
Your original statement:
> Also everyone seems to forget that the history of unions in the US is inseparable from mafia racketeering.
As we've discussed, major parts of union history has nothing to do with mafia racketeering.
Falsely associating all organized labor with the parts that were involved with organized crime is intellectually dishonest.
How about no. How about solve the problems that make corruption inevitable and then maybe I'll support your union.
All systems that organize and collect power inevitably experience corruption, including corporations, governments, and religious institutions, not just unions.
Even small businesses and sole proprietorships have incentives to engage in corrupt practices like bribery, especially at the local level. Singling out unions for corruption is selective reasoning.
(Unless you're a hypocrite, that will support government... while using the same talking points against something you personally don't like)
> “Talk about any bad experience you or others you know may have had with unions,” the document instructs managers. “Also talk about the union’s past. Tell employees about documented history of Mafia influence and corruption of unions. Tell employees examples where union leaders have embezzled money from their members’ pension and health insurance funds. Tell them about situations where unions have made promises and have not delivered.”
https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2007/03/14/hospital-document-...
It's one of those technically true statements. Like "the history of the web in the US is inseparable from child pornography". Yes, some regulations were put in place because of the existence of child porn, but the implication that the web was created by/for child molesters is wrong.
Union racketeering still goes on today.
People still get killed by hammers today.
Both in America and in Sicily are a trail of dead bodies from unionists who didn't want to play ball with the mob.
Anti-union behavior has been FAR more corrupt than unionizing.
The history bears this out. CEO's and Owners have a lot more to lose, and a lot more to fight with than workers who have nothing and are begging for the scraps they do get.
But we don't hold private corporations to the same standard here. Industrialists cannot be separated from a history of outright murder of labor activists. Rockefeller Jr. had labor activists shot with machine guns. But we don't see many calls to avoid working for any private business because of this connection.
(/s, in case it's unclear)
From startups to mega corporations - sexual predators and outright rapists are systemically protected. (I am aware of a few "hushed up" incidents personally here in NYC)
The focus on the unions on public sector, and the horribly distorted and weird policies that result is a negative.
It's hard to imagine a google being started by a union. Did the NY teachers union try to do a charter school in new york to show they could do as well as others? My impression was this was a flop.
In CA union passed rules banning schools from maintaining reserves. This is while the same schools teach students about having some reserves (critical) as a life skill.
It was AB5 which made life miserable for even folks who WANT to try to do right by staff and moved from a principles based a approach to a carve-out / exemptions approach (ie, forcing gig musicians to become employees for a 20 minute opening gig at a bar, forcing writers to clock in and out when thinking of their writing, and a ton more insanity). The list of careveouts they've had to add is mind boggling and illustrates how backwards they got it. Obama had this right by focusing on wage rates and hourly vs exempt. His approach was easy to implement and would have gotten rid of a ton of the "manager" abuse out there.
The fight against someone groups like success academy (delivering amazing results to historically under served groups) - denying primarily minority parents the kind of choices that the union bosses and chancellors take for granted.
I'm aware of a case where a union guy showed up drunk, drove a forklift and injured another worker and kept their job. I mean, more power to the union but I have friends who've quit working in a union workplace because showing up and working was like being a traitor to the rest of the group there (who had figured out how to create weird work rule conflicts for extra benefits with scheduling craziness etc).
The history of corruption also less than ideal. "The unsealed criminal case describes a prolonged embezzlement scheme starting in involving union money from the Warren-based union local that bankrolled high-end shopping sprees at Louis Vuitton, Balenciaga and Apple, and more union funds spent on child support payments and Greektown Casino gambling binges."
Because the bubble might burst? corps are constantly trying to lowball devs, but for competitive leverage they might succeed. Unions are a way to build the profession while the going is good and bargaining power on our side - good luck getting that foosball table when there are more devs than jobs.
The only time I’ve seen my union take action was when a previous employeer started bullshittimg about our pay been “industry leading” while in reality it was just average. Having a union that remaims friendly with the industry but isn’t afraid to callout single companies and use it’s leverage in that industry to make that company behave is extremely powerful.
My dad spent his career at a unionized company. There were both union and salaried workers. He was salaried. He experienced all of the frustrations of working in a union shop, such as practically having to bribe people to do things for him like plugging something into an electrical outlet (required an electrician). At some companies, they literally had to bribe people.
Non-developers experience many of the same frustrations dealing with software. It's no secret why "shadow IT" is such a game changer for people who can engage in it.
My point is that it may be technically true that programmers don't need a union, because they have something that functions like a union.
Historically, the most successful unions in the southern US were those run by communists, because they didn't exclude people on the basis of their race. They correctly recognized that the liberation of the workers could only happen if everyone was united. It was often a hard sell to the white workers, being paid the same as a black man during Jim Crow, but the results ultimately spoke for themselves.
Unions which were whites-only were far less effective. When the white workers would go on strike, temp agencies would just round up a bunch of black men to break the strike. Turns out being able to see people who look like yourself on a picket line makes you much less likely to cross.
Source: "The Noir Forties" by Richard Lingeman
I've heard some great things about how Google does things differently to create a better workplace for engineers and employees in general, but I'd seriously think thrice before taking a job there for many reasons including this one.
I went to work at McDonalds at age 15 and was part of a union. I have direct experience with what that is like. I don’t need to get my knowledge on the subject from flamewars between people pushing ideological agendas (most of whom themselves have apparently never had direct experience.)
It's not worth it, m8.
Example better solution: UBI, so that those workers can tell the boss where to stick it without starving to death, and the company then has to offer better working conditions in order to convince anyone to show up.
That said, this article is about tech workers, not line cooks, so any conclusions drawn from union experiences at $COFFEECHAIN are perhaps not easily mappable to Google.
If agreeing to union demands did not in some way cost the employer something, why would it need to be bargained out of them?
It costs them control and social status. A lot of people have egos that don't like yielding either of those, even if it's otherwise a win-win exchange.
Middle management has a huge incentive to produce short-term resume-building actions at the expense of long-term gains, so you should be able to quite fruitfully thwart those executives and produce gains for both the company and the rest of employees.
Don’t you have any real questions for someone that lived it, instead of the same party line all the time?
Since your whole goal is to share anecdotal data, I'd assume you'd be more responsive to receiving such data.
All it did was prevent me from working as much as I wanted, with ridiculous red tape rules. The union actively depressed my earning potential.
That's after growing up in terrible schools with incompetent and abusive teachers who were never admonished or fired because of union protection (side note: teacher's unions regularly protect sexual predators).
For the most part most fast food restaurants do not have any unions.
You want to look at a good example of a union look at the one for Autoworkers. My friend's dad growing up was in a good factory job, no college. He was earning >$22/hour, plus a pension, plus decent time off for vacations and things and the mom could be a stay-at-home mom.
Even on a programmer's salary, my wife and I still barely make our bills today. Rent's skyrocketed, cost of living has skyrocketed, and you need not look any further than the fact that nearly ever CEO (read: Billionaire) almost unamously has the goal to keep you, me, and everybody they know out of a Union.
Unions are not socialism. There is nothing bad about unions, some are better than others taken together all are better than none.
If that’s how you conduct yourself I’m not surprised you can’t find a good job.
But I suspect a union for programmers would look more like the Actors union or screenwriters union in Hollywood. They would negotiate minimum rates and benefits, but top performers would still be able to get significantly more. The union just sets the minimums.
Tech is known for shooting the moon, but if we can stand up opinionated examples of "minimum viable bargains", maybe that would help everyone grasp what's being proposed, and contrast the MVB with their local union's offerings.
So it would need to be similar. A single programmers union that sets minimums, where union members won't work for companies that don't follow the union rules.
So like in Hollywood a tiny production will not follow union rules but are limited to using up-and-coming actors who aren't in the union. Startups would be similar -- they could hire up-and-comers, or agree to follow the union rules, one of which is not hiring anyone not in the union.
Maybe that seems obvious written out, but it wasn’t to me at first. I felt a deep sense of being a product of my environment in a negative sense. I think what happened was that I began to see holes in my knowledge or understanding of things I thought I knew and it was a little unsettling. These days I just try to stop myself and ask: why do I think that? How far down the chain do I need to go in order to find concrete information?
To some people this is probably very intuitive. And it is for most of us when it comes to matters of science. But what about your opinion of companies, products, or even people? I think we all get into habits of being influenced here - it’s literally in our genes and can be very covert.
I guess in a sense this is like personal epistemology. It’s important to study on a macro scale, but also on a micro scale in individual day to day operations.
Manipulating the public opinion is a tool to make change happen. It isn't inherently good or bad.
Now consider how much of the thinking of the people who believe the opposite is there just because some other big entity wanted them to think like that and spent considerable resources to make it happen.
The one thing you can't outsource is critical thinking. Sorry, you have to do it yourself.
Yet once time for the team to celebrate comes, the door gets shut on them, as they are contingent workers. Showing them the same rewards would possibly make them seem like real employees worthy of praise. Hence, they sit alone in their empty open office, sometimes crying, hearing the cheers of their team in the next office as they slice that cake or watching them leave the office building to go to a wonderful day in the golden gate park.
Don't even get me started on having to hear the people doing identical work to them talk about buying homes in SF etc.
If these people banned together, they might gain some power.
Does this refer to contractors?
Should tell you everything you need to know about your company's HR department's true interests.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_strike
The whole "we're highly paid, ruggedly individualistic engineer" schtick buys into what the companies want. Sure, you may make 400k total comp as a SWE, but what if it were 500k had your employer was not been actively plotting ways to distort the labor market through collusion with competing companies. If activist shareholders understand that they need large blocks of shares to drive change, why wouldn't workers organize into blocks to drive change in their own favor?
https://www.cnet.com/news/apple-google-others-settle-anti-po...
I agree it can make life better for people in the co, just saying unions need to join forces and create syndicates of unions and really bring teeth against the powers of big companies.
I recall my first week as a Best Buy part time tech in 2002, we watched a video on how Unions are bad.
The word you're looking for is "propaganda".
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/02/18/magazine/goog...
I've never been in a union, but my wife is. And I've worked as management with unions in a factory setting. It was fine, actually. The company I worked for that was unionized was the best, most efficient corporation that I've ever seen.
In fact it was a superior there that told me, when I was more anti-union, that "companies get the union they deserve".
I did everything I could to get my wife into a professional career with a union, so that when I die she'll be as safe and protected without me. I never wanted anyone taking advantage of her in her career. The union may sometimes do stupid things, but overall to not have one is an absurd, and small-minded idea.
All that said, unions should also be sector-wide not worksite based. And there probably shouldn't be any government unions- I wouldn't budge on anything though as things are today, without real and significant gains for unions in the private market.
I do believe small business under a certain number of employees should be exempted from unions. Say <10 employees. I know France does this, or something similar to it. Big corps keep out competition too easily, and should be doing more to keep the American middle class around. Their contribution can be unionizing. I also think unions would help the world, while I'm certainly not overpaid myself, my Indian colleagues deserve the same pay I receive. I'd strike for that. They, and my employer, deserve it.
That’s how it works in Germany and it’s much better than the per company unions in the US. Workers also have a seat on the board of directors by law which also helps balancing things a little. The capitalists and CEOs still make plenty of money within that arrangement, companies are competitive on the world market so it seems to work.
The Betriebsrat approves major HR policies, like how long open positions need to be advertised internally before they can be advertised outside the company, or approving non-shift Sunday or night work hours (kind of a pain, but also a protection against abuse), as well as employee data privacy matters, such as whether MS Teams presence status can be visible to people outside of the company.
Their cooperation is also necessary to fire permanent employees for cause after their 6 month trial period is over. This is a mixed blessing - it means that there are some useless people who can drag things out for ages, but also means that a PIP is more than a bum-covering exercise for management.
If you're having an issue, and don't feel like your boss is hearing you, you can go to a Betriebsrat member instead of HR (especially if it's an issue with HR), and there are enough of them that it's likely that you know one of them, or a colleague does.
The rule of thumb I go by is "If the company has an HR department protecting the company’s interests, then the workers should have a union protecting the workers’ interests."
* What changed your mind when you were more anti-union.
* How upper management perceived unions.
* What joining a union means for your spouse.
* Why you would support a union today.
I've only worked in one place that had a union. I couldn't see the benefit. The union seemed to be contributing to collective laziness and complacency. Being motivated to go above and beyond always put me at odds with the union people who would snitch on me for working after hours. Maybe I wouldn't feel so motivated to improve things if more employees were contributing higher than the just bare minimum? This was a union for a US government agency.
>And there probably shouldn't be any government unions
Seems you understand that perspective as well.
What does that say about the companies that don't have a union?
> I did everything I could to get my wife into a professional career with a union, so that when I die she'll be as safe and protected without me.
The safer option is to make sure she has a skillset which is in high demand.
What's the union going to do if her company goes under?
> I also think unions would help the world, while I'm certainly not overpaid myself, my Indian colleagues deserve the same pay I receive. I'd strike for that.
Different places have different costs of living. That's the competitive advantage of people in poor countries. Have you considered that if the company had to pay them the same as they pay you, they might have hired entirely workers who are in the same timezone? Much to the chagrin of the people you thought you were helping.
> Big corps keep out competition too easily, and should be doing more to keep the American middle class around.
Big corps should be broken up. That's the solution there.
I didn't preclude her skills. I just wanted her to have a union, whether skilled labor or otherwise. Having both has her very well positioned. She doesn't need a union, but it certainly has boosted her pay, vacation policy, and treatment. She could easily put a grievance in at work. I cannot, my grievance is to quit.
I don't honestly think my software development skills put me in a better position. Skills are good if you're a basic worker. Helps. But you aren't in some magic land of success, you're just a worker that gets a job easier than the rest.
I have her well positioned. Everything I learned about reality, I passed onto her, before she got into a real career. Skills + union = a pretty nice life, one that everyone honestly deserves if they get out of bed to work in the morning.
Most people seem to think workers should be "skilled", or abused in some way. I think it's the non-contributors that should be punished or treated harshly. Workers should get all the good things. I don't ask that they build up a skillset.
Competent, capable, hardworking people often fail to see the bigger picture, and dismiss others that aren't like them. If you have all 3 of those traits, which are both from your discipline and genetic predisposition, the world looks like a meritocracy, and it isn't.
In that case, so is this very conversation, the fact that we're both on this website, and even the fact that we are both interested in tech.
If it's simply a roll of the dice, then nearly all aspects to existence are pointless, there's no point in trying to think for oneself, etc. Perhaps this is what you truly intend to convey, but until you explicitly state this, this is an incoherent perspective.
Having conversations on a website is a choice. Interest in tech is probably a blend of luck and choice (hard to be interested in something you're never exposed to, and hard to sustain interest in an environment where people consistently discourage it; people ending up in those situations are the "roll of the dice" the author is referring to).
In short, justifying a lack of empathy with "they made their choices" underestimates the amount people do not choose their circumstances in life.
I'm not saying everything is pointless at all. I've earned every one of the few pennies I have the hard way, believe me. I have a non-stop work history going back to when I was 11 years old, grinding down spot welding tips on a lathe to buy my own video games and toys. My efforts mattered. These experiences and my self-discipline built my character and who I am today.
There's some luck involved though. Whether it's your genetic makeup, how you were or were not groomed by your family, and simple right place, right time. To dismiss everyone as "failures in the meritocracy" is short sighted.
For example: John Carmack is a very successful programmer. I'd bet there's many here just as hard working, and as intelligent. He did the right thing, when he was at the right place, at the right time. That's all that separates Carmack from swaths, or multitudes of programmers on HN.
Where did you store the lathe at night? Where did you plug it in? And how did you get the electricity to that outlet, was there an account in your name with the power company as an 11 year old?
I'm not the GP but you're being obtuse and counterproductive. The idea that no one does anything completely on their own is not particularly revelatory or insightful. It comes off as dismissive more than anything else.
That's the thing- I'm 50/50 on this issue. I believe there's inherent advantages that people have, and it's also about discipline and will.
Some people will never grasp opportunity when it comes knocking. That's why many that do grasp (and are lucky to have) opportunity are often pretty upset when others try to dismiss their success. I get that. It's true too. Both can be true at the same time, some are fortunate by no effort of their own, and some are unambitious. It's a Venn diagram of conditions.
But in 2022, everyone wants to be the victim. I don't believe in victimhood as a lifestyle. I firmly believe that "no one has more control over your life, than you".
> That's all that separates Carmack from swaths, or multitudes of programmers on HN.
I am astounded by HN's hatred for the extraordinary every day I remain on this putrid hellhole of a site.
Notice how all of those variables are outside the individual's control. I never chose to be born in the shithole that is Greece that was ravaged by the debt crisis, yet it affected me as an individual significantly. Sure I may have had the ability to fight my way through, but I know many who didn't. Furthermore, Bill Gates and Bill Joy never chose to be born into the year they were born just as computers were taking off, they just did. And they used their smarts to make billions.
The sad truth still remains that the strongest predictor of an individual's success is their economic and family background. No one has proven otherwise.
Core R&D, hardware, B2B services, networking companies, etc. and then also the factor of geographic places that aren't considered "sexy" in the HN crowd revert to the mean for that geographic area in regards to the mix of political leanings.
I disagree it's about hard work, but about ego about how society deserves to value them. That correlates only really under the age of 35 before their first health scare when suddenly society owes something to them that they never previously wanted to feed a cent into.
At universities though, the libertarians had actually read The Road to Serfdom and could debate with you. Today’s libertarianism is google search deep, just another veneer over tha antipathies of our time.
People with terminal diseases also usually become religious. Perhaps atheists are faking it too.
> the world looks like a meritocracy, and it isn't.
Tomorrow an asteroid may, very unluckily, fall and strike me so as to kill me. It would not be due to my merits or lack thereof.
Yet if you want to get ahead, you should generally work hard and do the right things while being sufficiently savvy.
Abstract thinking pretty much makes it so that you can reason about your emotions, so you're not subject to that of others.
That's interesting. I wouldn't suspect that to be the case, but perhaps I'd need to think about that more. I would guess that while abstract thinking may not have much of a relationship with empathy directly, it may be a pattern of thinking that benefits highly emotional individuals in that if they are capable of empathy then being able to make connections between disparate concepts can help them intuit where someone else's emotions are coming from, hence helping them be better empathizers. Of course that doesn't mean abstract thinking creates empathy, but perhaps it helps existing empathy.
It is surprising to me since I'm not from US. Don't tech workers at Google have good health and life insurance for such cases?
I lean libertarian because I see all of the problems that come from federal level programs trapping us into a status quo that we are mostly powerless to change. You want to change the way that healthcare or education works...let's just say in your county of residence. It's virtually impossible, not because we lack smart people with better solutions but because the money for healthcare and education is already tied up.
Wealthy people can afford private schools or alternative approaches to healthcare if they want. The rest of the population is stuck with what they are given, whether they want it or not.
I don't know anyone who is happy with the state of public schools in the United States: teachers, students or parents. We're all mostly powerless to change it though.
It's not a lack of humility that creates these views, it's empathy for people who are stuck and want things to be better. I lean libertarian because I see the effects that are making it harder to improve all of our lives.
I simply want to reduce the barriers between a person having an idea of how to do things better and trying that out with other people who agree with them. If it works, it will be imitated and improved upon. If it doesn't, it will be discarded. This type of experimentation naturally leads to constant improvement.
People need freedom to make their own choices without having to ask for permission.
Many libertarians are above average in intelligence, in part because it's a less mainstream viewpoint, but I don't think it follows that intelligent people tend to be libertarian. I could be wrong about that, but I've met enough intelligent people whom are the opposite of libertarian that if there is any relationship between intelligence and libertarianism that it's probably small.
> Competent, capable, hardworking people often fail to see the bigger picture, and dismiss others that aren't like them.
It's interesting that you say that. I can't say that you're wrong if that's a result of your experience. On the contrary, I've found that those who are competent, as you say, and have their heads down in hard work a lot, are as liable to viewing the world as being anti-meritocratic. Though I wouldn't go as far as to say whether the world is strictly meritocratic or anti-meritocratic, I think there's more of a relationship between having such black and white viewpoints and having one's head down in work for so many hours that little time is left to read about different facts and opinions.
My best example is a good friend of mine who is also above average intelligence, but works in a field outside of tech where he is, in contrast to me, much more of a slave to the office, hence he spends a great deal of time staring at one subject and not interacting much with information outside his field of view. His perspectives are often very black and white, and he would view the world as being entirely anti-meritocratic. Being an openly communist type, I could make some educated guesses about why that is, but I'll leave my opinion on that vague for now. When we have discussions about any number of things, including meritocracy, it's pretty obvious to me that he holds these black and white opinions because he's rather oblivious to the various counterarguments and experiences of others outside of his narrow field of study. Yet he is at least 120 IQ.
I just realized I indirectly insulted your view on meritocracy. I'm not really here to debate that, and your conclusion may be entirely valid. (and I would say not completely unjustified)
Yes, it's one anecdotal example, but that's a repeated observation of mine. Besides, pigeon holing people into single categories is a flaw of its own.
Not even if it's true?
I can imagine someone presenting this as an argument for being open-minded, and that might make sense. But in every instance I've seen, including this one, it was deployed as an argument that some specific belief should be disregarded because the people who hold it have been tricked. That kind of selective skepticism doesn't make sense.
Is it, though? We've got here an article about a multibillion dollar company using its money and influence to peddle a view that's beneficial to them and trying very hard to make it look like it's not actually coming from them. This is absolutely not always the case. This is more than just run of the mill people being open to changing their minds then, is it?
>in every instance I've seen, including this one, it was deployed as an argument that some specific belief should be disregarded
I think you've misread the post above, because at no point in that comment was it suggested that said belief should be disregarded.
Every multibillion dollar organization I'm familiar with has a PR team who's responsible for shaping news coverage in ways that benefit the company. We just don't normally think about it this way. Nobody looks at the coordinated release of reviews about a week before video game launches and says "aha, Nintendo has dishonestly manipulated the media once again".
I get the point you're making that this seems like an individually unfalsifiable proposition. Fair point. It would require massive amounts of data to show the arc of people's beliefs and I'm not certain it's a tractable problem.
That said, I already believe that many things I care about I only care about because they are issues that society (or rather members/organizations there within) dedicated time to considering. I think that discourse is inherently limited because attention span and time are limited and, as an extension, I believe that there are issues that most people/all people never think about but by metrics that we deem relative importance we'd find worth major consideration. I would give an example but you can understand the difficulty of describing something no one finds important that is important.
By extension of the above, I believe that organizations, through concerted effort, are able to crowd out the marketplace of ideas (either at societal level or at organization level) with issues that they deem less threatening to their interests, so long as they have hooks that draw attention. I don't think this idea is particularly unbelievable because we can see similar concepts outlined by even the government in the forms of documents suggesting how to disrupt organizations [1]. I think that this idea also dove tails quite clearly with the concept of propaganda and mass media influence like that discussed by Chomsky.
I would argue that there are many arguments that are valid (and sometimes valid from both sides) but at a societal level not productive. I think the American issue of abortion is a great example of this: would you agree that in 70 years of debating the issue, we as a society have made the implicit choice to not debate other issues? Not that we discuss nothing els, but certainly we'd have filled that time with some other issues if there had been a conclusive resolution on the issue. There is no resolution to the debate which is what makes it such an effective tool for politicians to rouse support, so why would they seek a longstanding resolution instead of this continue back and forth of the judiciary as members die and are added? I am happy to continue this conversation but I've rambled enough now and must work.
See also: public sector unions.
No organization is inherently good. Unions can be led by bad actors, and that doesn't diminish their overall value. They provide employees with a countervailing force to use against employers who would otherwise be mostly free to squeeze them for every penny, whether via cut wages, unpaid overtime, etc.
Which is entirely the point!
Why should we trust a large monopoly like Google to have workers' best interests at heart when there's no counter-balancing force with the same power (be it a union, or trust-busting arm of the federal government)?
Everyone forgets that Google and Apple already colluded to suppress wages! https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2015/01/16/37...
It's not a situation like Boeing where there's a very limited number of other places that you can take your skills.
That is absolutely going to have a massive systematic effect on compensation.
The "take it or leave it" attitude strongly insinuates that corporations should be allowed dictatorial control over the manner in which work is completed. There are too many examples to point to which demonstrate the b.s. in this line of thinking.
I may be reading too much into what you wrote, but I never understand the libertarian need to reject government and union control but embrace everything corporate. It's plain weird.
The answer is that we shouldn't, but the latter solution is much better than the former.
I will no longer work for places where unions negotiate. I prefer the clear incentives of an employer over the unclear incentives of union negotiators. You never know when they're honestly standing side-by-side with you or when they're just there to pick your pockets.
This probably says as much about the wider society that you live in as it does about the unions.
This society is not a gerontocracy either. There's quite a few 30-somethings in the government.
If the views expressed regularly on HN are really a window into how the typical Googler thinks then presumably Google should be shutting down its ad networks and personal data tracking services very soon...
what unions really are often is something that primarily serves a select few members of the union, which is worse than not having a union at all.
Where do you read this? It seems to me that every thread about unions is filled with former union members that dislike unions but don't back up their dislike with any information.
I was part of Teamsters Canada for 10 years. I made $25/hr where similar positions at other companies were for $10-$12/hr. Overtime I worked was paid, always, that's literally never happened in software. If we were understaffed, management had to call in extra employees from a staffing firm to bring us to a minimum headcount, no working understaffed. We had guaranteed, mandatory to take, paid time off. When the managers were being idiots, we could tell them such without fear of being fired instantly, the union would back us when the managers were being idiots. Retirement benefits.
That's not to say it was all good though. The union never listened to our shops complaints. They didn't step in for months when things were terribly mismanaged. There was visible grifting by the leadership of the union. They could have done a better job.
That said, without the union, I would have made maybe 50% of the money I did make, the conditions would have been worse, and the chances of fixing things in the workplace would have been reduced.
No question unions led to many improvements historically in the lives of American workers, but they're also responsible for a lot of problems (including causing many businesses to close entirely). In many cases their tactics have been questionable.
Sometimes those demands lead to a lot of long term side effects for all of us too. Want to know why your healthcare goes through your employer? Unions. Maybe you see that as a good thing? Maybe not? But unions are the reason it's there.
In a software industry that's seen dramatic increases in demand and compensation, it's also questionable why people would even see a need? What is supposed to be the big benefit in this field that pays well, offers great flexibility in hours and location, cushy benefits and numerous opportunities for personal development?
Exactly. I really can't name one reason, besides in a hypothetical scenario where an entire tech firm was made up of employees who are married with kids and aren't being paid enough such that 2 to 4 months of unemployment would be a big deal. But even in that case, I have a hard time seeing that being a huge problem because it just seems so rare that anyone gets let go unless the company is in serious trouble.
Plus in tech so many of us have the skills to be our own employer if need be. That's not to say it's always an alternative to employment, but that's an opportunity there for many of us that doesn't exist in most other fields.
A particular company would have to have serious problems and its employees would need to lack leverage for a union to be conceptually necessary in tech, at least in the United States. I can't speak for the rest of the world.
I'm a single guy who's a senior software engineer with no one depending on him, and I've never had difficulty finding a job (quite the contrary), hence the benefit of being unionized doesn't outweigh the negatives. If an employer mistreats me, then I leave. It's that simple.
And yes, Poindexter J. Smartypants, not everyone has it "as good" as I. For some, unionization might be a real benefit, especially if they are working a job that is physically taxing and where the employer has more leverage. I am not disputing this fact.
In much of tech, however, especially if you are at all adjacent to Big Tech, the employee has more leverage over the employer than in many other fields. Many software engineers are in a similar position to mine, and even the ones who aren't likely need the employer much less than the employer needs the employee.
As much as I've heard great things about being a Google employee, I don't think Google would be concerned about unionization if they were as terrific as is often claimed. Perhaps you don't have to work for Google if they suck. The solution to working somewhere crummy, if the negotiation stage fails, is to leave. Even if you're the worst engineer who ever lived, you'll find another job, and probably a better one.
I went off on a bit of a tangent there, but I don't think the anti-union perspective is as simple as to be explained by corporate propaganda or the HN bubble. If someone tried to sell unionization to me in my position as a software engineer, it would only come off as an added cost with for nothing I would personally be interested in benefiting from, and I don't believe I'm an oddball in that regard.
> the employee has more leverage over the employer than in many other fields
Housing deductions, childcare costs, food, travel, etc are all heavily subsidized by the company making it near impossible to leave without moving out of the Bay Area. Housing benefits alone can be an enormous deterrent because if you quit Google, your rent can jump up 50% easily.
If such rates exist, they are uncommon or not often talked about.
There may be better proof out there, in which case you ought to provide it. But until I see something better, I am very skeptical.
This doesn't follow.
In general, unions are bad for companies. That isn't the same thing as saying that they're good for employees. If they do nothing useful and increase overhead, they're bad for both.
Unions also have structural incentives to impose things like seniority rules, because existing employees have a vote in the union and future employees don't, so they vote for things that benefit one at the expense of the other. But that can interfere with the company's ability to attract new talent, which is bad for everybody.
To take my argument to its logical extreme, let's imagine the real world probability that an asteroid may hit BigCo HQ and completely destroy its main data center and most of its key staff, killing the business both figuratively and physically; while that possibility is extremely remote, it's still a non-zero probability. Is it a good use of time for BigCo's execs to come up with a plan to lobby the government to build a giant laser to obliterate incoming asteroids? Would any individual bother? Probably not, because a more likely an immediate threat to BigCo is competition from other BigCos and even SmallCos, government regulation and so forth.
In comparison, if a particular company or industry happened to have such a culture where everyone was generally benevolent, everyone was making lots of money hand over fist, and the work-life balance was optimal, then it really doesn't make sense for big wigs to seriously consider dealing with the possibility of employees taking collective action to gain leverage because the will among individual employees may not exist. Maybe it'd manifest as a topic during a meeting between big wigs only to be shrugged off and replaced by the next agenda item.
On the other hand, if BigCo realized that something is creating a high probability that its employees will unionize, which is adversarial to BigCo, but the thing that is generating said will to unionize is too ingrained and there's no incentive for leadership to change it, the path of least resistance may be to develop techniques to persuade employees not to take action that may be in their own favor.
Indeed, unions can be bad for both employers and employees. That doesn't really matter, though, because either enough employees are going to believe they will benefit from a union or not, despite whether that becomes effectively true, and businesses know that unions are bad news for them; the business also couldn't care less whether a union is bad for their employees unless that hurts productivity by-proxy, as is the case with your example with talent attraction.
All that rambling is to say that I believe that all the individual pros and cons of unions can be presented and weighed, but ultimately the primary driver that creates the will to unionize comes from just how disgruntled or alienated employees feel. If employees don't feel alienation, if they feel they are treated with respect, they like the work they are doing, they are paid fairly, and can go home without stress at the end of the day, then what's the incentive to unionize? So that I can give yet another boss a slice of my paycheck that they didn't earn? Rather than think about all that, I'd rather just hit the gym after work, go home and not harbor that stress.
This is why I make presumptions about life as a Googler in a general sense. If being a Googler is the kind of career apex it at least once was seen as, it seems odd that those who have "made it" would think they need to spend time and money on unionizing. And why would Google's solution be so tactical? My guess is that there are reasons why Googlers in particular would want to unionize, that Google knows this, and have decided that the best way to address the issue is to weaponize psychology. Otherwise, it wouldn't be such a secret. Hell, they actually hired a company that specializes in this.
I could be way off base because I've never worked for Google, and having worked for Apple I'd presume that there are divisions of Google that operate significantly different from the others. Nevertheless, I still think it's reasonable to see a relationship between the employee experience and whether unionization is a real threat to a business.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Some commentator once noted that those elite with the highest levels of wealth (say top 1%) don't disbelieve Marx's analysis of the world and capital distribution. They understand it quite well, they're just on the opposite side of the field from the proles and they leverage that analysis to keep it that way. The commentator continued that when you think about it this way, business papers and similar sources of info are actually quite useful for a Marxian lens. Those with capital know that capital is biggest driving force, so that's of course what they're going to focus on.
Top 1% global income is about $60,000 a year. Many Americans are above this, yet I doubt that they feel strongly about what you mentioned.
Are you sure? All of the big tech companies are entering one of the most union-entrenched industries in the US: media.
If the management wanted to really confuse the line workers, they would celebrate the union with some reverse reverse psychology.
An example of this is when they published a whole story about a guy who became radicalized from YouTube... and then became unradicalized a few months later without doing anything radical. But someone could have stayed radicalized so Google needs to censor YouTube and hand back authority to the fact checkers and trusted news, which conveniently happens to be... The New York Times.
Another example would be when The New York Times wrote a whole shock article about the shocking nature of dark patterns in technology and the irresponsibility and corruption of Big Tech for using them. Except that their own unsubscribe system is loaded with dark patterns that are even worse.
Do I think that YouTube isn't partially responsible? Of course they have some responsibility, but The New York Times and other news sources are capitalizing on the situation for their own interests.
Compared to that it probably does feel hostile. But it's just them being part of the general and widespread shift of more skepticism towards tech's promises and more awareness of its downsides.
Almost all brand surveys will have most of the top 5 be the tech companies you know and which HN loves to hate. That's not trending downward. It's trending upward.
The upward trend indicates that it isn't "riding on" but simply being considered good because they are.
The author of the article was super mad, lambasting tech companies left and right for dark patterns, called it a bunch of different synonyms of immoral, etc.
His own paper, The New York Times, has a dark pattern system so pervasive that people here, on Hacker News, had to tell their bank to block payments because they couldn't get to the end of it. I've seen this story repeatedly here.
There's no way that didn't come up during the author's research. The author chose to completely ignore that and publish anyway. And The New York Times chose to make a huge deal out of it. What does that say about their ethics?
Because the author (who does not control how NYT subscriptions work) does mention that in the story:
> About 30 sites made it easy to sign up for services but particularly hard to cancel, requiring phone calls or other procedures. The Times requires people to talk with a representative online or by phone to cancel subscriptions, but the researchers did not study it or other publishing sites.
And highlighted it on her social media promotion of her work: https://twitter.com/jenvalentino/status/1143531833147240449?...
However, if I were still nitpicky, I would say that her little mention leaves out a ton about what the unsubscribe experience is like.
For example, she doesn't mention that The New York Times employs very few chat agents, so that waiting to cancel takes forever even on weekdays. Or that when you get through the chat, they will offer you a discount, and if you decline they'll give you another discount, and you have to decline that one too. Same understaffing and manipulation for phone calls also applies.
Or that The New York Times has different rules for California because of the law, and allows 24/7 calling and cancelling there, whereas for the rest of the US it's only standard business hours.
And so on...
I also subscribed (and still do) to the WSJ who are much better about keeping the looniness to the OpEds. They don't exclusively keep it to the OpEds, but they mostly do.
Unionized workers vs Ionized workers is an eternally charged discussion. It's the vim v emacs of the world. There's very little point rehashing things but for some reason, the outrage and hunger takes us and we must participate. The best thing to do is to not play.
It looks like this is the story: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/30/opinion/dark-pattern-inte...
Which I found really well done. In fact I think it shows how one part of the company can police the other by putting up articles like this.
Your comment is like saying only Olympic level athletes can write articles on exercising.
And if I wanted to run the story anyway, I would at least mention that my own newspaper is guilty of the same thing for full disclosure.
I actually think it is unethical to suppress news like this, but fine, let's grant it for argument's sake.
> And if I wanted to run the story anyway, I would at least mention that my own newspaper is guilty of the same thing for full disclosure.
Fine, let's see what the article says:
> The Times requires people to talk with a representative online or by phone to cancel subscriptions, but the researchers did not study it or other publishing sites.
Okay, the paper being discussed didn't discuss the NYT, but the NYT journo decided to bring it up. We're good then.
Meanwhile, the Times did take a huge beating in the 2000s during the transition from print to digital and with the collapse of classified advertising. But today they're up 1000% from their 2009 low and flirting with historic highs. They're a category-defining digital media company with millions of digital-only subscribers that's on a tear buying up smaller players. https://www.google.com/finance/quote/NYT:NYSE?sa=X&ved=2ahUK...
I believe the news should have a vendetta against anyone and anything that has outsized influence and control in society.
I don't think the NYT has the domain experience or insight to present the most damning critiques of big tech. I think that even when they get a chance, they'll prefer hot button topics over than the meatier but less sexy lines of criticism. I often think their motivations for articles are suspect.
However, even with all that said, media orgs like theirs are still the closest thing we have to a check on the control soulless monsters of industry have over our lives.
so, should news have a vendetta against news? because one thing i've seen over the past 6 years is how much influence media has on the population.
They can do both at the same time though?
You could call it informing people just as much as "convincing" them.
That's slang for swallowing propaganda and committing suicide.
But a small part of me wants Google to end up with a nice, fat union. It may teach management that they should be careful with what kind of (disengenuous) messaging they put forth.
Instead, treat the relationship as adversarial and come ready for battle every day against the legal structure designed to exploit you for the benefit of distant shareholders.
There is no shame in fighting for yourself. You are worth it.
Because I see a whole lot happier employees at Tesla than I do at General Motors.
I'm not saying this is an all-or-nothing thing. I'd join a union if I was working for a certain type of employer (company town, federal government, etc) but when it comes to technology companies, I got to say it's pretty good here.
I guess, it could be awful at Tesla, but maybe GM is even worse?
I know GM had a REALLY bad reputation in the days of the NUMMI plant.
Almost anybody can complain about their job, but in this industry, in this job market right now - anyone staying is staying because the pluses outweigh the minuses.
are you just saying that or have you spoken to a number of employees of both companies? It's kind of interesting to me because I would have assumed the opposite to be the case.
GM: 9k reviews, 4.0 stars
GM is also higher rated on most metrics in the "Work Happiness" survey
At the moment yeah in some areas but I wouldn't say that 12 years or ago, and maybe not 12 years from now
But I seem to recall a time (up until perhaps 15 years ago) when Google would not have been expected to engage in such blatantly Machiavellian tactics as placing fake op-eds.
Nowadays though, I don't put anything past Google.
A lot of large companies clearly do look at unions as something that forces them to pay more compensation for less work, which they'd have to justify to shareholders and the board. Even if the board would be cool with it, and they could make it fly with shareholders, leadership bonuses and stock grants are tied to performance. I really don't see where this is an incorrect statement to make.
0. https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/8146/are-u-s-co...
They may not have a legal duty to maximise profits, but investors will expect them to do so - and negative reactions in the stock price would be expected if they were to support unionisation within their business, as it would (rightly or wrongly) be expected to reduce profits going forward.
Boards don't like unhappy shareholders.
I'm not defending an anti-union stance - I'm simply saying that company leads will most certainly see it as a threat to their job if they are unable to increase profits or keep margins fat in perpetuity.
The highlighted explanation in your link supports this assertion.
This reads to me like characatures used to construct a straw person argument. Your inevitability decoration is denied by observable fact.
EDIT: Hyperbole here, and it was lost on some. Despite unions in germany, German companies are exploiting their workers compared to lucrative salaries that non union US software engineers are enjoying. The gap beteween the lifestyle of a german software engineer and a US one is quite large.
All helps keep me sane, anyway.
Perhaps a German citizen living in Germany with young children that is supported by local family; "only" speaks German, Afrikaans, and Chinese; and is independently wealthy but enjoys writing software might disagree.
I know that since I dramatically changed my contexts the way I look at roles changed dramatically.
anyways, IMHO, the beginnings of the end were: * when google search first landed in china * the initial few mass hiring events (2005-2008) * when they cancelled "social TGIFs" (TGIFs that your non-google friends could attend). i think this was 2008?
the whole social debacle was just evidence that google had already lost that fight years previously...
Which one is often a function of the people running it at the highest levels. Very often companies are founded by good people with good intents, who end up leaving for one reason or another, and are taken over by people with a different set of values.
I don't know enough about the internal workings of Google to say that's the case here. But from what I've read on HN, it does appear that Google's morals changed dramatically when its founders lost control of and influence in the company.
Are there any large companies, that stayed good?
Yes. However, the complication is that different people have differing ideas of what constitutes "good."
The billion-dollar healthcare company I work for does stupid things sometimes, but overall I still quantify it as "good" because I see that the number of good things it does outnumbers the number of "bad" things it does by about 10,000:1. But if you're that one person, then you might consider it a "bad" company because you don't see the other 10,000 people who ended up with good things happening.
But obviously organizations change. Much of Google's infrastructure now exists and nobody needs to be convinced to build it. Google/Alphabet also has new corporate leadership that is more beholden to the company's shareholders. Of course, one could point out that this was inevitable from the beginning: corporations can temporarily behave in "moral" ways, but (absent outside pressure) they won't necessarily stay that way.
To think it is just Google CEO/Founders/Executives who forced this "Evil" stuff would be hilarious.
Any ideals that survived going public will slowly be ground out by repeated exposure to management consultants from McKinsey and the hordes of MBAs attracted to the smell of ibanker excitement.
You can't go public, or become part of a public firm, and not become more like the rest of the big players.
Any proposed solution is going to have to explain how to change the very strong financial incentives that lead to people doing the same things over and over.
Now, there are different people, with varying morals. When they advance to major positions in a company, they make various decisions. Unfortunately, our culture rewards the actions and attitude of people like Gates who deliberately made many grey-area decisions that we might call "egoistic" or just plain "evil" if they were aimed at individuals, or like Bezos, who treats human beings in his warehouses like cattle. So I'm sorry, we are not the ones being cynical here.
The third stage seems to be surprisingly rare, as most people either get stuck in stage 1, existing in a kind of shared delusion that all things are fine, despite the evidence that some aren't, or in stage 2, that all things are falling apart, despite evidence that some aren't.
Stage 3 reconciles the previous stages, first by zooming out and seeing how transient and precious life is, civilization is, and how in this perspective, power is itself rather silly. There have been great kingdoms, entire societies, that have arisen and died, even in our brief recorded history. Lowering the stakes like this lets us relax and remember: nothing is forever. No law lasts forever, almost everything we try is an experiment, and it may fail. Armed with a profound knowledge of the absurdity of our large-scale situation, now we can zoom in and do our judging, knowing properly how ignorant we are, how ignorant the actors are, the abuser and victim alike. And we can begin to see opportunities for change. Small scale stuff, firing that abusive person, or even lightweight activism where you change something about your behavior to change things, if only a little. You are not going to have the grand-slam insight that fixes everything, or anything. Such an insight doesn't exist - or maybe it can, but it cannot be transmitted without great care, which presupposes a society that supports transmitting delicate ideas, which is already a society that is functioning pretty well.
Essentially your comment is stage 3, because you remind the reader of the essential mutability of the system, and zoom out and show how its changed, and that there is every possibility of changing back to an earlier state where antitrust was actively enforced (read: successful antitrust enforcement gave political juice). If I could wish a thing into existence, it would be to engender a feeling of lightness to political discussion that comes from realizing this is all an experiment, nothing is written in stone, and we should feel free to try new things, knowing that they might not work, that real lives will be harmed when those experiments fail, but we also get good data about it for future decisions, so it comes out in the wash.
I'm not an anti-capitalist, and I don't expect such a government to just fall into my lap without a Herculean effort on the part of somebody, but I don't see any point in sugarcoating the current state of affairs. Corporations and other wealthy interests aren't just a symptom of our current malaise—they're a direct contributor to it.
Is it shady to communicate to employees the company's view that unions aren't good? Ie, is it that much different from the standard company public statement sayijng something like "we do not think unions are in the best interests of either the employees or the company"?
This is a sincere question, as I'm not that versed in labor law and AFAIK it may even skirt legal lines to do this.
The large companies I have worked for — some unionized, some not — took great pains to be very neutral on the subject of unions.
I suspect it has a lot to do with labor law. IANAL, but from what I read in the newspaper, there are certain circumstances where a company taking an anti-union stance is illegal.
> come ready for battle every day
On one hand, yes, it’s important to remember that you are only an employee at a company and to not get too doe-eyed about it. On the other hand, we shouldn’t have to come ready to fight misinformation from our own employer. Also, most people do find meaning and purpose from working, if they are working in the right career for them. It is an oversimplification to say the relationship between employer and employee is adversarial.
Accepting that bad people exist and are bad and that their badness needs to be fought against, does not make the bad people somehow less-responsible for the badness.
But here's the thing: They're all (95+%) fucking terrible. No exaggeration, no drama; they're literally evil and for real killing us and the planet.
Rs and Ds, judges and lawyers, Banks, Media Energy, Pharma, Guns, and Big Tech - all of them.
People might think this comment isn't helpful - because they don't see the above as scum. But they are.
The one problem is that people use this "everyone is terrible" argument to justify selfish libertarianism. "All politicians are bad anyway, so I voted for the one that appeals to my personal beliefs." This seems to be more of a "right-wing" and/or "libertarian" phenomenon, to the point where it seems to be used as a dogwhistle in some circles. So I'm hesitant to promote it.
I don't know how they do it, but I sure hope we can grow more of them somehow.
Exploit you with industry leading pay and perks?
Unions are designed to balance out monopolistic / low pay / highly geographical companies like large auto manufacturers or airlines. There is so much competitive hiring in tech, it’s one of the easiest careers to switch companies if you don’t like who you work for.
You’re not “free” under a union either, you’re just swapping one boss for another. Except now your new boss wants a cut of your paycheck, for you to be a nameless cog in the system who has to put in time instead of effort and for you to be willing to go without pay for a period of time if they tell you to, while putting up with the same (or worse) bullying and intimidation tactics if you disagree.
Unions are great in some context, but for white collar careers with competitive pay and hiring practices in place, I can’t see it working out well, especially now that you can work remotely at most companies and literally choose any modern, remote-friendly tech company / startup within a few time zones of you.
They'll work for a situation where everyone gets that, and everyone is treated the same. That's the whole point.
Goodbye work flexibility for your entire company.
Or if your position requires after hours work, it’ll ensure you are fairly compensated.
Goodbye ability for upper management to demand unpaid overtime or fire people for violating unspoken “agreements.”
(Obviously being union doesn’t force everyone into the same position description.)
You’ll be free to choose non-union jobs, it’s just there will now be an option for a “business hours only” workplace where there’s none now.
From my experience, this sounds awful. I have a person on my team currently that does nothing and brings down team morale and it’s pretty clear that everyone would want them gone. We might even work better because we wouldn’t work under the assumption that we have N people when we really have something like N - 1.
Perhaps unions are better when you don’t depend on your coworkers’ contributions as directly as you do in tech. e.g. teachers.
But even that’s not true in my experience - under the union there were still performance reviews where you had to advocate for yourself a little bit. It just all had to go through official channels.
Is your workplace unionized?
Why is that? There are many reasons; self-selection for promotion was noted as one reason at the time. Managers need to encourage employees to go through the promotion process, but managers don't do this consistently. The data shows that the result of this is that there is a gender gap in pay, and that doesn't feel very good. Some system other than individual managers encouraging people to go up for promotion is needed; a union looking out for that is one solution.
I don't know how it would work, I'm not really up to speed on how to organize a union or anything, but issues like that is where the core of the support comes from. (The article also mentions binding arbitration clauses being another sticky bit.)
Honestly, I really can't see this anti-union rhetoric as anything but being terribly naive.
For further evidence of bad behavior that you can't avoid by changing jobs (because under this scheme you wouldn't be hired!). https://www.cnet.com/news/apple-google-others-settle-anti-po...
It's also possible for a union to be bad for the company AND employees at the same time, right? Just because actor A dislikes something does not imply it must be good for actor B.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-requires-s...
Probably staying competitive vs. companies that don't have unions.
> I find it far-fetched for example (and I know you're not saying this and hopefully would not say it) that Google was looking out for the employees' best interests by surveilling/misinforming them and subverting their efforts
Correct, I wasn't saying that.
> Put it to a vote! The people who don't want a union can vote no!
OK, but at some point it becomes disruptive if you're continually holding votes on your entire company's employment structure. These are massive changes that would require to employee contracts, accounting, employee handbooks, handling grandfathered or expiring benefits, etc. It's hard to embark on innovation if you're under threat of having to overhaul your internal structure and a possible giant shock to your estimated expenses.
Directors Guild of America says hello!
1. On-call and off-hours expectations
2. Return to Office rules
3. Whether and how pay is based on where you live
You can also imagine it pursuing things that are much more contentious and annoying.
The question to me isn't about whether unions are good or bad, but making sure you its members know and agree on the organization's purpose and purview.
It seems like you're implying that this is absurd or impossible, but...it's not, right? Surely whether my employer is exploiting my labor has very little to do with my compensation relative to similar jobs.
And if there was any doubt, this action by Google — in and of itself — should convince everyone (outside of Google management) that unions would be a good thing.
Imagine this scenario: If as OP stated employees treat their employer as an adversary, it's a reasonable outcome where adversarial employees demand more than a sustainable company would be willing / able to give. You cannot trust employees to demand a reasonable amount any more than you can trust companies to offer a reasonable amount. Both sides want to maximize their gains. If a collective group of employees have leverage over their employer (through strike threats, mass resignation threats, etc.), it's a perfectly expected outcome for them to squeeze the last ounces of profitability out of a company before it fails, then jump ship to the companies that replace it, especially for non-geographically dependent tech companies.
Just as if the company had maximum leverage and no minimum wage / government intervention it would be a perfectly expected outcome for the company to squeeze the the last ounces of concessions out of their employees before replacing them, as we saw throughout most of history.
It's nice to think that morals would intervene and both sides would find a healthy, sustainable balance, but that's the ideal outcome, not the realistic one.
Indeed, it is not an absolute.
But, considering that the power relationship is setup in society to nearly always favor the groups with the capital - the employers, it is close enough to being universally true to be a very usable heuristic.
And yes, I understand that unions in the past have gone too far in extracting concessions, especially in the areas of work rules that impair progress, but I can't say I've ever seen a situation where unions squeeze then bust a company then just hop to a better deal elsewhere. The times I've seen a company fold, the workers wind up pretty much on the street... do you have any examples where they did wind up in a better situation?
There's a reason why new teachers, doing the same job with the same title, make less than half of what teachers with seniority do. There's a reason why many unions use credentialing as a way to restrict the free market and the only way new people can join is through nepotism.
Do unions proivde some benefits? Sure. Certainly the threat of a union can also provide said benefits. But unions, like all centralized power structures, eventually become corrupt and end up doing harm at the cost of protecting a small group.
Many of the actions a union will take will do things that do not just 'enrich' its members. Here in Australia, unions will often use their organisational power to lobby government for things like increased safety standards, fair treatment for workers regarding discrimination or after an injury, maternity leave etc. I dont know if you can call keeping your salary during a a time of hardship 'enrichment'.
Further, in Australia we have something called an enterprise agreement (or an 'award' depending), which all workers whom fill the description of the task automatically fall under, this sets the minimum salaries, expected working hours, penalty rates for holiday work, etc. When the government (usually at the behest of an industry or company) wishes to alter the EA, they must negotiate with the union whom will act on behalf of the workers covered by the EA to argue for their desired changes (or things that shouldn't change). These changes are then applied to everyone who works under that EA, union or not. So, here at least, most workers passively benefit from union activity.
Caveat: Probably not 100% correct with minutia of EA and awards, been a while since I took the class that covered this.
Any corporation joining in when it gets to nontrivial size is...not at all surprising.
Wasn't Google supposed to be a place that only hires the best and brightest?
I think this is far too broad a statement to be useful. I personally know of several cases where a union has helped defend an employee from illegal behaviour by their employer, for example. No doubt the individuals involved could have taken the employer to a tribunal if they were suitably motivated, but having the weight of the union behind them meant the issues were resolved quickly and correctly.
I think there's a point during everyone's career when a union could be useful. Maybe it's not apparently useful to you right now, but we'll all experience hardships at one point or another.
Might feel a bit better, but if you really care, quit!
The Google union aims to stop Google to work on certain projects.
Many don't agree with unions. What should those people do? Make another union?
If people don't want to work on DoD contract, they can transfer to other teams. There are like 1000 teams in Google. Internal transfer is not hard.
1) Collectively getting the better stake of the pie influences other organizations compensation methods/amounts
2) the market is telling employees what to do, meaning that it doesn’t matter that an individual can do far more work for less pay somewhere else - just don’t do those things.
As it stands, all the DoJ was capable of was issuing guidance that acknowledged that crimes were committed that should have led to jail time, and politely asks corporate executives to not commit those crimes again, on pain of another chiding letter.
basically, because the government also wants competition in the market, they can't be the reason why there is no competition after they curb stomp one of the major few competitors in many fields.
there is some degree of truth in this, but it has also been co-opted to prevent any meaningful consequence for people and their organizations, once they are big enough
Companies structurally and intentionally pay the average employee less than that employee generates in value. (If they paid more on average, they'd obviously either decide to never start or would go bankrupt. If they paid people working equal to their contributions on average, they'd show no profit and would have no reserves to cover for employees who are out on paid leaves that society or the employees want companies to cover the costs of.)
The underpayment relative to value delivered is a necessary condition (at least in my opinion, by simple math above). If you want to capture all the net value you create, you should work for yourself. For many (including me), I'd rather trade away some of the upside in exchange for a much lower stress existence.
If I want to work on those projects and don't agree with the union, and 50% of the Union vote the other way, my only choice is also to quit.
I don't agree with the union's direction of forbidding company to work on a perfectly legal project.
If you want the project to be illegal, maybe call your senate instead?
You don't even recognize others' point of view where they think it is perfectly fine.
You straight up imply other people (who voted for politicians) are unethical.
My country has strong unions (industry wide), yet any employee or group of employees who would engage in that sort of activism, unrelated to bettering work conditions or compensation negotiation, for instance trying to dictate their boss who they should or shouldn't do business with purely for political reasons or affiliations, would be deemed insubordinate and would be fired, lawfully.
Hell, in many places they haven't even been paying what they legally are required to: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/sep/10/google-un...
Microsoft used to treat independent contractors similarly to full time employees, except for a few benefits such as participation in their stock benefits. When the IRS ruled that the independent contractors were really employees due to them being treated similarly as full time employees, independent contractors sued Microsoft to get stock benefits as well.
See https://www.reuters.com/article/businesspropicks-us-findlaw-...
Ew.
You want to not traumatize kids? Have proper boarder control and don't tell people if they manage to sprint across the boarder they will get a bunch of free stuff.
Why would I hope for intelligent or even articulate thought from you on this?
Do you have anything less batty and more interesting than "ICE should paternity test families that cross the border" to offer here?
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/apr/24/apple-goo...
The best trick management plays against workers is to convince them that their opponents in the game of capitalism are other workers, not management. Are software engineers over-payed? It's entirely possible, but that isn't justification for their company illegally screwing them any more than Amazon is justified in screwing its warehouse employees.
And as a movement, the message for labor organization would be powerful if Google employees successfully unionized: that even well-compensated employees deserve the benefits of collective bargaining against a corporation that is structurally incentivized to screw them when it can get away with it.
Long term effects of that transfer are rather unpredictable, because there are too many factors in economy.
Think from the point of the Employee:
1- Union Provides rights; but the employee feels that most of the basic rights are either already provided, or if not, should be provided by legislation not by union action now, so better vote in your favorite politician rather than fiddle with a union.
2- Union provide benefits; but employee might feel the benefit provided by stock options supersede any benefit provided by union (stonks over pensions, basically)
3- Union provided job security; but people don't care that now. For themselves, the idea of one long term job with benefits is no longer relevant, better to work a few years, encash stocks and move with a higher signup bonus and a pay increase higher than any company raise. For their fellow employees, you might NOT want to have job stability for the dick working next to you. If they are fired, all the better for your job, your stock not affected by their poor performance.If an entire department needs to be removed because their work is obsolete (say, ICE specific dept being useless in the new EV world for example) you might not want the dead weight.
4- Union provided social benefit; but linked to example above, instead of the dead weight employees being forcefully kept employed by the company, and hindering your work, you would much rather the govt allow you to kick them out, allow you to increase efficiency and raise stock price, and then TAX you... and provide them social security benefit, while they train for new work or whatever. You are still morally satisfied because the social benefit still takes care of them, but they are not hurting your work (and your stock price), so you don't feel irritated by them.
-And many other such benefits in a similar vein.
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TL;DR: employees want the benefits that unions negotiated with companies (job security, health care) to be replaced by govt provided options instead (universal medicare, social security) and they want to be left alone to succeed and earn those stock options.
Basically, Tax me once a year and then leave me alone to work.
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Caveat: I'm not American, (or from any developed country for that matter) This is just my personal understanding from observing habits and social comments and actions of silicon valley types. E&OE.
Wooow. That was at the height of ICE being shown as deeply corrupt and racist child abusers. (They still are, but it hasn't been used as a stick to beat Biden with because 'reasons').
>the NLRB issued a federal complaint against Google for illegally firing and surveilling the four software engineers
Illegal surveillance. By fucking Google. Scary scary shit.
> Kara Silverstein, Google’s human resources director said that she “like[d] the idea” of the op-ed, but that it should be executed so that “there would be no fingerprints and not Google specific.”
So, she knew how uncool/illegal that looks. Schwifty.
Looking at how other outlets have covered this - looking at you, NYT - it's pretty fucking awful that the best coverage is coming from Vice.
> So, she knew how uncool/illegal that looks. Schwifty.
Guess who's currently the "Director of Integrity" at Google. I sure hope it's someone with integrity who would never want their actions hidden.
> Google Had Secret Project to ‘Convince’ Social Media users that everyone convinces Employees ‘That Unions Suck’
Google can settle this by re-employing the organizers and ceasing to retaliate against union organizing work, as they are legally required to do in the US. However, they have decided on a different path.