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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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