12.184B in revenue for 2022 and they are still cutting headcount, another tech company who could not care less about it's employees.
Regardless, you shouldn’t assume that any company’s first priority is to continue employing and paying everyone. A business is a business, and the employees are hired to do a job. The working world makes a lot more sense when you accept that jobs are jobs and not a benevolent source of guaranteed income.
For sure you can treat employees as disposable objects, but this zero trust situation surely will backlash in one way or another.
Labor should aim to do the least work possible for the most compensation and only do what gets by. Labor too is not a benevelot source of resources for a business to leverage, it's a two way street.
Instead I often hear a mixture of inconsistent arguments where after all moral and ethical lip service is exhausted, we fall back to the "business is business and not charity argument." That's fine (and I agree with it) but if we're going to strip away morals and ethical obligations in society from business, we need to do the same for labor and not chastise labor with morals and ethics to prevent double standards.
If we do want labor to follow moral and ethical social obligations that aren't focused on pure self interest at all times, then we should also talk about how businesses should also have some sort of loyalty and societal obligations as well.
We sort of need to pick one option, not pick and choose a mixture that benefits business entities above all else. Not that this specific post makes any such claims.
As someone who has managed a lot of tech teams over the years across multiple companies and including remote teams in different countries, I can confidently say that people already act exactly like this.
> Labor should aim to do the least work possible for the most compensation and only do what gets by. Labor too is not a benevelot source of resources for a business to leverage, it's a two way street.
This is how most people operate, especially in the tech world in recent years. Usually when people go above and beyond, it’s for promotion and advancement opportunities or to build their resume to move to another job.
The thing is, if either side takes these positions too far then the other side is going to want to cut ties. A company doing a 6% layoff into an obvious global downturn isn’t exactly unreasonable. An employee who actively tries to do as little as possible and requires more management oversight than their peers is being unreasonable, though, and will find themselves at the top of the list for layoffs (with good reason).
Neither companies nor employees should be adopting extreme positions. I don’t see Spotify doing anything unreasonable here.
People making the money we make in the tech industry should be living well below their means, saving, and supplanting the tech giants with worker-owned coops and guilds. If all tech workers united into guilds the corps would come begging us for technical contributions, and we would collectively charge up the ass for it — and all make 100% of the profits.
Generally, I think that the strategy will be some combination of technology, coop ownership, and worker insurance.
Technology, for making corporation killers. Making alternative tech stacks that make existing corporate offerings irrelevant and requiring a sort of ransom to keep the licenses non-competitive. This provides nuclear leverage.
Cooperative ownership to align the organizations objectives with individual workers. The profit is distributed in a relatively fair way without these 100x pay differences, in a manner members can all agree with, and planets away from only caring about enriching investors.
Worker insurance where the coop offers healthcare and minimum income guarantees between jobs with corps. When a member is working for a corp, it is expected the corp pays for their insurance etc. If the member leaves the corp, they seamlessly continue to have healthcare etc.
I think the first step to making something like this happen is creating an extremely valuable piece of tech that society cannot do without. That acts as a beacon to attract workers and provides leverage. With the appropriate legal framework around that, it would cascade from there.
How do you purpose to market guild labor over non-guild labor, especially at a time when anyone can earn a CS degree, publish open source, and right to work laws pepper the country.
Open source is basically this in a naive and unorganized way, especially when MIT licensed (a giant con in my opinion). GNU does much better. But if there existed a guild license connected to tech and patents that are must haves, it would tip the balance.
The guild would offer objective security to a worker — health insurance, income insurance, and legal backing, with intentions aligned entirely with the worker. It provides a behemoth aligned with maximizing the rights and income of a worker. That would do a whole lot in attracting people to join.
It sounds to me like you're just describing a tech company.
Software needs to be elevated, credentialed, regulated, and more respected. This is what a guild would enable. But I think merging benefits of unions with the prestige of a guild would provide some needed innovation in that space.
Providing skilled professionals with an army of lawyers, professional insurance, income guarantees, healthcare, lead management, all with cooperative ownership, profit sharing, etc is a drastically different incentive structure than existing organizations.
You haven't convinced me that this is a thing desirable or plausible. You keep mentioning benefits that I feel I already have. You haven't convinced me that the technical output would be better than the current system. You haven't convinced me that there is a place for this in our current world, or that their is a reasonable growth path for the idea. In fact, the discussion is largely abstract. I wish you all the best with your idea, maybe there is something here than just isn't getting through to me right now.
The issue I am thinking about and solving for is the fact that I believe there are thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of Einstein-level intellects who are completely unknown, under-utilized, and lost in the current system.
With the resources (including intellectual resources), we are far in excess of what is necessary to be a multiplanetary species. Yet here we all stand, upon our home planet, with minimal access to space except for a small exceptional few. It is a gross failing to be destroying this world with industrialization while there exists dead worlds with bountiful resources.
And that is the beginning of the problems. The current structure pays even top-level tech workers a pittance compared to the ruling class, and that ruling class has no vision for the future of humanity beyond their own wealth and prosperity. They are driving our kind and our world straight off a cliff to oblivion while utilizing the planetary resources for their own vapid pleasure and security.
Perhaps, if you cannot see why I say this, you may consider walking a mile in the shoes of common people. This planet is in need of a competent technical class with a collective mission of uplifting, enriching, and enlightening with technology. The technical class are the true leaders / managers of resources, and within it exist the means to maximize beneficial traits while minimizing destructive traits.
In any case, these are just words. I just hope that when paths open up, we all can recognize it and travel it.
I don't get this. It's a layoff - what do you think not spineless and not falling in line looks like?
“If you do these layoffs, all of us will strike”
In other words, unified action among the workers that costs the business significantly more funds than the savings from laying people off.
That is one example of having a spine. There are countless others.
You have to do what's best for you and those that you support. Do not accept anything less; your company certainly will not.
Until it becomes apparent that the constant turnover of tech workers hits the bottom line, these companies will do less than nothing to make things better for their employees.
"Don't worry, we'll make up for it in volume"