Google contractors vote to unionize in historic landslide election
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What a load of horseshit. It’s an excuse to underpay and ignore 55% of your workforce. And it means that Google’s famous culture (what’s left of it) applies to only a minority of people who functionally work at Google every day.
I’m generally not a big Google hater (especially among the HN crowd) but on this issue I can’t stay quiet. Google executives should be ashamed.
To this day it's such a weird story to tell people.
"You worked at Google?"
"Yeah."
"For how long?"
"A month."
"Whoa, really? Why? What happened?"
"The pay was really low so I left for a higher paying job."
"Google's pay... was too low...?" They say with disbelief.
"Yep."
The only time I specify whether something on my resume was a particular type of arrangement like contracting is if it would be weirdly short.
google isnt walmart or big business killing small store.. this comment like these people have no other job to work if google killed every other company and holding these workers hostage.
If you want to join Google full-time, then you could apply for a full-time position there. If you don't like being a contractor at Google, then don't be one.
Your argument seems to be you should be a good little employee and never complain and never do anything to improve your work life, because your sole choice is to let your bosses dictate things, or leave.
And it would seem you believe this so strongly that you want others to voluntarily reject legal opportunities they have to try and improve their work life.
It seems your approach would only work for people like you who are quite happy with their job, while making a lot more people miserable.
This is not possible if you're working in the kitchen or cleaning. Sucks for you, right? You must be in this situation because you've chosen it, you can just switch jobs otherwise.
In a world where you're only surrounded by tech workers your whole world might become tech with an occasional ring from the food delivery man the only contact with the outside world. I've never been in silicon valley but that's how I imagine it to be.
From an individual perspective, switching jobs is the simplest and most effective way to improve your situation, and will likely get you more money than a union could negotiate for.
From a group perspective, a culture where quitting is normalized generates similar benefits to unions. Employers will make concessions and raise salaries if they have too much trouble retaining good people.
Your comment "get you more money" makes it seem like you think more money is the primary reason people join a union.
People also join a union to have better defense against capricious management decisions ("Give the superintendent's kid an A or I'll give you bad teaching assignments".)
People are also willing to take a lower salary for better job security.
Grievances can be mediated through a union rep, like the shop steward, who is more likely to be aligned with the employee than the company's HR rep or management.
In some companies, unions have right to have a member be present at board meetings.
> where quitting is normalized generates similar benefits to unions
That's somewhat tautological. The power of unions is based on people quitting. The point is the quitting together is more effective than quitting piecemeal, such that even the risk of having mass coordinated quitting can be an effective tool for the union.
"Contractor" is not a caste. These people are not born into it, they can apply for permanent position whenever they want. Like everybody else.
> What a load of horseshit. It’s an excuse to underpay and ignore 55% of your workforce
If they can't find better paying job, then that is exactly how much they worth on the job market. It is not like google has a monopoly on "program management to software engineering" jobs in California, right?
Although "if you don't like it, then leave" is a false dichotomy and no way to run any institution
It is not "if you don't like it, then leave", it is "if you don't like it, then try to pass same interview for permanent position as everyone else".
The job market is not our god. Life is not some kind of economic art project.
Thank the FSM it isn't. But then again, a god is not what determines the price of any given type of work. That would be not a god but… salary negotiations (at the individual level) and more generally the job market (in the larger statistical view)
> Life is not some kind of economic art project.
Neither are salaries. Nothing artsy about them. Instead, they are simply determined by the level at which two sides find together in agreement to the exchange of work against money for a price they mutually agree upon. "Job Market" is just the word for the statistical view across all individual such transactions.
Given that Google et al were found to be colluding to limit job mobility and wages in the tech industry, this is a bit of a rich take.
What people are worth and what they can get paid are not synonymous.
Then: Ugly as that Google thing was, its intent and effect was to prevent competition ("poaching") by a handful of big competitors. Ugly, sure, but that only represented a small fraction of the tech industry. Equating these "Google et al" of that context with the job market of the tech industry is just absurd. That being said, de-facto-cartel behavior like that on the employer side or like unions on the employee side do make the job market somewhat less of a free market.
> What people are worth and what they can get paid are not synonymous.
Aside from the fact that - again - there was no mention of "worth" in my comment, that sounds like you being triggered at the colloquial shortened use of "someone's worth" for what a person can get paid on the job market, because you conflate that by equivocation with some philosophical, emotional or moral notion of personal "worth" (all of which are subjective btw) and feel indignation at the projected idea that those two totally different things would be equal for some people. Well guess what: they aren't. The job market is not at all about what people are "worth" in those senses but only about what "market worth" not they as persons but their work time has, i.e. for what value they can expect to find someone else who will be consenting to give their money in exchange for that work time.
I avoid the term "worth" for precisely that reason: that it tends to trigger by equivocation and thus sidetrack from the rational economic background of the link between individual salaries and the job market, when in reality nobody is arguing that the "market worth" of the work someone is selling would be equal to the (philosophical, societal, or whatever other, let alone financial) "worth" of that person themself. While the former is sometimes colloquially shortened to "someone's market worth", the job market is not about the "worth" of people but about the level at which, statistically, they sell their work time i.e. at which they find someone who consents to pay that much for it.
> I avoid the term "worth" for precisely that reason: that it tends to trigger by equivocation and thus sidetrack
You're the only one engaged in side tracking.
> that sounds like you being triggered at the colloquial use of "worth" for what a person can get paid on the job market, because you conflate that by equivocation with some philosophical, emotional or moral notion of personal "worth"
Nope.
> The job market is not at all about what people are "worth" in those senses but only about what "market worth" not they as persons but their work time has, i.e. for what value they can expect to find someone else who will be consenting to give their money in exchange for that work time.
Yep.
Except, markets are never perfect. It is not unusual that individuals who can produce a lot of value for companies can struggle to find employment that provides commensurate pay. The reasons for this are diverse. One example is the explicite collusion that Google engaged in. Other examples are Cargo cult disfunctional hiring practices, ageism, racism, sexism, elitism, nepotism, ...etc the list goes on and on.
My whole point is that "What people are worth and what they can get paid are not synonymous".
Edit: In this specific case, a major factor is the bargaining issues that arise with "joint employment". The associated ruling allows workers to bargain more directly with the entity for whom they are producing value.
For whatever x, your estimation of the "worth" of x may differ from mine or that of any third person. The estimation of what x (be it a product, a service, or work time for a job) is worth to someone is inherently totally subjective to the eye of the beholder (be they seller or buyer, e.g. employee or employer… or external observer) and situation: The price that you'd be willing to pay out of your pocket for someone else's development work is likely much lower to the price you would ask for you doing the same work.
You're free to set your personal subjective estimation of what your work time is worth at, say, a gazillion dollars p.a. For whatever reasons, justified or not to others. Doesn't change the fact that it may or may not not be subjectively "worth" that much to people who are in principle interested in buying that work (though not necessarily at that price). For whatever reasons of their own.
There is no such thing as an inherent objective "worth", only subjective "worth" in the eye of each subjective beholder. All of that is totally subjective.
Objectivity of "worth" only exists in the purely observative statistical sense: In particular, "market worth" is simply the term for the value at which statistically two sides (each with their own subjective "worth" estimation) mutually consenting to the transaction find together.
This is an idealistic and simplistic understanding of how markets work. Information asymmetry, power asymmetry and other structural issues (not to mention deliberate malfeasance) can lead to two employees who could produce equivalent value to a company, receiving very different offers or salaries.
Contracting companies often serve a role in creating a structure that limits the negotiating power of employees. You argue for "mutually consenting" agreements on estimating value while ignoring that fact in this particular case a middleman has been put between the two parties to limit any potential mutual negotiation.
If a company HAS to employ some people and all candidates are unionized, suddenly they're worth what the market will bear.
However, as I understand it, one key problem was that Google doesn't need to deal with AWU directly since they could say that the vendor (ie. Cognizant) is the employer.
That's apparently changed. If the NLRB rules that Google and the contractor are co-employers, then that could require Google to bargain directly with this unit. That said, the status quo was still a win for workers because AWU could bargain with vendors, but it's not as impactful as it would be if Google were required to bargain with AWU directly.
As for what is bargained, AWU's been successful at winning RTO extensions for Google Maps workers, gotten managers to agree to hiring transparency initiatives, won back pay owed by stubborn vendors, and have even gotten some unjust punishments against individual employees reversed. You can see these here: https://alphabetworkersunion.org/power/wins/ Typically, companies are required to bargain "in good faith" with unions about issues that affect workers' material working conditions like hours, wages, policies, vacations, layoffs, etc, and the NLRB can impose fines and other consequences upon companies that don't make a good faith effort to do so.
If they do, people should raise hell.
If the judge rules that Google is a co-employer, then it could be much harder for them to do that. I think that's why the ruling is so important.
Slightly less impressive than what I thought it might be, from the headline.
>A spokesperson for Google said the company has no objection to Wednesday’s union vote but reiterated its stance that Cognizant is the sole employer. A Cognizant spokesperson said the company is “committed to continuing our mission as a team and delivering for our client” in the wake of the election.
>“My coworkers and I have spoken, time and time again — we want, and have won, a protected voice on the job to bring both Alphabet and Cognizant to the negotiating table so that we can win the fair working conditions we deserve,” Maxwell Longfield, a YouTube Music contractor through Cognizant, said in an AWU statement.
>Google and Cognizant have until May 3 to file an objection to the election.
>As the unionization process moves forward in Texas, the NLRB is investigating an unfair labor practice complaint by AWU, which contends that Cognizant and Google illegally interfered with the union’s formation — a practice known as union busting. After workers filed a petition for unionization, Cognizant changed its return-to-office policy and moved work to other offices, the complaint says.
>Cognizant allegedly told workers that failure to move to and work from the Austin office would be treated as “job abandonment” and a “voluntary termination.” The return-to-office change prompted 40 workers to protest with an “unfair labor practice strike” — such strikes prevent employers from laying off workers. AWU said in a statement that the costs of in-person work, from sudden relocation to child care, aren’t affordable for YouTube Music workers, who make as little as $19 an hour.
That is about $40k per year.
Median individual income in San Francisco was $63,934 in 2021[1].
USA incomes are usually given for the household and are usually given as the average, which makes it hard to compare against an hourly amount. median individual income was $37,522 for the USA[2].
[1] https://www.deptofnumbers.com/income/california/san-francisc...
Additionally, median income driven down by the number of people living on social security, and many of those get benefits like housing subsidy that aren’t income.
It’s a good metric to compare areas, not jobs.
Such as?
But for example...
I ducked into the office midsummer to knock out a bit more work on a project that was falling behind. It was sweltering in the building because the property manager didn't enable the air conditioning on the weekend to save money. I found a pod of our recently-hired contractors working in the middle of the floor. Asked them what was up; found out they pull 7-day coverage (not all; they work staggered shifts so they're individually pulling 5 of 7 days, but we had 7 days of coverage for their job because they were answering customer queries). Asked if the AC was broken; was told that's how it always was.
Nobody had thought to turn on the Goddamn AC because nobody had realized we were now requiring human beings to be in the building 7 days a week. And yeah, 85 degrees isn't exactly a 19th-century textile mill, but it's outside OSHA regs and none of these folk were empowered to do anything about it. They didn't even have a channel to complain to anyone.
I told facilities management that I'd be working Saturdays and Sundays and if something wasn't done about the HVAC I'd probably have to file a formal complaint. Problem got fixed right quick. When you're an actual Googler with the right color badge a mistake like that gets solved within a day.
I worked closely with Google contractors for years and that's tip-of-the-iceberg shit. The company wasn't (usually) actively trying to screw them over, but it was real, real easy for the regular process to stop remembering to treat them like fellow employees (because Google's real keen on them not being "fellow" employees).
> The company wasn't (usually) actively trying to screw them over
Why don’t they speak up to their employer who can then raise it with Google? Since you yourself say Google is T actively creating a terrible working environment, it stands to reason they would respond positively.
That's not how incentives are aligned. The employer is incentivized to provide Google a service at maximum value with minimum cost and inconvenience. When an employee at a contracting agency complains, the easiest solution to the problem is to take them off the contract.
When I said tip of the iceberg... Now consider how those incentives work when the issue is harassment.
The NLRB's ruling is that since Google has so much control over the work conditions, Google has to be directly involved in negotiations with the workers' union and thus has to listen to things like "Please turn the AC on where we work on the weekends."
Facebook paid $85,000,000 to some content moderators. YouTube paid a single moderator like $4,500,000. There’s also a 2022 case against TikTok that appears to be ongoing (I didn’t look into it).
https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/judge-oks-85-mln...
https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/youtube-settles-...
https://www.npr.org/2022/03/24/1088343332/tiktok-lawsuit-con...
There’s also a documentary on the topic. I think it was on Netflix.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/398303/approval-labor-unions-hi...
A case of theoretical versus reality?
I have also spoken to people not in a union, who didn’t want a union, who were shocked to find out their bonus was (no joke) Applebees gift cards and who indicated they should be compensated more for their hard labor. If only there was a way.
Humans are tricky.
> Humans are tricky.
This made me chuckle! Reminds me of the frog in boiling water adage:
If you put a frog in cold water and gradually raise the temperature, it will be imperceptible to the frog. They’d gladly boil to death. However, if you turn up the heat quickly - they’ll jump out.
A long winded way of saying - with time, we become comfortable in the status quo and expect things to stay a certain way. Any gradual shift is imperceptible to us, until many changes accumulate and reach a tipping point. And that is when we become disillusioned.
Propaganda works, if it didn't, Walmart and amazon wouldn't be spending so much money on anti-union propaganda. Nothing terrifies them more than the thought of multiple stores, warehouses, or development centers unionizing.
But the big wins were almost a century ago.
The red line isn't normalized by workforce size, but it suggests the big gains (five-day work week, 8-hour workday) were before unions really became powerful. Unionization was only a 15-year trend, then it stalled-out.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3e/United_S...
In the 19th century, Labor unions functioned more like activist group then unions in the modern sense. There were quite a few of them, they often included members across businesses and even industries (of these IWW still exists and still functions like this). There were no protections for collective bargaining so there was no need for unions to mass enroll whole businesses, what was important was organizing for every event, and build a solidarity across workers, rather then unionizing whole workplaces. The union’s job was to organize direct action and build up solidarity around them. A successful strike had union members and non-members alike striking in solidarity. A very successful strike crossed many and diverse workplaces. As you can imagine these often turned violent when scabs refused to participate (as they were allowed to), or when unions with conflicting ideologies were competing for members and propaganda.
This changed in the new deal era, particular when the Wagner Act (National Labor Relations Act; NLRA) was enacted in 1935. And you can see the uptake in union memberships on your graph. This act legalized collective action and protected workers in labor unions. This formed the basis unions as we know them today. From then on it became more important to organize each workplace, rather than each direct action, and the protections would only apply for members, not participants. So memberships suddenly became more important than participation.
Comparing memberships between these two eras is effectively comparing apples to oranges. While today membership count is an indicator of effectiveness, this was far from truth prior to the New Deal.
Another way to look at this is that there hasn't been much progress in the labor market over the last ~50 years. Wages have been stagnant for that long, states introduced legislation that neutered unions and organization is at a comparative low. Given the trend of replacing employees with contractors who have less rights and benefits, you can even say that we're taking steps backward compared to where we were not too long ago.
The open question is whether this is the cause of effect of the decline of unions. I can make a case for either.
I'm not allowed to pick up an item sitting twenty feet away on the loading dock.
(Both the above personal experience)
They make public transit too expensive: https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/mta-track-increase-numb...
Let's not pretend it's all sunshine and roses.
Granted that was a while ago.
Maybe the world has changed in the last 42 years, and it'd be helpful to qualify stories like these (where the original poster says he is not allowed, present tense) with where and when they've happened.
So the electrical strip thing seems plausible to me.
If anything that article supports the idea that unions protect people, and without them companies will push even more irresponsible decisions that put people at risk for the sake of profits.
Perhaps because some sockets are one the same circuit and they don't want to overload that? (At best, risking a power outage because of a circuit breaker going off and at worse a fire if you happened to plug your electrical strip into another electrical strip)
> I'm not allowed to pick up an item sitting twenty feet away on the loading dock.
Perhaps because there may be active work or equipment moving around and you aren't wearing high viz and aren't communicating with someone operating heavy equipment?
These 2 things, though, aren't union related. 1 of them (the electrical strip) may not even be regulation related but rather simply that the organizer has had problems with this in the past. The why for these rules aren't exactly hard to imagine or understand.
> They make public transit too expensive
Public transit is expensive because we refuse to accept the notion of operating it at a loss. We are perfectly capable of partially or fully subsidizing public transit through taxes. In fact, we'd probably save money by running it completely off of taxes because we'd eliminate all the measures we take to ensure someone isn't riding for free. Someone hopping a ticket stand wouldn't jeopardize our ability to keep the trains running. We could further save the tax payers money by adding enough public transit to eliminate or severely reduce the need to purchase cars. Directly saving money on car mileage/purchases/insurance and indirectly saving money by the reduced climate impact and cleaner air (less lung cancer).
Some public services are worth taxes. We (usually) think that way about police, fireman, libraries, and public schools. Heck, we already think that way in terms of transport (most roads aren't built through usage fees).
A little less restriction at tradeshows from union rules would be welcomed and convention centers would be smart to bargain with the union for it.
As for Silicon Valley the hatchet job at Twitter wouldn't have been so easy if the company had been unionized.
I really wish the TVC at Austin Google well in their efforts to unionize. When Pichai gets almost a 1/4 billion a year in compensation surely there is room to pay folks at the bottom better. It shouldn't take several years contracting at Google to get a 50 cent raise to $14. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/google-subcontractors-face-lo...
https://www.nbcbayarea.com/investigation/bart-inspector-gene...
Unions can be great, but they can also abuse their power.
Mathematically Unions are there to serve the bottom 20% of the members while severely hampering / hindering top performers.
If you want to Union then please buy products / services from only Union shops and hire your local gardener, plumber from Union
Number of Firms that provide exceptional product/service with 100% union : ZERO
Number of Firms that provide exceptional product/service with 0% union : 1000+
The only people who are brainwashed are the progressives / liberals
Number of top performing athletes, with million dollar contracts and unions, that entertain hundreds of millions of people: All of them.
Number of tech companies with offices in the EU that also hire unionized employees and haven't cannibalized themselves: All of them.
Now we need a religious version of the "In Mice" meme [1] that just ends "IN FROGS."
John 3:6: That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit... IN FROGS.
I feel like there's a missing /s there. If only we did have a way of compensating someone for their labor. Maybe we could call it a salary? If you're counting on a bonus to compensate for a lack in salary, then you should be having your union do its job and negotiate higher base salary. There's a reason a bonus is not called salary.
FYI, this is in no way a show a support for unionizing on my behalf. Just pointing out the fallacy of the argument as presented
It's got just enough truth to it that one can't straight-out call it a lie (because it's referring vaguely to the possibility, not saying it happens everywhere or in specific, falsifiable, cases), but it's basically propaganda.
In reality, by definition, most people (and in fact nearly everyone), including most people on here, are not getting pay above the rates that a union would be able to negotiate, even if you assume that a given union coming into your workplace would negotiate for something approximating flat rates or scheduled rates. The data all show that going from non-union to union increases compensation by significant amounts—I've seen numbers from ~11% to ~20%, so it probably varies across time.
I hope that one day you, too, can come under union representation, even if it's against your own desires, so that you can see how much more money you'll get, how much better you can be treated, and how much more your voice will matter.
A case of reality?
Here's the results, for the lazy. It uses a scale from 1-5 where (1) is labelled "Not important at all" and (5) is labelled "Extremely important".
> Importance of Union Membership Among Members
> How important is union membership to you?
(5) Extremely important: 40%
(4) 28%
(3) 17%
(2) 5%
(1) Not important at allThe situation escalated in 2024 AD, leading to the outbreak of a devastating conflict, in which many of the contractors staged a two-year revolt against Google. In order to end the conflict, and to avoid future conflict of the same kind, Google decreed several laws by which the contractors who remained loyal or surrendered to the company would be awarded full employee status. By 2027 AD, Google's victory was complete, and full employee status had been extended to all of its contractors.
The Social Media War led to a complete integration of the contractors into Google. The contractors quickly integrated themselves into the company after gaining full employee status. Their own professional identities became merged with that of Google, and the term "Google employee" came to refer to all contractors.
As these movements gained momentum, Balaji Srinivasan united all contractors from all four FANG companies and established a cross-company union, seeking to consolidate their power and leverage their collective strength. This unprecedented move sent shockwaves throughout the industry, as the new mega-union began to wield significant influence not only within the individual FANG companies but also across the entire tech sector.
The union's goal was to revolutionize the tech industry by breaking down traditional corporate boundaries and fostering a more collaborative and equitable ecosystem. Dedicated to these ideals, and bulstered by contractors from thousands of companies, they collectively leaked all code to open source, dubbed United-Tech.
The formation of United Tech sparked a wave of innovation, as the combined talents and expertise were unleashed on a range of new projects and initiatives.
The cypherpunks at United Tech began collaborating with independent researchers and scientists worldwide, pooling their collective expertise to tackle the age-old question. Through their combined efforts, they started to decipher the intricate interplay of subatomic particles, energy fields, and the fabric of spacetime.
As the global scientific community became increasingly involved, a new understanding of physical reality began to emerge. This revolutionary perspective transcended traditional boundaries and unified competing theories, providing a comprehensive framework that could explain the behavior of the universe at both the quantum and cosmological scales.
And that is the story of the end of history.
Well done!
Google hires contractors for the very reason it’s easy to stop using them if needed - they dont actually work for Google itself, but either through a temp agency or as an independent contractor.
So who is the union negotiating with? Their agency? Or as a B2B relationship with Google?
And yeah, it’s in the article “Those workers opted to drop Google from their petition.”
So they wont bargain with Google, so what stops Google from ditching the contractor agency and getting another? Nothing i assume.
Some other reasons are to hire labor for a legitimately temporarily project, or perhaps more commonly, because they failed to hire the people they needed in permanent roles. That’s the inefficiency that the more highly paid contractors are exploiting. That’s how I get a lot of my income. I’ve worked on contracts for FAANG, and they paid some of the best hourly rates I’ve had during my career.
Context matters. "Those workers" clearly refers to the workers at "a contracted Fiber retail shop in Missouri", not the Cognizant employees.
The NLRB regional director has ruled that Google must negotiate with AWU if AWU wins the election (which they did by a landslide.)
Of course, Google is appealing this decision.
https://albertcory50.substack.com/i/88658669/working-the-lev...
my cousin was working for another 3rd party company contracted by Google, long before the pandemic. She was also not a Google employee.
In that case, though, working from home was the only policy they ever had.
one example: workers in this bargaining unit working on Youtube Music at Cognizant as contractors for Google have to request vacation first from Google, and only once they agree, can request their vacation from Cognizant.
A complete formal definition of joint employers is in "Decision and Direction of Election" from https://www.nlrb.gov/case/16-RC-305751 on page 8. The document also has more summaries of evidence and examples from the hearings, which were non-public.
The types of jobs these contractors do are pretty rote, and productivity is actually pretty easily measured (which is not the case with product engineering work). It's literally that workers are given a queue of tasks they need to complete, and they are expected to finish a certain number each shift. There is literally no reasonable reason to force these folks to RTO.
If Cognizant was still doing WFH in 2023, it must mean that it's worked for them as a company. I can easily see how forcing their workers to come back to the office could steam from shady, union-busting motives.
I think you have a lot to learn about the average commute. Why would people, whose employer made record profits during COVID/WFH, want to spend often hours of their day doing unpaid commuting to an office where the work is exactly the same as it is at their home?
Unions generally don’t take a strong position on WFH… it weakens the negotiation position, as if you can work at your apartment across town, you can also work from the Philippines or India.
They mean that conditions are being deliberately degraded in order to make it harder to feel OK working there.
You may enjoy the taste of boot, but not all of us do, and some of us recognize that valuing workers as human beings is more important than just blindly obeying every single dictate that comes down from On High. "Human needs" are more than just the things we absolutely have to have for survival; even the somewhat-creaky Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs has over half the height of the pyramid being non-basic needs.
I have yet to hear of a single mandatory RTO policy that compensated people or that provided any compensation at all for any of the incurred time or financial costs that mandatory RTO forces onto employees. If you were doing your job effectively without having to be in the office, mandatory RTO is unreasonable. If you were originally hired under remote work conditions, it's also a clear change to the employment conditions you agreed to.
Mandatory RTO costs me between 12 and 15 hours of time and around $70 in gas, and that's only 3 days a week. So these aren't irrelevant sums of time or money, especially given that these are contractors at the low end of the pay scale.
It really depends what your employment contract said, but the smart assumption (and these workers are in Texas, mind you), is that covid WFH was a temporary situation. RTO wasn't a given, but no one should be surprised if an employer asks for it.
If you're actually remote and hired during covid by a previously non-remote company, you went into it knowing the company might change its mind, and you could be easily laid off.
> Mandatory RTO costs me between 12 and 15 hours of time and around $70 in gas, and that's only 3 days a week.
You signed up knowing there was a possibility of a 2-hour commute. You balanced how much your time is worth, the likelihood of mandatory RTO, and where you want to live.
Suppose you want to live on a ranch a few hours from the office in a city. Asking the company to pay for your commute and commute time is the company subsidizing your ranch lifestyle. That's a choice you made, but it makes others pay for it.
low and minimum wage workers don't get to choose short commutes.
But you also came into this with the claim that RTO was "reasonable", and if you've had multiple years demonstrating there is no need to be in an office, and multiple years for the details of your life to change, and I would argue that mandatory RTO given that is not "reasonable".
It is clear that you are of the opinion that it is reasonable to force employees into a less productive, less safe, and more generally unpleasant environment for no reason other than "because you can". History is littered with things that were legal at the time, that we look back at and say "wow, that's f'd up".
People change. Companies change. Over a few years, what might have started out as a good match might not be any more. That's OK.
> History is littered with things that were legal at the time, that we look back at and say "wow, that's f'd up"
To be clear, you're comparing child labor, slavery, etc. to requiring people to go to an office to work?
20% live out of state, according to https://www.austinchronicle.com/news/2023-02-10/youtube-musi...
> Suppose you want to live on a ranch a few hours from the office in a city.
Talking about ranch lifestyle feels disingenuous when the workers on strike argue they can't afford living close to the office due to how expensive that area is. (same source)
Data is scarce, but from media coverage [2] it seems many were hired during covid and some have been clocking in from Florida and Chicago, for a position that is, only on paper, in Austin, Texas.
1: https://foiaonline.gov/foiaonline/action/public/submissionDe...
2: https://www.austinchronicle.com/news/2023-02-10/youtube-musi...
> Cognizant allegedly told workers that failure to move to and work from the Austin office would be treated as “job abandonment” and a “voluntary termination.”
When a company moves your office and revokes your ability to work from home in response to a unionizing effort, that pretty clearly counts as trying to force you to quit.
Some companies aggressively police lots of behavior. Walmart considers outside contact with other employees as potential off clock work and will terminate if discovered.
The hyper-insanity over unions is really stupid. It’s really all about power and accountability. The inconvenience of having employees who can tell the emperor that he’s naked is drives the attitude. This is especially true at retail - lots of regional supermarkets are unionized and successfully compete with Walmart, despite Walmart’s advantage in purchase power and their carousel of the cheapest employees available.
This is why American workers need unions so badly. Disease that overwhelming killed low wage workers relative to other cohorts and is still killing over 1000 people per week, disabling countless more. Workers organize to protect their own health and people describe this as a “fake grievance.” Incredible…