It is disappointing how all the "union victories" these days seem to involve under 100 employees, and are often motivated by "fake" grievances such as the end to temporary pandemic policies.
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 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)
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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...
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…