Grindr Tells Unionizing Workers: Move Across the Country or Be Fired | Hacker News Reader

Grindr Tells Unionizing Workers: Move Across the Country or Be Fired

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36 pointstreldorian27 comments

I never understood why corps in US (even in Canada) aren’t regulated enough like how they are in Europe for example, imagine getting fired just for asking for a union!? Instead of useless crys and wars over musk’s next move, how about actually dealing with the real problems?

It’s illegal to terminate employees for attempting to unionize.

https://www.nlrb.gov/about-nlrb/rights-we-protect/the-law/di...

and how does enforcement look?

Getting better. Certainly, it’s a long road ahead in the fight against labor violations and abuse.

https://www.nlrb.gov/news-publications/news/news-releases

In the US? It's an incredibly slow process with a designated separate court system with seperate labor laws. Oh yeah and solidarity strikes are illegal.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solidarity_action

The police can't be defunded but the US National Labor Relations Board had to resduce it's staff by 50% from 2002 to 2022, with bipartisan support!

https://thehill.com/opinion/congress-blog/civil-rights/37839...

Because in the US it‘s easy to call anything “socialism“ that is labelled a “social market economy“ in most other places in the world.

It certainly doesn't help that some American leftists call themselves "democratic socialists" while having views that are more inline with European social democracies.

The 50 mile rule is an IRS regulation that is being increasingly enforced.

https://www.irs.gov/irm/part1/irm_01-032-001

Here is Grindr's unionization website: https://grindrunited.org/

When you're at work you're not a human being, duh. You're company property.

Bold strategy of reorganizing based on willingness to move, though I don't know the history of ether the teams were located. Seems terribly disruptive, but so is a union; one outcome is that everyone loses their job and the assets are sold to match

How is a union disruptive?

Employees fighting unionization and refusing to negotiate with unions is disruptive. Unions themselves are not.

I'm certain the company is all for human rights too...

Covid was for many people a Rorschach test that let them predict or believe whatever their desired change to society, it would become permanent. But the original unknown, uncontrolled, emergency form of covid was always likely to be temporary.

Some people in service jobs thought work was over, or should be.

People said movie theaters would die. Maybe people who already didn't like theaters.

It was supposed to be the death of brick and mortar retail. Of cities.

People prone to fearing impractically theatrical methods of control by governments thought we'd be forcibly under house arrest for good, or that businesses would never be allowed to reopen. I never understood how this should benefit local governments, why they were waiting for this opportunity to force people to wear masks and collect unemployment and spend their money online instead of locally.

Many people in a community with a high percentage of introverts who work in a city with real estate that makes it too expensive to live close to their office thought that working from home would last forever.

Some things are taking longer to get back to normal than others, but we knew fairly early on that a few promising vaccines were in development. I never understood why it didn't feel likely that society would get back to its old status quo in the most fundamental ways.

We're a social species, period. We're not Solarians. We don't want to become the society from Wall-E.

The humans in Wall-E are all fat and happy. Plus they get a second chance at rebuilding the world.

Sounds like a good deal to me?

If your takeaway from Wall-E was that the human characters were aspirational I don't even know what to say. Suffice to say most people don't see it that way.

The human characters in Wall-E had more to look forward to than most of us.

Perhaps that is why apocalyptic fiction is compelling. It is as way of wiping the slate clean.

We'll have to agree to disagree. Most of the things I look forward to involve getting out of my chair.

Why would "wiping the slate clean" mean anything? The behaviors that lead to the previous slate don't magically go away. Our behaviors are innate and ingrained into us one away or another (nature, nurture etc.).

I don't imagine society would evolve differently even if it started all over again, unless something fundamentally changes about the human condition or human nature.

Edit: had a question about unions, asked and answered by the article...

Perhaps that apocalyptic event is the closest thing we can imagine to changing fundamentally.

History says no--look at any event that was considered apocalyptic for a given population. Pompeii? Black death? Spanish flu?

In my timeline, those events produced very fundamental changes in their societies. Extinction of that society counts as a fundamental change.

Sure, but what about people changed in general? Our relatively short life spans and the increasing amount of information renders it difficult to keep a perfect thread of lessons learnt from history (and people are inclined to learn different lessons from the same events). Future generations also have their own morals, ethics philosophies (as they should), and so anything we think was accomplished by some big event in the past may just as well as had not happened. So no, I am not convinced that apocalyptic events are needed for human cultural evolution. The catalyst of cultural evolution is almost always a desire for a better way to live. Even if everyone was the same religion, caste, race, class, education level, IQ etc. , fundamentally people will always behave the same.

>The behaviors that lead to the previous slate don't magically go away.

no, but the people do. At some point that's as close to a clean slate as we can get. Breaking down dynasties when they get too big, even if in centuries' time we get more dynasties.

HN may be Solariana, but they should spend a week in Dallas, Chicago or Kansas City. Bustling. People mingling. Going to the office. Oh the humanity.

Perhaps Elon will take all the intros to Mars. I should write a scifi on that…

But things have changed. Before COVID I had a fixed desk. Now I'm lucky to get a locker and have to fight with colleagues over a random desk because they didn't bother making a reservation (in the retarded "Planon" system which is admittedly unusable)

And when I'm there my colleagues aren't nearby. I used to enjoy being in the office but now it feels like I'm coming in just for the sake of it. During the office days I do almost no useful work (apart from the occasional meeting) because it's so distracting.

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