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Comment by bluefishinit | Hacker News Reader

No one should put up with being treated like a child at work. No one should put up with being forced back into an office to put on a performance for management. And absolutely no one should put up with workplace surveillance.

The companies enacting these policies are on my permanent "do not work for" list and I coach every report I have to steer clear of companies that want to own you and put the executives' "feels" over worker's mental health and productivity.

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We can have all the morals we can afford.

…or we could unionize.

Why? For pay? SDEs at Amazon make more than a lot of C-level employees at smaller companies. Working conditions? Oh no, you have to show up to an air conditioned office three days a week (not even five!). The amount of entitlement is insane.

Yes it is. But there is a reason. I'm being paid a lot of money because the company finds value in what I do. If they play dirty tricks, I can either fight - and unionizing is one of the ways to do that - or just quit. There is nothing in unions that makes them somehow exclusive to low-wage jobs. FAANG, on the other hand, will vehemently fight against unions - and that's telling.

You unionize when you have "power", not when you're out of power tbh.

Anyway, throwaway account clearly shilling for companies. Interesting :)

It’s not a throwaway account, I just like watching people get twisted about a name instead of content.

> I just like watching people get twisted

I am certain that trolling is not allowed here.

Where am I trolling? I can't help it if other people look more at username than the content I'm posting, which certainly isn't trolling if you look at my karma.

An idiotic policy is an idiotic policy. If I can deliver work from anywhere why tf does it matter where I am. I love how when it comes to “intangibles” like “collaboration” in person execs are geniuses but when it comes to “intangibles” like open office sucks for employee productivity they conveniently ignore it. The most hilarious part is remote saves even more money on office space!

I don’t like being subject to the arbitrary whims of management’s stupid, baseless decision-making, without any form of recourse beside uprooting and starting over again somewhere else. This is sufficient enough for me to want a union.

As for pay, I’m of the opinion that workers create the vast majority of value at companies, while the c-suites are largely sociopathic parasites, chasing whatever fads they heard about on the golf course, in between doing Game of Thrones shit to one another. So, even if tech workers at Amazon make more than people at small companies, I still think more of that money should be going to them than people saying “bow to my authority and show up in the office.”

Definitely more things besides money that collective action can help with. OP spelled out three of them, why not re-read the post?

> No one should put up with being treated like a child at work. No one should put up with being forced back into an office to put on a performance for management. And absolutely no one should put up with workplace surveillance.

Already highly paid actors and sports figures have unions. It's not just about negotiating pay.

Alanis Morissette articulated it quite well: "I'm broke but I'm happy, I'm poor but I'm kind"

Morality doesn't have to come with a price tag.

thats great, but amazon pays top of market, so they have more power. You get more money in exchange for less freedom, its not completely explicit, but its also not a secret and its not like they're abusing their workforce by paying them well and having specific and high expectations for how work is being done.

> thats great, but amazon pays top of market

Amazon is not known for paying top of market.

> You get more money in exchange for less freedom

Why would this be the case when less freedom leads to worse business results? High churn, less access to top talent and worse productivity. Freedom and trust are the easiest ways to start getting better results from your team.

> high expectations for how work is being done.

They may have high expectations for how the work is being done but they'd be better off worrying about what work gets done.

Why was it OK to be required to work at an office 4 years ago?

It was never ok. I've been working remote for over 10 years, it's always been superior to being in the office. Post-pandemic the leverage went to the worker to demand better working conditions.

Whenever I'm sat in a four mile tailback at 6pm, I often look at everyone in the cars around me and, if they make eye contact, I give them a little nod and a smile, as though to say, "We chose this. This was a great choice".

Maybe you should live closer to work. The choice to live in sprawling cities and partaking in dystopian car culture _is a choice_.

I don't make enough money to afford a place within an hour of where I work.

Any advice? You seem to have answers.

Take advantage of the fact that you can change companies to somewhere that provides you with enough compensation to live near your work. This might require a move. People have moved for work for centuries.

I actually had to move to take my current job.

Any recommendations for places I can move to?

Sure, simple.

I'll just pack up my family of four and move to a bachelor apartment to save the commute.

I choose to have a family, and I choose to work too, I suppose.

Maybe $JOB will provide me a raise to do so.

Perfect argument for WFH. It doesn't get any closer to work than that.

Moving is a burden of a highly varying degree. The implication that it is a non-factor points to a fundamental absence of shared experience between you and the people you are criticizing.

I have moved significantly more than the average person to do exactly what I’m talking about here. Without money, with money, without kids, with kids. I feel like I have a pretty reasonable amount of experience.

It’s not that bad.

"Simply emigrate to another country, bud, you are choosing to live with the car culture"

You don’t have to emigrate to another country. I’ve lived in half a dozen U.S. cities with no car at this point.

And then what after he is laid off in 9 months by this job randomly?

Buy a new place next to the new employer?

Why buy? Buying houses is a bad idea if you don’t have certainty or value the flexibility of moving.

I work for a company that's fully distributed, and do ~2k miles a year, almost exclusively to visit family.

Your halfway-house "build your life around your career" mentality appealed to me in my early 20s when I was on starter salaries and was unmarried and childless. That is no longer the case and you couldn't - as I've had the pleasure of telling several interviewers - pay me to return to it.

> tailback

I assume this is the thing that's called a "traffic jam" where I live?

I'm actually British but I was appealing to the er, status quo in this case!

we always needed this. Covid was the catalyst for change, which I am eternally grateful for, but we cant let this change revert

It wasn't. Virtually everybody I know was miserable. Now they aren't.

Nobody is being forced to do anything. It's at will employment. If the employees don't want to work in the office then they can find work elsewhere.

Or they could organize and negotiate their own terms with Amazon.

Could you imagine the colors bezos would turn if they unionized in response to this? I would buy that pay per view.

I really hope they do! I bet in 100 years we will look back at what is happening now in a similar way as we look back at 19th century capitalism and people fighting for a 40-hour week.

> If the employees don't want to work in the office then they can find work elsewhere.

Which is exactly what I'm doing and advocating for others to do.

The person you were replying to is directly advocating for finding work elsewhere?

Free choice in the land of the free!

"How Amazon Crushes Unions" - https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/16/technology/amazon-unions-...

"Amazon intensifies 'severe' effort to discourage first-ever US warehouse union" - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/feb/03/amazon-in...

"Corporations like Amazon pay big bucks for "union avoidance" — and it all happens in the dark" - https://www.salon.com/2021/06/24/corporations-like-amazon-pa...

"Amazon calls cops, fires workers in attempts to stop unionization nationwide" - https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/13/amazon-...

Just you, alone, vs the trillion dollar company, its lobbyists, its influence over local and federal government, its PR machine, its full-time, well-funded teams of people who are against you, and its constant fight to stop you combining forces with other individuals to fight back.

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