Google lays off entire team while they are testifying to the city council | Hacker News Reader

Google lays off entire team while they are testifying to the city council

mas.to

157 pointskrig59 comments

The resolution passed by the Austin City Council mentions not only Google, but also Cognizant.

This Tweet suggest that these folks are employees of Cognizant, which provides services to Google:

https://twitter.com/busterfestus/status/1763610215402873000?...

If I cancel a contract with an external party with immediate effect it's fair to say I 'fired' them. I have taken the decision to end their job working in my company. That's true even if they continue to be employed by the company I've contracted them from.

If Google specifically cancelled the contract for this team from Cognizant because the team unionized it's fair to say that Google fired them. The only way it isn't fair to say that is if Cognizant fired them without Google's input. Knowing contracting companies though, I'm fairly sure that didn't happen. Cognizant wouldn't jeopardize their relationship with Google like that.

My friend owns a security guard company - he employs about a dozen guards and takes on contracts that last anywhere from a day to a few years. When a guard quits or gets fired he has another one on the bench that goes and fills that role. If a guard is assigned to a construction site to watch it for a month, he isn't "fired" by the construction company when the work is done. Instead he goes back on the bench or is moved immediately to another job site.

These Cognizant employees are going back on the bench and being paid for seven weeks until they can be reassigned to another contract. https://www.kxan.com/news/youtube-music-workers-laid-off-aft...

Cognizant, Google, and the workers all knew the contract was ending today. By their own admission they had been training other people to take over the work in anticipation of the end of the contract. This was theatre.

The only way it gets even close to “fired” is if you had a month contract for the construction site, and the company cut it short and banned you from the property.

A contract expiring is not being fired. Maybe - maybe - a contract that has been renewed repeatedly being not renewed is similar, but it still really isn’t.

From https://www.alphabetworkersunion.org/press/youtube-music-wor...: "NLRB announced that it would uphold a previous ruling that found members of the YouTube Content Operations Team to be jointly employed by both Google and Cognizant"

Unless the guards employed by your friend's company are also jointly employed by the places where they work, the two situations are not directly comparable.

The NLRB describes why joint employment is relevant, at https://www.nlrb.gov/about-nlrb/what-we-do/the-standard-for-... :

"Considering indirect control prevents an entity that has an employment relationship with employees from avoiding joint-employer status—and the bargaining obligation that goes with it—by using an intermediary to implement decisions about essential terms and conditions of employment."

> it's fair to say I 'fired' them

The title here says "laid off". This is definitely not the case if they're a third party whose contract was cancelled. If the Cognizant team unionised, it will have done so as part of Cognizant, I assume, so I'm still a bit confused.

How does the legal definition of firing compare to the legal definition of canceling a contract? I would imagine that the outcome depends on exactly what was specified in the contract itself. While I might feel sympathy for the former employees of Google, without knowing the exact conditions under which they were employed at (not by) Google, I can only sympathize and not much else.

The company was sacked, the expression goes. The employees of the terminated company are not sacked, layed off, terminated

The whole concept of collective bargaining kinda evaporates when the collective is small enough, and the company large enough, that the company is be able to not give a duck about the entire collective and their collective actions. In this case they can just fire them all on the spot ("can" as in are able to, not as in have a legal right to) and it evidently doesn't cause any large enough issues for them.

I sympathize with the workers, but they clearly overplayed their hand.

That’s why an American president prevented corporations from becoming this almighty

>I sympathize with the workers, but they clearly overplayed their hand.

Who? The workers? By unionizing?

The more I think about this the less I understand what the employees were trying to accomplish. Let's say that somehow they somehow get the government (whichever level of it) to force Google to sit at the table with them.

The union states their terms. Google just says 'no'.

"Uh.. then we'll all quit!"

"ok"

I guess they could go on a strike so Google would still be on the hook for paying them? A strike has to be disruptive to the company to have any effect though... they'd all just be made redundant and let go anyway.

Seems to me like they didn't really have a viable end game.

In a "closed shop", which is sometimes mandated by law, all replacement employees would still be in the union, so the work would never get done until an agreement formed or some other loophole was found, like management doing the work.

Isn't that why government labour boards exist, so the company just saying 'no' forever isn't an option?

The company can always say no forever. It's just that doing so normally causes major disruptions in operation and so isn't really an option at companies where a critical chunk of the labor force is unionized. If it's just 10 out of 100,000 employees participating and they can be easily fired and replaced then the union is always going to be toothless. For example I am a union of 1 at my company and can try to negotiate "collectively" but the company can also say no and fire me.

To everyone claiming that the Google engineers just make too much money to unionize. You seem to have a very short memory.

https://globalnews.ca/news/1776324/apple-google-join-tech-co...

There was a tacit agreement between big tech to engage in wage suppression and no poaching agreements. This is why unions exist -- to protect workers and their rights. It doesn't matter what kind of wages are in play.

From the posters stream. Is the poster ironic?

"#OTD in 1922, The Soviet Union was Created! It remains one of mankind's greatest achievements."

> one of mankind's greatest achievements.

Well, for a few decades there it probably was a great achievement for a few people at the very top. ;)

For the rank and file though... not so much. :(

So was the atom bomb.

Terrible, but great.

It did become a competing superpower in less than 40 years.

One can argue that Soviet Union was a great achievement in 1922, but Stalin hijacked it.

1922: ·Official founding of Union of Soviet Socialist Republics

April 1922: ·Stalin elected General Secretary of the Communist Party

January 4, 1923: ·Lenin warns the Party to remove Stalin from his position of power.

January 21, 1924: ·Death of Lenin. Stalin survives the reading of the Testament by the Central Committee in May.

Or read Animal Farm.

The USA was a great achievement, but has been hijacked too, after a while.

In a business with so many opportunities, it makes little sense to organize. I've met a few Software Engineers here in the US who talked about unionization, including some who were actually in one of the minor Software Engineering unions, but they were invariably among the bottom performers.

For the top 50%, unionization would mean lower wages and benefits; for lower income workers in fields without well-established pay-for-performance policies, that's a different story.

What you describe is class warfare of mass workers and elite. I would say high performers are also more easy to switch to another place, and more importantly, they may/should have stronger morals to not give in to company demands, make some temporary sacrifices, and generally to do the right thing. That's how a healthy society should function.

Weird how people who anonymously comment on behalf of tech bosses claim "pay-per-performance" policies while most high-performing developers report it being easier to get a raise by being poached than within their extant tenure

Your comment feels like a regurgitation of the lie propagated by employers to discourage people from forming unions. Employers spread these lies because they know they only stand to lose from unions. Top performers won’t lose anything after unionizing. That’s the entire point of a union - to provide employees with leverage to not only keep their current incentives, but to expand them. The important thing to realize here is that companies are not our friends. Not even if we are top performers. The reason why top performers feel like they don’t need a union is because they have the illusion of leverage. Unions grant real and greater leverage by default, to all employees.

>Google refused to come to the bargaining table.

Google is not their employer

Older workers will have to face this more often. Younger generation, coddled on campuses and not used to be told "no" to will cause absolute havoc in the workplace.

They don't know how to politely say "maybe don't use the phrase 'you guys'" - they just right away accuse you of assault. Who can work like that?

https://www.thecoddling.com/

What's unclear here is what exactly these people were told by Cognizant and Google when their employment at Cognizant started, and when their work at Google started. Also if this work is still being done by other employees.

If you don't have a closed shop, you need everyone to join the union, including potential future workers (and they won't agree to that unless they get paid, either by having jobs somewhere, or being paid to be in the bench).

A union has to be big. That's why AFL-CIO is a huge conglomerate and SEIU and Teamsters too, even though they separated back into 3, each still large.

Nowadays an information workers union especially has to be international, since there is little value to a specific location. Multinational companies call for multinational unions. Citizens across the world should stand up to force their national governments to form international labor agreements.

Unsurprising that this comment is written in American English.All this’d do is further show how far behind the rest of the world the US is. In reality the rest of the world will be have to sit and wait while the Americans caught up.

I don't understand US laws nearly enough to form an informed opinion, but it just seems odd that a city council would or should play a role in an employment dispute.

People like this that don't bat an eye to dehumanize, shouldn't be anyone's elected representatives.

There was nothing “dehumanizing” in her comment. She said she feels bad for the people who were laid off, but it is not the role of a city council to intervene in these kind of disputes. It is a perfectly valid position.

Is it actually required that an employer “come to the table” at all? Presumably they could say no, and if employees don’t like it they go on strike, but then wouldn’t they all be let go anyway?

Yes, and then the employer has no employees, no business and no profits. Employers tend not to want to drive themselves out of business, which is why they come to the table. Not because they choose to out of a sense of personal generosity, but because employees acting as a collective have leverage over management.

Also, in the US, employers are required under the National Labor Relations Act to bargain in good faith with union membership. It is also illegal to fire employees for organizing into a union.

What was his annual salary before the layoff? 250?

I think you won't find more consensus amongst employment lawyers that laying off people like this is exactly the wrong way of doing it

Laying off people like they are trash?

No, that's fine, you're just supposed to make it look like you aren't doing it _because_ they unionized.

> you're just supposed to make it look like you aren't doing it _because_ they unionized

It’s totally legal to shut down an office because it unionised. It’s not legal to fire the unionised workers and then replace them.

I insist that the shortened form of "laying off people" should be "offing people".

Laying off people like theybare trash in revenge.

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