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Comment by vineyardmike | Hacker News Reader

This is definitely true, but Google pays US employees very well. Layoffs dramatically increase profits. That’s been a meaningful driver of their growth and margin in recent earnings reports lately.

There are, of course, many benefits to US hiring - a strong talent pool, maintaining a team in the same region/timezone, etc. Google can easily hire back Americans in a few quarters if they need to.

Join the alphabet workers union if you’re a Googler who cares.

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I would support the AWU if they were actually monomaniacally focused on worker issues like they're supposed to be (specifically I'd love to see a main focus on preventing offshoring). But instead it seems like they spend most of their time fighting the same kind of culture wars you see on college campuses, most recently Palestine. I don't agree with their views on that issue, and thus they've turned me off completely. They just overall strike me as young, immature, overly idealistic, and not actually suited to run a broad union that should be able to appeal to most of the employees (which is what is required for the union to actually be useful).

I always assumed these culture war unions were fostered precisely to make unions unpalatable.

If that's not their intent, they're certainly doing a good job of it. The people running them are cosplaying running a union, without fundamentally understanding what a union really is.

It's a common management strategy pushed worldwide by consultants. Undermining the opposition by promoting the worst in it. The people who are making the union unpalatable are not under threat from Google as they're in effect unwittingly performing a valuable service for management. Due to intrinsic deficiencies in humans there is no real way to fight it. What usually happens is that the organization, now free from internal opposition, is be able to make the large changes that it always wished to do only to find out that management did not see all ends, makes a bunch of mistakes, and enters into a terminal decline.

> Join the alphabet workers union if you’re a Googler who cares.

I was considering, but after seeing how they operate, I am certain I will be ok without doing so. I am yet to see them accomplish anything meaningful, and behavior of some of their members tripped my “this seems unethical” meter really bad.

I might’ve mentioned that story on HN before, but the rundown of it was that one of my friends was interviewing at Google. He called me the day after one of his interviews, saying that he had a really weird experience, and he wasn’t sure what to think of it.

TLDR: his interviewer was a member of AWU and spent every single second of the interview (that wasn’t spent on working on the coding problem) on trying to sell AWU to my friend (as a candidate/interviewee). All that time that would normally be reserved for the candidate to talk about their experience/projects, ask questions, etc., it was all taken up by the interviewer shilling AWU. My friend was shocked enough by this to warrant calling me, which he never did before with any work-related things.

Had a neutral-positive opinion on AWU until then, and had a neutral-negative opinion since then. And it has only been very slowly going down as the time passes.

P.S. The following part is definitely biased on my end, but the vibe I got from a bunch of interactions with a number of AWU members over the years was the same vibe I get from reddit slacktivists coming from certain subreddits (antiwork and atheism ones specifically). And while I have nothing against the stated goals/purposes of those subreddits, I have plenty against the actual reality of the behaviors of their members. I don’t care about it much, because a lot of them are actual teenagers. But it isn’t good optics for an actual workplace union, when your union members behave like they forgot they aren’t on reddit anymore.

On the internal memegen site, where people post and vote on memes, the AWU folks (they have a red logo around their profile picture, so easy to identify) are basically Debbie Downers. Constantly posting comments or memes shitting on the company. Whatever it is, see red logo around profile picture, you know it's going to be a "this company sucks" comment.

They very much give me the vibe of the "late stage capitalism" 23 year old reddit type. I remember one post from a guy complaining about how the company abuses its employees because in the EU everyone gets so much more vacation. I guess he didn't compare his US salary to EU salaries. Checked profile, tenure: been at company 6 months, and already complaining.

Union's power is in the enforcement of employers to accept collective bargaining (that's why the misnamed US "right to work" laws are so effective at disenfranchising workers). AUW, as it currently organized, lacks that power, so yes, all that remains is bitching.

Which is why memegen exists: it is a way to disarm Google's employees. Had they didn't had memegen to post on, the higher probability more would tunnel their disappointments into organizing.

Those disappointments were created by Google: they (used to) market themselves as a benevolent employer. People get on board, and realize that the truth is far from that. Of course, they wouldn't be able to hire some people they wanted to if they had told them the truth. Should those employees know better? Maybe. But any relationship, including labor, is built on trust.

Memegen is a way for employees to vent with no action taken by leadership. It serves its intended purpose.

No further action taken by employees as well. If memegen didn’t exist, some might be inclined to escalate, actually forcing leadership to do better.

That's essentially the thesis of Hirschman's treatise on Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty

Holy molly, this explains 99% of management behavior out there. Basically this explains why every single manager I have had has the exact same narrative, something along the lines of:

"I hear you because we care about you, your concerns are noted, but please stop thinking for yourself and stay in your lane, because we are a family"

> Which is why memegen exists: it is a way to disarm Google's employees.

Are you in PeopleOps and trying to do the reverse-psychology trick with this?

I am only halfway joking. It seems rather strange to me that if memegen is such a helpful tool for Google higher-ups to suppress the employee discontent, given the string of recent memegen changes that caused large uproars from those same employees (removal of downvotes/overall score display specifically).

If anything, those recent memegen changes (along with plenty others) do the opposite of attracting people to memegen. If PeopleOps/higher-ups wanted to incentivize people to use memegen (so that they would waste time on that instead of unionizing), why would they make those massively unpopular changes to it?

Personally, I think Google higher-ups/PeopleOps are, at best, neutral on memegen or, at worst, negative on it. I am almost certain if memegen didn’t exist already since the olden Google days, it wouldn’t have been allowed to get created at the present-day Google.

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