When I talk to colleagues in tech about unions I hear a lot of misconceptions, seemingly based in stereotypes about what unions are for and who they serve. People often seem to think of unions as being purely blue-collar operations, and this just isn't true.
For example, I've had people tell me that they don't support unions in tech because they'll be "paid less", or less competent engineers will be promoted faster.
And it's strange, because the other major industry in California - the film industry - is heavily unionised, and you just don't see that happening there. You have vocally supportive multi-millionaire card-carrying members of the Screen Actors Guild, the Writers Guild, and the Directors Guild to name a few. None of these unions are limiting the work their members are carrying out.
This is because those unions are serving a very different purpose to the stereotypical union some engineers seem to fear. SAG, the DGA, and the WGA aren't guaranteeing hours or limiting pay: they're simply trying to curb abuse in what it a very abusive industry, and putting in place procedures to protect members and resolve grievances.
And they don't always get it right, and I don't pretend that Hollywood is a perfect utopia of worker relations, but I think it's pretty undeniable that the industry is a much better place with the unions around.
> This is because those unions are serving a very different purpose to the stereotypical union some engineers seem to fear. [...]
I think there's another purpose of the film industry unions that doesn't get mentioned much in these (tech industry) discussions. Specifically, that the film unions raise wages by limiting the number of people who enter the industry. It's simple supply and demand.
This works via the following mechanisms:
First, the film unions provide useful benefits (like reasonably-priced health insurance), so most professional actors want to be part of the union.
Second, union members are prohibited from working on non-union productions. Additionally, most well-known actors are union members. This gives a strong incentive for a production to be a union production.
Third, union productions are prohibited from hiring more than a token number of non-union actors (unless they pay a fine to the union). This gives a strong incentive for productions to only use union talent (which also gives actors another reason to want to be a union member).
So far so good. But how does one join the union? That's the catch-22: You must work for at least n days on a union production (n=1 for speaking roles, n=3 for extra roles) to be eligible to join SAG/AFTRA. But most union productions won't hire you unless you're a union member (see above).
I don't know whether something like that would work in the software industry, but it seems at least plausible to me that it could benefit everyone who is currently employed in tech (at the expense of future potential tech employees).
I would add - finally, the nature of the film industry is to work on a contract project basis, with individual funding rounds rather than being a "regular" employee. Thats why the union benefits in terms of health insurance is so important.
So imagine a union of software contractors - that union would have no power because anyone wanting to use a contractor could sidestep them immediately by hiring a non-union contractor of which there are many.
How it could work is this - imagine you took the top 20 researchers in machine learning and they unionized, and refused to work except under a contract negotiated by the union. If Google wants "that guy" then they have to use that union contract. "That guy" has power, because people want to hire them. That can form an umbrella under which other ML researchers can sign up. Suddenly you can't effectively do ML without working with the union.
Companies with people like that keep those people under extremely lucrative contracts so its unlikely they would be financially motivated to form such a union. There's also the factor that "what even is the top-20 researchers". In movies you know if you have Brad Pitt or not. But you 100% need as many top people as possible to somehow become union-minded. I'd hope that this group of Google workers grows quickly. Its great that they've voted to form.
Note of course I'm just spitballing here and am not at all an expert in labor relations or how unions really form or work. Maybe it didn't go like that. Here's an interesting article thats paywalled, but it at least describes an early unionization and then a big back and forth struggle. It would behoove us all to understand how the labor movement of the 1890s to 1960s came about, because it would appear we are just about to enter such a period.
In the theatre industry the union's work to limit supply and demand is usually along the lines of assigning work by seniority and seniority based on how much work someone has done, so when you first get into IATSE, you have to be really flexible and available for whatever work comes along so that you can accumulate the time to get more work.
This somewhat limits entrants. Some IATSE locals use different variations on that work assignment strategy and some entrants get work outside the union, so it varies by location, specialty, sector, etc.
> I don't know whether something like that would work in the software industry, but it seems at least plausible to me that it could benefit everyone who is currently employed in tech (at the expense of future potential tech employees).
I doubt it, if only because actors are hired in large part due to their celebrity. There are no celebrity SREs (at best they have some cache in the software/SRE community, but not in the general public).
The other unions are even harder to get into. At least occasionally a casting director will insist on a non-SAG actor. Many of the other unions are effectively impossible to get into except via their apprenticeship programs. Similar to the physician cartel ...
Indeed, sports and entertainment unions probably aren't a good comparison for tech. Other professions like accounting, medicine, law, and engineering might have better examples of cost/benefit, though it's hard to think of another professional industry with the ridiculous level of functional duplication (a million frameworks for everything) in tech.
Honestly, an apprenticeship model is probably fairly well suited for a lot of types of software development. In my mind it's superior to a CS degree or bootcamp in terms of teaching practical skills.
There's definitely challenges in not turning it into a protectionist thing, but done well I don't think it's a bad thing.
Mentorship programs exist at most major companies, and new software engineers are not allowed to commit code willy-nilly - They pass code review, and less senior members of a team typically have more careful code review applied to their commits than more senior ones.
Mentorship programs that bypass the degree requirement are less common, but I made it through without a degree. I would love to see more of them, and more companies willing to help with work-study, but the challenges of that approach are real and may not have an easy solution.
I was responding to a particular comment that was talking about the mechanics of these entertainment unions with respect to actors specifically:
> First, the film unions provide useful benefits (like reasonably-priced health insurance), so most professional actors want to be part of the union. Second, union members are prohibited from working on non-union productions. Additionally, most well-known actors are union members. This gives a strong incentive for a production to be a union production. Third, union productions are prohibited from hiring more than a token number of non-union actors (unless they pay a fine to the union). This gives a strong incentive for productions to only use union talent (which also gives actors another reason to want to be a union member).
Note that by observing important differences between the film and software industries, I'm not arguing that unions couldn't work for the software industry. I suspect this is why I've been downvoted.
> I was responding to a particular comment that was talking about the mechanics of these entertainment unions with respect to actors specifically:
I get your point, but I was just using SAG to give a concrete example. The rules are broadly similar for the other film industry unions as well, with similar effects (and other roles have "industry-famous" if not "mom and dad famous" talent).
I suspect you'd get similar dynamics if, for example, a large cohort of the staff/principle engineers plus a bunch of senior engineers in the valley joined the SWE Local 16384. It's probably not necessary that your mom and dad have heard of them.
I guess I'm saying that the celebrity nature of actors is a confounding factor. It's not that these actors are merely celebrities among the film industry, but your mom and dad and friends actually have heard of them and their presence in a film is going to influence whether or not people turn out to see the film. You can get the most famous programmers together to build a product, and no one is going to buy that product on the basis of those programmers' celebrity unless some segment of the software industry is the target audience for that product.
To be quite clear (and likely this was your point, in which case I agree), if the film/tv unions excluded actors, the effect would be pretty comparable. My friends and family aren't going to see a film because Joe The Sound Guy worked on it just like they aren't going to buy an app just because Collin The SRE worked on it (no matter how famous Joe and Collin are in their respective industries).
In general, I try to avoid Twitter though because the software community there is very self-congratulatory and a bit toxic elitist. Not to mention if you aren't a front-end dev good luck being treated like you are a real engineer.
> Not to mention if you aren't a front-end dev good luck being treated like you are a real engineer.
Is this a typo? I was under the impression that frontend devs were near the bottom of the dev pecking order. At least that's been my experience wherever I've worked and in things I've read.
I think you're reading it wrong; the phrasing as I read it is consistent with your "frontend devs at the bottom of the pecking order" perception. The original quote says "good luck being treated like a real engineer" implying that frontend devs are treated so poorly they aren't even considered to be real engineers.
FWIW, frontend is a suite of hard problems which are distinct from the problems we face on the backend but no less challenging. Frontend development today certainly seems a lot less rigorous than backend development in the sense that there seem to be fewer best-practices and more of an embrace of a certain "cowboy/ninja/move-fast-and-break-things" chaotic ethic (engineers from other disciplines would balk at the characterization of backend engineering as 'rigorous', but I think it's fair to say that we devote more rigor to it than frontend development). I think this is largely due to our industry deciding that frontend was a low-skill position and thus putting most of our most junior engineers there to sort it out, and then we on the backend mock them for churning out new frameworks and tools in a desperate effort to bring some order to the chaos.
No, not a typo, just specific to Twitter. On Twitter, I seem to only find React-devs that gain any kind of fame, and then it's all a big circle of people who self-promote one another.
My personal guess is it's because front-end people can demo things easier.
I think amongst larger dev circles, it's probably generally true that front-end are considered towards the bottom. I think some front-end developers, like Dan Abramov, show that that's a bit unfounded.
Hightower's celebrity does not extend to the general public. I don't think he even has a wikipedia page, which is certainly the low water mark for celebrity.
>When I talk to colleagues in tech about unions I hear a lot of misconceptions
Because everyone talking about unionization refuses to get into the nitty gritty of what I might gain, what I might lose, and the structural changes to the workplaces that are inherent with unionization.
And if/when I/others start spitballing about what those might be we're treated like dolts uneducated on organized labor, and should just shut my mouth and get on board.
>they don't always get it right
This is the closest anyone every gets to saying something, but it doesn't mean anything. Where the fuck is the actual case study about the structure of the system, constraints, influences, incentives? How does it evolve and how does the contract change and evolve that system?
>I don't pretend that Hollywood is a perfect utopia of worker relations, but I think it's pretty undeniable that the industry is a much better place with the unions around.
SHOW don't TELL.
tl;dr: Don't tell me I want a union contract, tell me what the terms of the contract will be and I'll decide for myself. I'm probably on board, but every time someone glosses over the details you push me further and further away.
>tell me what the terms of the contract will be and I'll decide for myself.
Nobody can tell you what the contract will be because the contract won't be drawn up until the union exists and has enough members to bargain.
What you DO know is the current contract you have. You DO know that you have virtually no say in what is in that contract, "accept it or leave," is not having a say in that contract. You DO know that as a member of the union, you will have a vote in what employment contracts look like. You DO know that if you have an issue, you have someone outside the company that you can talk to about it--that is, you wont' get fired for bringing it up.
Sounds like the cart before the horse. Tell me I'm signing up for something that I have no idea how it will turn out, and then present me with a take it or leave it contract months later. And I'm stuck.
Its funny to see someone argue for less control over their workplace because they're used to being handed take-it-or-leave it contracts because they've never had any power in the workplace other than to leave.
The feeling you're describing is called negotiation power. What if you and your coworkers like your job but are getting slavedriven for 80 hours a week and that just doesn't work out for you? Right now you have the following options: 1. Leave.
If you had a union you could: 1. Leave. 2. Decide to stop working along with other coworkers who are also pissed off until they agree to stop slavedriving you. 3. Decide to stop working along with other coworkers who are also pissed off until they agree to pay you more for being slavedriven.
I like the latter myself. Having people who care about an enterprise means you don't end up getting run entirely by a bunch of MBAs who listen to complaints while watching a spreadsheet of average tenure.
I (from the UK) don't understand: you don't have to join a union. Keep your current contract and don't have a say in Union representation and negotiation, if that's what you want.
It's 'take greater combined power against the corporation you work for' (and in things like representation of your industry before government) or stand on your own as you do now.
I don't understand how it's possible to lose?
You can even wimp out at the first call for solidarity of you want to.
In my current role there are 3 unions that are well represented in the work place, I chose one that seems best to represent my interests and that has members in industries I might move in to.
Benefits for me are currently advice seminars on career progression and work related issues (pensions!), and annual pay negotiations (which are quite weak, pressing for inflationary pay rises).
>Keep your current contract and don't have a say in Union representation and negotiation, if that's what you want.
Union contracts with the company typically bar the company from keeping or entering contracts with non-union workers that have different terms from those of the union.
In many (23) US states, when a union forms at a workplace, it can compel all non-union workers to pay fees to the union, weather they want to join or not.
I think most US workers would be for unions if they were presented as you described, where you can choose between different options or working without a union.
"Arranged as a members-only union, the new organization won’t seek collective bargaining rights to negotiate a new contract with the company. Instead, the Alphabet Workers Union will only represent employees who voluntarily join, as reported by the New York Times. That structure will also allow it to represent all employees who seek to participate — including temps, vendors, and contractors (known internally as TVCs) who would be excluded by labor law from conventional collective bargaining."
That sounds to me awfully like a voluntary union, though I'm not familiar with the laws allowing unions in various US states to compel non-members to join.
I was speaking to US unions in general. Your quote matches my understanding of the Alphabet Workers Union as well, which is essentially the same thing as a social club. It provides no legal protections, and Alphabet has legal obligation to recognize them.
That's not to say I don't like like the idea, which I prefer to traditional Unions where participation is forced.
That requires a vote of 50%+1 of all eligible employees (not just voters) though, to certify the union as the employee representative, followed by regular elections to union leadership. It's not like a few dozen people can just seize control over union dues and negotiation for the whole workplace.
> Union contracts with the company typically bar the company from keeping or entering contracts with non-union workers that have different terms from those of the union.
I believe that's incorrect. IIRC, the contracts apply the specific classes of workers at specific locations.
I have a friend who works in HR and I know for a fact that their company has different locations that do similar work: some are nonunion, some are union, and the union locations do not all have the same union.
That makes sense, although I would argue he parent post still holds true in that you may not be able to keep your contract and avoid union dues if your workplace forms a union
In a lot of cases, once there's a union you're either in it or unemployed. Unions have a lot of benefits and a lot of negatives. But voting to have one without knowing what _this specific one_ will have either way, knowing that you _must_ be part of it if it passes... that's not a clear decision.
In this case it would be me against a group of employee activists with goals I don't agree with plus the executive leadership. So now I'm powerless against two groups. Even from their announcement post it sounds like they're mostly in favor of political activism and not a single whiff of anything that would actually make my life any better.
This is not how most unions in America work. Usually the entire workforce is represented by (and pays dues to) the same union. Today's Google/Alphabet thing may be an exception to this.
> I (from the UK) don't understand: you don't have to join a union. Keep your current contract and don't have a say in Union representation and negotiation, if that's what you want.
That's not how American unions work. If you don't join the union, you can't work there.
> Sounds like the cart before the horse. Tell me I'm signing up for something that I have no idea how it will turn out, and then present me with a take it or leave it contract months later. And I'm stuck.
That's not a reasonable position, since you're basically asking for someone to predict the future for you (accurately, I hope). Not knowing "how it will turn out" is life, for instance have you ever hired someone new with the knowledge of how they'll perform over the next few years? The answer is no, because it's impossible.
You never know what a contract will be before you negotiate it, and you can always quit and work someplace else if you don't like it. Which is exactly what you probably have now, except your employer writes your contract unilaterally without your input or that of anyone like you.
> You never know what a contract will be before you negotiate it
False. What we can do is look at real life examples of how contracts in other unions have turned out. That is a good baseline for what we could expect from other union contracts.
And the actual, real life examples of other unions, shows me that I absolutely would not want to be in a union.
We do not get to just throw away and ignore the decades and decades of examples of union contracts. That is real evidence that we can look at. And the evidence shows me that I do not want to be in a union contract, based on what other union contracts commonly look like.
> False. What we can do is look at real life examples of how contracts in other unions have turned out. That is a good baseline for what we could expect from other union contracts.
Ok, then. There are a lot of "other unions," which ones are you thinking about? They're pretty diverse. I mean you have all the way from autoworkers, to the film industry, the public sector, to engineers (at Boeing for instance).
> And the actual, real life examples of other unions, shows me that I absolutely would not want to be in a union.
Then go find a non-union workplace, then? It's not like they're going to get banned or anything, and they currently consist of about 100% of software engineering workplaces in the US.
There's this weird vibe I get from some people that tech unions shouldn't exist at all because they personally don't like the idea of them. What about choice?
Or, instead of that, I could sabotage any efforts to create unions, thereby making it so I cannot be forced to join a union. That sounds way more productive.
> that tech unions shouldn't exist at all
I don't have any problem with a union existing, as long as they are not using labor laws to require people at a certain company to join that union, or require them to pay fees.
You can form whatever social club that you want, but the moment that you try to use the law to require me to pay your fees, or accept your contract, under penalty of losing my job, as per labor laws, then we have a problem, and I will fight your efforts to unionize.
> It's not like they're going to get banned or anything
A union shop would ban me from working at a company, if I don't join that union, or pay their fee. That is how it negatively impacts me.
> they currently consist of about 100% of software engineering workplaces in the US.
Yep! Anti union efforts are winning. And as long as union advocates are attempting to creation union shops, which use labor laws in this way, I hope that anti-union efforts continue to win.
> There are a lot of "other unions," which ones are you thinking about?
Yep! And there are problems with most of the ones that you brought up.
Any union that takes into account seniority, and negotiated based on that, is a union that I have a problem with.
Any union that puts up barrier to entry into the industry, by required certain standards, or doing the things that for example the film industry does, is a union that I have a problem with.
The film industry union, for example, has very serious barriers to entry, that make it difficult for new actors to join certain film productions.
Other examples of bad unions would be things like the pilots union. It might be fine for the piloting industry, but the problem with the pilot's union model is that it is literally entirely based on senority. If you leave Fedex, for example, and join Delta, then you start at the bottom, and lose all of your pay raises and benefits that are strictly determined by the union.
(And please don't even try to argue with me about this, regarding piloting unions. Both my parents work for fedex, and are in the pilot's union. I know how they work.)
This situation might be fine for the piloting industry, but I would absolutely hate it if I were defacto required to work at the same company for my entire career, in the tech industry.
> Or, instead of that, I could sabotage any efforts to create unions, thereby making it so I cannot be forced to join a union. That sounds way more productive.
Well, at least that's honest.
> Other examples of bad unions would be things like the pilots union. It might be fine for the piloting industry, but the problem with the pilot's union model is that it is literally entirely based on senority. If you leave Fedex, for example, and join Delta, then you start at the bottom, and lose all of your pay raises and benefits that are strictly determined by the union.
> (And please don't even try to argue with me about this, regarding piloting unions. Both my parents work for fedex, and are in the pilot's union. I know how they work.)
While I'm sure you disagree, that's some pretty fallacious reasoning. It's like arguing against the concept of for-profit corporations because you don't like some practice of, say, Accenture, because you falsely assume that practice must be replicated without any any reform to all other companies.
Most instances of things have flaws, often serious flaws, but a lot of people seem to hold unions to a weird standard where they should be rejected unless all instances are flawless.
Personally, I'd also have a problem with a union that "is literally entirely based on senority," but I think it makes more sense to reform the institution than reject it (and throw the baby out with the bathwater).
>> they currently consist of about 100% of software engineering workplaces in the US.
> Yep! Anti union efforts are winning. And as long as union advocates are attempting to creation union shops, which use labor laws in this way, I hope that anti-union efforts continue to win.
And anti-democracy efforts are also winning in China. I mean, CCTV has pretty clearly shown that they're so unstable, with weak incompetent leadership. Don't you hope those anti-democratic efforts continue? I know I prefer to live under a strong, competent leader like Xi.
Anti-union efforts are winning, but mainly because business has long been in a more powerful position than labor and has been more effective at propagandizing its position. IIRC, that propaganda mainly consists of creating a distorted picture based on selectively chosen truths.
> because you falsely assume that practice must be replicated without any any reform to all other companies.
You yourself asked me for some examples of problems that I had, lol! Why even ask me what problems I had with unions, if your response was just going to be "Well, we can't look at your real world example"?
Also, I do not accept any hypothetical union, that does not exist, as a justification as for why unions are good.
The only thing that I will accept is a real world example, of a real union, so that we can make judgements on that to see if it would be good for the tech industry or not.
> to a weird standard where they should be rejected unless all instances are flawless
It is not about being flawless. Instead it is that the actual, real world examples that I have of unions, very often include very serious problems.
> reform the institution
So now we are entering the world of fantasy land. If you cannot point to a real world example of a union that you like, then any argument that you are making right now is just a story that you made up in your head that is not backed up to fact.
I have already pointed to very serious problems in unions. That is valid evidence.
And the only response that I ever get, when I point out the very serious problems with real world unions is "Well, all the examples that you brought up don't counts, and no I don't have any examples of unions that I like! Instead, you should just believe me that things are going to be good, even though all the real world evidence proves otherwise".
If pro union people want the tech industry to get on board then they need to show us facts, evidence and real world examples, instead of making up a story that is not backed by anything.
That's not how collective bargaining works. A contract has to be negotiated between the union members and management. As a member, you would have a say in the contract that the union negotiates.
For example, I was a member of the organizing committee for the union at my last job where I worked as a software engineer. After the union was recognized, members held an election for all the union's leadership positions as well as for the members of the bargaining committee that negotiates the contract with management. Bargaining sessions between the union and management is completely open for any member of the union to attend. The committee publishes reports to the membership after each bargaining session on the items discussed. Presuming the union and management come agree to the terms that would go into a contract, that tentative agreement is sent to the members of the union to vote on and either accept the terms, or to reject them, in which case the union and management will continue to bargain a new tentative agreement.
What you're describing "tell me I'm signing up for something that I have no idea how it will turn out" is actually what happens when you accept any new job you take. When you accept a job offer, you know a few things, e.g., your salary and benefits, your manager, etc. But there's a lot you wouldn't typically know, e.g., how performance is evaluated and how promotions and raises are determined, what your workload would be and what protections you might have from overwork or excessive discipline or unfair termination.
What a union provides is not only a voice for everyone in the workplace, but for collectively bargaining and making clear the the conditions and treatment you can expect in your workplace.
If the new contract is worse, leaving the union isn't sufficient to get back to where you were, because the employer won't offer the old terms to non-union members and the new terms to union members.
You may or may not be better off. How will people that are/aren't part of a union be treated if some people are members? If majority is union and you are not, will you be shunned, denied same opportunities for promotion, etc? We can only guess.
The management have to find out you're in a union first, then ... why do they shun you, what's the play you're imagining here?
Don't you have employment contracts? People will, at least under rule of law, be treated according to their contracts and your country's employment law??
Does your company currently investigate who you've spoken to about your job and seek to punish you for representing your better interests?
I believe the person you're replying to was talking about how non-union members would be treated by union members. And, at least in the US, the answer is "horrible". The people in the unions are widely known for coming out hard and strong, with considerable bile, against anyone that so much as expresses the opinion that the union might not be the right choice for them. Rats, scabs, etc; pick your insulting name, they're called it.
> if you don't like it, yeah, leave the union, you're no worse off than you were before.
Completely false. With the ways that union laws work, if the majority of workers at a company unionize, then I have no choice but to be subject to their contract and fees.
Most tech companies are not in right to work states, so I'd have to go along with the contract.
The person asked if I was worse off or not. And I am. I am worse off in that I cannot stay at a job that becomes a union job, without having to pay the union.
Why is it bad to be forced to contribute to union dues involuntarily, but OK to be forced to contribute to shareholder profits involuntarily (as all employees are in for-profit enterprises)?
Give whatever moral arguments that you want. I will repeat once again. The person who I was responding to said " you're no worse off than you were before".
This statement is not true, and I have explained exactly how I would be worse off.
I would be worse off in that now I have to give money to the union, and I now have to be represented by their deals, and I don't want that. That is how I am worse off.
I don't care about your moral arguments. Instead I care about what hurts or helps me.
I will repeat again. The person claimed that I would not be worse off. And that person was wrong. And I have described specifically how I would be worse off.
You keep trying to redirect to something that is not relevant. The relevant question was whether or not I would be worse off with a union. And the answer is that I have giving an exact answer as to how I would be worse off.
Glad that you agree that the original person was wrong, and that I was right on how I would be worse off.
Nothing that you said at all disagrees with me regarding this specific issue. You have made no statement that disagrees with the true fact that I would be worse off by having to be under the union contract."
This conversation is about whether or not people are harmed by unions in this way, and bringing up irrelevant stuff does not change that.
Nothing that you said is an actual convincing argument as for why unions do not harm me, when I have laid out specifically how it makes my situation worse.
I'm simply asking you why you're very bothered by union dues, but not by shareholder dues. Why not give a straight answer?
To address your better off vs worse off question: You'll be better off as a union member, through the superior negotiating power of collective bargaining.
> I'm simply asking you why you're very bothered by union dues, but not by shareholder dues
I said nothing of the sort. Instead I responded to someone who claimed that unions make me no worse off. And I have described how that is false.
That is the only thing that I have said. Please do not put words into my mouth or say that I said things, when I did not say them.
Can you please stop lying about me saying anything, when I have been extremely clear regarding my original statement?
It seems like you do not disagree with me that the original person is wrong though.
> You'll be better off as a union member, through the superior negotiating power of collective bargaining
Not if I don't want that contract, or if I don't want to engage in collective bargaining, that I am now forced to join if I want to keep my job. There are many things in actual real life examples of union contracts that I would strongly oppose.
And no, I will not accept you talking about some hypothetical union contract that does not exist, where you claim that this non standard union contract, that has none of the bad things that I brought up, would help.
The only thing that I will accept as arguments, as for why unions are good or bad, is actual real life examples of contracts that have been enacted in the real world, because anything else is just a story that someone made up in their head.
And there are many examples of concrete real union contracts that I would absolutely not support.
> Why not give a straight answer?
A straight answer to things that you are lying about, that I did not say? I have already given you a straight answer about exactly what I believe, and that I have made no comments on any completely irreverent thing that do not disagree with what I said.
What I don't want is union contracts, which have many very significant drawbacks, in the real world, that have nothing to do with pay.
There are many real world examples of union contracts that have very serious issues, regarding many things not related to pay at all.
And yes, I get to point to the problems that I see in real world examples of union contracts, because anything else about some hypothetical that does not exist, is just a story that someone made up in their head.
Why is it bad to be forced to be part of a union and contribute dues involuntarily, but OK to be forced to contribute to your employer's profits involuntarily?
Wouldn't it be a win-win if the shareholders make a profit and I make a profit from my pay, vs. me being forced to pay union dues due to laws protecting unions bargaining power and ability to dictate who can and can't join a certain industry?
Some employers have a little flexibility in their contract (I got one of the probably not enforcable in California claims of ownership of work outside the office redlined on a support position).
If you're joining an employer with a negotiated contract, there's really no chance to change it when you're hired; it's accept it or leave. You generally aren't part of the bargaining if you're not a current employee.
Maybe the contract is better, but we'd have to see some to know. Maybe I don't want what the union wants and while I have a vote, it doesn't have significance unless my opinions are shared by others.
Their union seems to be more social justice focused than I'd be interested in joining, e.g. "achieve just outcomes, social and economic justice are paramount".
I'd be much more interested in tackling things like non-competes, employee ownership of side projects, better vesting schedules, better direction for the company, salaries, revisiting how many H1B visas there are, etc.
My general point is that I'd be up for unionizing to make things better for employees. Not for social justice. Another big one would be moving to a 32 hour work week.
I want specific objectives that make life better for employees including me (although I don't work at Google, I mean hypothetically, if I did). I don't want generic platitudes.
How does one define "inclusive and fair". Who decides what is inclusive? The Union? I don't want to apply the fallacy of inclusion, but if someone wears a crucifix and that makes an atheist feel excluded, who is right? I know "the Union will decide" but tyranny of the majority is a real thing. See the ban on burkas/hijabs in many "inclusive" countries.
Also, if you are appealing to the public, saying that the working conditions at Google, where you are paid near the top 1% of the all workers and have free food etc, "working conditions" might not be the right term.
We have the freedom to decline to work on projects that don’t align with our values
When do you declare your values? Is it always a moving target? To be a conscientious objector in the United States, there needs to be a demonstrable history of your objection. You can't get drafted and then suddenly find religion. How do you stop the inevitable abuse of this exclusion?
>When do you declare your values? Is it always a moving target? To be a conscientious objector in the United States, there needs to be a demonstrable history of your objection. You can't get drafted and then suddenly find religion. How do you stop the inevitable abuse of this exclusion?
Well, we're talking about working on software projects here. I work in defense and would have no qualms about the whole Project Maven thing. But if all they want is the freedom to decline to work on it, that seems pretty reasonable to me. They didn't sign up for that stuff, and Google isn't primarily a defense company.
The draft is (in theory) an emergency measure for the good of the nation. Just like the government can force you to pay taxes, they can force you to fight in the military. That's certainly not a power a private corporation should have.
I find this sentiment quite weird honestly. The "contract" between the employee and the employer is that the employee does what the employer asks of them, and in return gets paid for his work. If these employees do not desire to work on projects that Google is getting, then they should terminate the contract and find work elsewhere.
So, Actually. That's exactly what they signed up for.
It is bonkers to me that a employee does not work on what the employee wants to work on, within a company, and yet also expects the employer to keep paying them.
This honestly sounds like so much privilege. These workers are top 1% of the world, it sounds like "whining" when you are not in their position.
Is that "privilege"? Sure, it's power. It's a straightforward extension of the "take-it-or-leave-it" principle you describe.
I have the power to tell my boss "I'm not going to work on that", and they're free to keep paying me to do something else instead. It's the same power I use to negotiate my pay and benefits, and the entire reason I developed this skillset and work in this industry.
Using that power to form a union and wield it collectively is one aspect of the right to freely associate. If Alphabet workers want to use that collective power to negotiate a legal contract protecting their job if they refuse to work on a project, that's their right.
> and they're free to keep paying me to do something else instead
But I am guessing they're not free to fire you, right? So, it's not really "take-it-or-leave-it" but more "take-it-or-choose-something-else". There's not leaving involved.
> If Alphabet workers want to use that collective power to negotiate a legal contract protecting their job if they refuse to work on a project, that's their right.
This is what confuses me, and maybe you can help me understand.
1. Employee and Employer have a contract where Employee will work on what Employer wants and get paid in return.
2. Employee does not want to work on what Employer wants, yet wants to be paid i.e. wants the employer to honor their part of the contract while wanting to renege on their part.
Let's use another example.
Would one be supportive of employees wanting to only work FOSS while at Alphabet refusing to work on anything else, and still "protect their job" i.e. not be fired?
> The "contract" between the employee and the employer is that the employee does what the employer asks of them, and in return gets paid for his work. If these employees do not desire to work on projects that Google is getting, then they should terminate the contract and find work elsewhere.
Ah, okay. So if your current employer asked you and your coworkers to do something that was legal but highly unethical, you and every one of your coworkers would be financially secure enough to quit at the drop of a hat? Must be nice.
> you and every one of your coworkers would be financially secure enough to quit at the drop of a hat
If i worked at Google, where SWE's are earning above 120K at a graduate level. I would hope so. I don't earn that sort of money, nor have that level of a safety net, so therefore, I must compromise and continue to work.
What do you think negotiations are for? Google will decide if accepting these projects is worth keeping their workforce and the workers will decide what they can accept working on for money
I would say it's more culturally motivated than political. Google has accumulated a lot of idealists that have strong opinions about the direction of the company without being promoted to a level where they can actualize these opinions by themselves. Given the support previous walk-outs have received asking employees there seems to be at least a strong passive support for these opinions.
Part of this is from how outside leadership has been brought in that is accidentally trampling over unwritten rules and part of this is conflicts in the different interpretations the increasing number of employees have of these unwritten rules.
Banjo music and high school sports are cultural. Rules about empowerment are political. The word power is right in there.
I'll grant that there is support and perhaps increasing sentiment. I am not sure that there is consensus that those issues are paramount. I'm also not sure it's even enough for overwhelming majorities are sufficient to enact rules. There is such a thing as a democratic tyranny. But some sort of bill of rights might be interesting, depending.
Thank you for, at least, hypothesizing the benefits, so we can have a proper discussion.
The top two seem fine, but Google is one of the best places to work at on the planet. But I don't mind it being improved.
The fourth one is really just a compensation package. I don't agree that every job should have the same compensation/benefits.
The third one is what I oppose. If you don't want to work on a project, then don't. I don't want to work in a trash dump (oh the pay is great too), so I don't.
I'm also certain that the fourth one will be weaponized and use for deplatforming people.
Sounds political, which is the problem with unions. If I want to work I have to pay dues to a political organisation. Also, why should a company pay you when you refuse to work on a project?
> You DO know that you have virtually no say in what is in that contract, "accept it or leave," is not having a say in that contract.
Not only is "accept it or leave it" very much a form of "having a say" in your work parameters, it's a much more powerful way of exerting your preferences than voting.
If 100,000 people are voting on a contract your 1/100,000th share of the influence functionally rounds to zero. The contract will reflect your coworkers aggregate preferences, which will in general be completely orthogonal to your own preferences. On the other hand, when you shop around for a job you have unbounded freedom to decide where you want to apply to and what working conditions are you willing to accept. If you want more job stability and better working hours in exchange for lower pay, someone will be willing to offer it to you. If you want "fuck you, pay me", someone else will offer that too.
"Accept it or leave it" is a post-facto event: one accepts or rejects the contents of the contract. What the OP is referring to is participation ("having a say") in the drafting of the contract itself. By definition "accept it or leave it" is not having a say in it.
Having a say in the contract you end up signing (which may be at a variety of different companies) is more personally useful to the individual than having a say in the specific contract of a specific company. So the claim that unions give you more say in the employment conditions of a specific company is irrelevant because it's an optimization towards the wrong objective.
> If 100,000 people are voting on a contract your 1/100,000th share of the influence functionally rounds to zero.
Assuming that you make no effort to influence any of the hypothetical 100,000 people voting on the contract in any way.
> The contract will reflect your coworkers aggregate preferences, which will in general be completely orthogonal to your own preferences.
This is a fairly surprising assertion for me - I can't recall a time I've personally found this to be the case professionally. May I ask how you encountered this in your own professional experience?
> Assuming that you make no effort to influence any of the hypothetical 100,000 people voting on the contract in any way.
And if all 100k people all try to influence each other to different ends that ends up a wash.
> This is a fairly surprising assertion for me
Some people prefer better work life balance, other people prefer higher compensation. Some people want job security, others want higher risk and higher upside. Labour market mobility allows people to sort into the jobs that match their preferences, which is impossible to achieve through collective bargaining because the parts of the collective want different things.
>The contract will reflect your coworkers aggregate preferences, which will in general be completely orthogonal to your own preferences.
Can you elaborate on your thoughts here or cite evidence to support it? On first thought, it doesn’t ring true to me. E.g., most of the union contract conditions seem to benefit most individuals with the exception of some edge cases
Plenty of union contracts emphasize seniority when it comes to pay/benefits/promotions etc, which makes it harder both for younger employees to get pay increases and promotions out of turn and for people to job hop for career progression.
That’s a real concern in terms of meritocracy, but I don’t see how it makes your goals orthogonal to everyone else’s, unless you are always a young out-performer. Almost by default, if you’re not job hopping (presumably to get a raise) you won’t always be one of the younger employees. The out-performance piece is by definition an edge case.
The original comment seemed to lay claim that each individual will sacrifice for the collective to become a net negative. I think there’s a good case to be against seniority rules, but it’s almost impossible to claim they are against every individual self interest.
Most of these problems are industry wide, poor work life balance is the rule in tech jobs, and jobs that are better have such high competition almost nobody will actually be able to shop around.
Flexibility can be built into union contacts, and its unlikely each of the 100,000 people will have entirely different and opposed interested to you
Tech jobs have by far the best work life balance among any job where you can make well into six figures right out of college. How many hours do you think investment bankers, biglaw attorneys, management consultants, medical residents etc. work?
What do you think the software industry will be like 20 years from now? Do you think the cushy salaries and relative lack of gate keeping will stay around? I sure as hell don't.
Unionize now, even if you earn a little less, while you have the most bargaining power, so that later you don't have to fight through pinkerton detectives just to get a seat at the table.
There's a reason companies like Google suppress initiatives to form unions, and build strong zeitgeists within their employee base that unionization is bad. If unionization is so bad why do companies spend so much money breaking it up? For the good of the workers? Bahahaha.
> There's a reason companies like Google suppress initiatives to form unions, and build strong zeitgeists within their employee base that unionization is bad. If unionization is so bad why do companies spend so much money breaking it up?
If something was bad, why would you take the existence of opposition to it as evidence of it being good?
Suppose unionization was bad for both employers and employees. You would certainly expect employers to oppose that. Even if it was totally neutral for employers and bad for employees, they would oppose unionization at their own company because it would make it more difficult for them to attract and retain quality employees.
If unionization were bad for employees, I'd expect the employers to be able to make that case persuasively. If they don't, I assume there's not much of a case to be made.
Salaries would fall due to increased supply. A union would keep salaries high by not keeping the gates open (if it were modeled on the film industry unions).
> A union would keep salaries high by not keeping the gates open
That’s the same argument people use against immigration.
I realize HN is a diverse place and not everybody has the same opinion on these matters, but I find it interesting that people here generally support labor protectionism when it applies to high-income earners like software engineers, but they don’t support closing the borders in order to increase the wages of low-income earners.
USA-centric (but not in the south): I'm pretty open to most immigration. The "close our borders" discussion tends to lump in skilled-worker programs; I think those are usually more amenable to most than general immigration. Regardless, my country was built on immigration and I think it'd be foolish to lose sight of that.
This is what I'd consider the "traditional" answer to the function of a union. I think it makes plenty of sense.
The parent comment seemed to me to suggest that a union would both keep the door open and the price high, and I don't see any clear way a union would do that.
Additionally, the low hanging fruit for automation is going to diminish. We'll always have things to automate, but in general those things will decrease in value.
I think this isn’t true, at least for SWEs at companies like Google. Do you have any evidence for this position? Or any example evidence of what salaries used to be and what they are now?
I only have my personal experience contrasted older swes. In the nyc area swes start at around 80k a year entry level, whereas a few years ago swes started at 120k+ entry level
Maybe google is different, but industry wide wages are falling
> When the vision maps to 80 / 90 percent of labor at that enterprise, the effort to unionize can win.
The odds of this happening at Google in the next ten years are pretty low, I'd say. That's why they organized this as a members-only union rather than trying to do a real unionization drive.
I agree. It will be interesting to see it play out.
Members only does lower the bar considerably.
Size matters. If it gets big?
New ideas matter too.
The traditional union struggle has become very difficult in the US. The high solidarity numbers required today are 20 to 30 points more than necessary before.
> What terms improve things for everyone? How should work be?
There is no such thing as "improving things for everyone" because different people have different preferences. Some people want job stability, some people want work life balance, some people just want to get paid, fuck everything else. If a union tries to pursue some priorities over others they are screwing over all the employees who have different preferences.
You're taking it on faith that those with authority in the discussions will be acting altruistically with equitable consideration for all would-be members.
Nobody can tell you what a contract will look like because unions are democratic, all of us decide what we want, then send negotiators to get what we want, then we approve the result
Thats like saying if democracy is so good, why wont anyone tell me what the result of the election will be
When the company has numerous legal or illegal but usually unpunished methods to suppress the discussion, it can be very difficult to conduct the negotiations between employees necessary for the concise plan/contract you request.
Voting in a union is actually voting first that you opt in to a collective bargaining agreement, then negotiating the terms of the agreement among members. Later, negotiations are had with the company.
Your POV is common to many that will accept much less with certainty rather than working through a decent amount of uncertainty for the prospect of a whole lot more.
>Your POV is common to many that will accept much less with certainty rather than working through a decent amount of uncertainty for the prospect of a whole lot more.
Don't you put that on me. You're explicitly talking about a scenario where we're not even comparing notes on the possibility space of that uncertainty until I'm downside-committed.
> Where the fuck is the actual case study about the structure of the system, constraints, influences, incentives? How does it evolve and how does the contract change and evolve that system?
These are the questions that some organizers who have written books about organizing are also trying to answer.
Thanks for the info in general, I just wasn’t expecting a general response to be your motivation in a response to a comment where I pointed out the parent poster was bullshitting me.
> "everyone talking about unionization refuses to get into the nitty gritty of what I might gain, what I might lose,"
Do you support dictatorships or monarchies on the grounds that democracy enthusiasts cannot tell you exactly what the populace will vote for?
To use your phrasing, where in the fuck is the actual case study about the structure of the status quo's constraints, influences and incentives?
Apart from the lobbying, the quiet silencing of health and safety and maybe ethics violations, the de-facto expected longer hours and 24x7 on-call, the decades of open-secret poor working conditions in the gaming industry, the constant complaints of tech worker burnout, tech often being considered a cost center and reporting to MBAs and CFOs and not getting a board level representation that reflects the value tech creates, the use of stack ranking that doesn't get applied to sales / management teams, the standard advice that the only way to get a significant salary increase is to change jobs, the often poor or misaligned or unreachable incentives and targets, the situation where a company paying more in perks instead of money is considered good, and etc.
You didn't demand a study before agreeing the current approach is good, did you?
> "Don't tell me I want a union contract, tell me what the terms of the contract will be"
Exactly what people negotiate for will be a representation of what isn't being taken seriously in any specific workplace. "Divide and conquer" - one employer with tens of millions of dollars and a team of lawyers united on one side and every individual employee divided with a fraction of a lawyer and a small amount of money on the other side. How can this ever result in great things for the employee side?
Unless you're the 1% with your pick of FAANG jobs and high 6-figure salaries, in which case you're the exception everyone else should ignore because we aren't you and a system where only the 1% can get desirable working conditions for most of their life, and everyone else deserves to suffer for not being good enough, is a bad system.
It's worth noting that the Bill of Rights was agreed to in principle before the U.S. Constitution was modified. The amendment process also can bypass the national office holders if need be, which is a kind of democratic check on centralized power, albeit an basically unused one so far.
Unions depend on making a black and white argument. The whole idea can't work with a nuanced argument. Either the company bows to the union or strikes start up. Either the employee joins the union or he/she gets kicked out of the company.
It's socialism for the majority. If you want a nuanced argument, meet your union leader at the church he goes to on sunday and see how fervently committed he is to his goals. You're more likely to get a nuanced argument in the face of God, rather than these big dick, black and white union arguments people endlessly wave in our collective face.
The union structure is not free from religious, political and justice problems. Some of the largest unions in the US spend union funds on politically charged topics that easily divide it's own membership.
You won't get a satisfying answer because it has little to do with rational answers and more to do with sexual security. Union members secure and promote their progeny.
I don't need to see a negotiated contract. I need to see a list of grievances the union wants to negotiate for. So far everything I have ever wanted but not had from an employer I was able to find by switching employers. What is something concrete that would make my life better that I can only get by joining a union?
Not omitting anything. Organizing is what discontinued the DoD contracts and several other unsavory problems in recent years. That's entirely my point: employees already have the power to effect change for important issues without involving all of the problems that plague official unions like teachers' unions and police unions.
I don't see what adding a body that allows you to vote on what get's done involves all of those problems.
Unions are structured in a way determined by the workers who are voting, there is no inevitable path for a union to take. A teacher union is very different from an actor's union, for instance, even if they are covered by the same basic laws.
FYI: AWU is a no-contract (minority/solidarity/members) union. Their strategy for the foreseeable future will be pursuing precisely what you are describing here (organizing workers for walk-outs, without locking in a CBA).
Yes, if they're willing to continue letting their organizers be fired afterwards for "unrelated reasons". As-is organizing each walkout has to start from scratch since the previous leadership structure no longer exists.
This has allowed the management to make promises to address concerns and fail to follow through on them. Or have HR take over employee-organized community groups discussing grievances and slowly let them die.
This is usually communicated in the course of organizing - you don't win union elections by not communicating what you stand for/what would be pushed for in a new contract.
I hear a lot of misconceptions, seemingly based in stereotypes about what unions are for and who they serve
Unfortunately, through my own experience being in one & observing other unions, they often end up serving the organization of the union itself. They may still work for the workers, but also end up making decisions that are better for the union than for the workers.
Right now, my kids are learning remotely. However, the school district has encouraged teachers themselves to still report to their classroom to teach from there because seeing that environment lends at least a little bit more normalcy to the experience. You might agree or disagree, but the teachers have the choice. However, teachers are being told & subtly bullied by the union into not doing this for some vague justification that it weakens the union. At least one member I know of has said they're teaching like this, but they hope the union doesn't find out because they would "get in trouble".
I think unions can be a good & important tool in equalizing the power imbalance between an individual worker and their larger employers. Unfortunately, those who seek & rise to position of authority within the union structure are often those who end up seeing the union are a "good" unto itself rather than serving the members & their wishes.
This isn't a power trip by union leadership/ "the organization of the union itself" though?
It's a real concern
about the safety and working conditions, and how a lack of a unified front can lead to fissures when negotiating that could actually hurt a majority of union members.
The unions members probably mostly prefer work from home due to safety concerns. Should the school district wish to demand all teachers report to the building, the negotiation position of the union is significantly weakened if the administration can say "well 25% of your membership is already in the building" as a justification for denying hazard pay, further health and safety precautions, etc.
The schools are sanitized nightly and those who go in literally don't have to see anyone else, and by policy are not supposed to.
"Unified front" That is not the purpose of the union. The union exists to serve it's members. If serving it's members might be slightly more difficult if it actually accommodates the choices of the members it serves, well that's it's job. It's job is not to make it's job easier, it's to serve the members. If the district tries to pressure other members because some make a certain choice, or not provide a safe working environment, That is the fight the union should fight. Not bullying members against making the choice the members feels is the right one to best serve the students.
The possibility of adversarial action by the school district is insufficient to justify the union's actions, especially when, in the case of my school district, the district has otherwise been very responsive to the concerns of the union with respect to health & safety protocols.
Is the union preventing teachers from going into the school? Is it not OK for the union to have a position on the matter and communicate it to their members?
Why is it ok for the administration to say "we prefer but don't require you to come in" but not ok for the union to say "actually, we prefer but don't require you to stay home"?
A unified front is EXACTLY the purpose of a union. The threat of collective action by the entire workforce is what unions derive their power from.
> not ok for the union to say "actually, we prefer but don't require you to stay home"?
If I prefer to work from the building, and the union is pressuring[1] me to stay home, that tells me the union is not working for me.
If the union were working for me, it might demand that work from home be allowed for those who prefer or need it, and that work from the building be done in safe conditions.
This is my problem with unions; it's fine if you fit with the majority, but if you don't you're paying a portion of your salary to prop up an organization between you and your employer that's actively pushing for things you don't want. It's just a different windmill to tilt at.
[1] When the union expresses a preference, and people are worried about the union hearing that they didn't follow the preference, that's pressure.
I don't understand how you can claim that a unified front is their purposes. Their purpose is to serve their workers. Forcing all workers to behave the same way seems a poor interpretation of that duty.
Otherwise, sure it's fine to have a position on an issue and communicate it to members. What is not fine is to imply to members that if they make their own choice then the union will never support them should they have a problem, even for an unrelated issue, essentially stripping them of union support. This is what I meant by bullying, and have myself witnessed.
But if you insist that a unified front, rather than supporting workers, is their purpose then we fundamentally disagree, and I'll leave things by pointing out that the "unified front" can be to support worker choice & flexibility.
Their purpose is multifaceted, but without a (mostly) unified front on matters they wish to bargain around, their ability to best serve their members during bargaining is compromised.
Threats of withholding union protection for making an informed choice would be shocking (and likely illegal!).
I don't pretend to know what you've seen and heard, but in most cases where "threats" were made, my bet would be that a statement like "if you want the union to be around to help protect you, listening to our guidance is the best course", was interpreted as a threat (singular specific you), rather than a general statement on the importance of how vital solidarity is for the survival of the union and its collective bargaining power(general/plural you).
Shocking, but not uncommon in my anecdotal experience. Of course it might not be universal. In my experience it went as follows:
Union members automatically pay dues. They have the option of paying more dues. Someone who paid the automatic dues went to the union for help. Each time, they were urged to opt in to paying more dues. They chose not to, and were left waiting for help. When they finally chose to increase their dues, the help suddenly materialized.
And sure, most speech surrounding the bullying isn't direct. Would you expect it to be explicit? That simply isn't how any remotely intelligent person makes illegal threats. But it's pretty easy to pick up on the tone of "hey it's a nice job you have here. It would be a shame if something were to happen to it"
I support unions, I think they provide a net benefit to workers, but power structures frequently attract people more interested in wielding the power than in the purpose that power is suppose to serve. I see too much of a tendency in supporters of unions to overlook this fact, with any criticism dismissed as "you don't support the workers!". (Note: I'm not accusing you of that. We appear to be having a reasonable discussion)
> And sure, most speech surrounding the bullying isn't direct.
Having been in two unions in a prior life, I'd say the only reason this is true is due to lack of in-person communication. Anything documentable will be kept to semi-acceptable levels. The true (daily) abuse comes when they return to the classroom. These folks need to prepare for some bullying.
Most teachers defying the union on this will not make it more than another year in that district once classrooms return would be my uninformed bet. It will be a mission of every other union member at each school to make their everyday existence a living hell.
Yes, I have very poor taste in my mouth when it comes to my experiences with unions. I certainly recognize what they've accomplished and could still accomplish; but until they stop existing as corrupt rackets to protect the lowest common denominator employee they are going to be a hard sell to much of the US who has dealt with such creatures.
of course, just like how when the mob says "if you want our guys to be around to help protect you, listening to our guidance is the best course" it's not a threat but a general statement on the importance of community solidarity or how when trump says "if you want our tax dollars and support for your state, finding those extra votes is the best course" it's not a threat but a general statement on the financial realities of federal spending
Having teachers drive to work to talk in front of a webcam is an obviously unnecessary move and a waste of time. They don't need a vague justification, it's pretty evident why this is a non-starter.
Labor laws and collective bargaining are two very complicated topics. Perhaps the union gave the teacher you talked to a perfectly rational explanation but it came out as "vague justification" to them because they didn't understand it? I think that is more plausible than the union demanding teachers to work-from-home for no good reason.
1. Fat cats. What are the due fees? %1 now?, later then? %5 of gross annually? 200 people * 300k year * %5 of salary = 3 million. They will use this on fancy dinners with Google execs? Or spend it in "wrongful terminations" law suites with google for years? What happens when 50x more join.
2. Who runs it? Will it be a 10 year long president? What is her union salary? A non-google person? Will it be full time? A slack group? They dish out favors to win elections?
3. Who gets into the union? Base is on the newest woke culture? Base it on need? Salary? Scan their social media? Popularity contests? Seems like a great way to start discrimination.
4. Will being in this union freak out future employers? If your union spends most of it's time suing - will they want you around? EG. I don't see Tesla wanting a high ranking union person from google.
5. My wife worked at a union. Unions tend to not fire - so (non blue collar) you end up with hundreds of drained, demotivated, incompetent - due payers. This is the direction people at google want to go? Who will actually do the work? Non-union Sub-contractors?
6. Will they become political? Will you have to join this political party? What if you disagree on a few things? You still pay dues right - to the Fat Cat?
7. Will they corner off work? EG. You can't be a designer level III without being in the union.
One thing that wont happen: better working conditions.
These are all real problems, especially in a lot of today's older unions that have been completely hollowed out and have become a kind of do-nothing "labor aristocracy."
They don't function as democratic institutions serving laborers' interests anymore, only their own narrow, elite, institutional needs--often institutional self-preservation at the expense of their members' interests. They're decrepit, corrupt dinosaurs, just like the Right says. But they got that way by losing the fight in the 20th century. Now they're kind of useless vestiges just waiting around to slough off eventually.
So the old unions are no model to emulate here. But just noting that and giving up of course leaves the problem of my lack of power in the workplace completely unsolved.
> One thing that wont happen: better working conditions.
I still want better working conditions though, for me and for everybody. What do you suggest?
> I still want better working conditions though, for me and for everybody. What do you suggest?
Well, a re-brand for one. Don't call it a "union". Call it something else if it is something else. If you make a union patterned after traditional ones, why shouldn't it become a corrupt entity 50 years later just like all the current corrupt unions?
I'm very pro-labor/pro-worker, whatever you want to call it, and I'd be all about using a different term than union. It's a loaded term that has all sorts of negative connotation. New decade, new world of tech, new term for collectivized labor. I will admit, the police union problem is a hard counter. It's a solvable problem though, I think.
Guild has a connotation of workmanship and craft expertise, industriousness, etc. I do like that.
But there is also an existing phenomenon of various things calling themselves guilds (there are various "freelancers'" guilds, e.g.), but they do not function as an economic bargaining institution at all. They're just professional organizations where people exchange contact info for networking purposes.
I think there's no getting around the task at hand: rehabilitating the concept of a union of workers with shared interests and goals (even shared fraternity, if I'm gonna be super sentimental). It's capital, it's labor, it's unions. New century, same basic stuff.
My take on this is the old unions aren't decrepit just because they're unions and they've existed for 100 years. I don't think it's built in to the nature of unions to eventually become decrepit (no more than any other institution anyway).
Their problem is not that they're old, it's that they're not powerful enough anymore to be the kind of adversarial force they once were. They're shrinking instead of growing. Their strategy, if they even have any, is built around defensive self-preservation and survival. It's a siege mentality.
There's a reason for it, and a history to it. In the first half of the 20th century, upstart unions were on the rise, growing all the time, taking over everything, expanding into new sectors, gaining power. There really was a time when it was reasonable to think eventually just about every job in the country would be union, and that's just how things are. Perfectly normal. (And generally speaking, those young unions were more spontaneous and democratic than their progeny today. They were more "bottom up", less bureaucratic. Also much fightier.)
But capital isn't stupid or defenseless and they fought back. The result, for a while, was the Fordist paradigm that ruled the postwar years. The idea was union leaders and management leaders could work together and reach compromises that were acceptable to both sides, and overall productivity and quality of life would be optimized through this kind of give-and-take. We're all Americans, right? We all have the same goals (even if I own the factory and you work in it).
Well, that's all gone now. From the 70s on, the formerly powerful unions got totally pulverized. One major weakness they had is their own leadership had, in the compromise period, gotten pretty cozy with management and formed a kind of "labor aristocracy" whose interests were more aligned with management than the rank and file. This is basically the state the old unions are in today.
In other words, the developments were contingent on dynamics of 20th century history, not the only thing that could have happened. The problem with 20th century unions is not that they have some innate structural flaw, but that they lost the fight.
I don't think we need to re-invent the concept. The boss owns everything you need to do your job, and you have to have a job. You lack power and control over your working conditions. As an individual you can't do anything about it. Banded together with the rest of the workforce, you can. This is a concept everyone can relate to already and I don't see any utility in renaming it for the new generation or something.
I used to drive a 30 year old beat up car. One day somebody crashed into it and smashed it up. I tried fixing up everything I possibly could, but eventually I realized the engine was completely shot, the block had been cracked, and the thing just wasn't coming back. I didn't rebrand and go get a hoverboat or something. I just got another car that wasn't wrecked.
This is a really well-formed response with great historical context. I think you should consider posting some form of this to the main article so more people up top can see it.
Working conditions should be regulated reasonably at a societal level. This already exists in practice via OSHA and minimum wage regulations. Advocate for improved worker conditions via legislature, although be aware of the market counter-reaction of making certain jobs more expensive than they are worth.
Industry-wide unions can work, they are widely used in Europe, but they essentially act as barriers to progress and create arbitrary barriers to entry.
Industry wide unions are the goal, but you don't just flip a switch and change to a society with industry wide unions.
We don't have industry wide unions in the United States because, although unions were on the rise in the first part of last century, they eventually got beaten down into their pathetic state after the Fordist compromise broke down.
> act as barriers to progress
They give workers a say in what counts as "progress." "Progress," to my mind, does not necessarily equal improvements in my quality of life. e.g. I used to not be constantly surveilled. Then some progress happened, and now I am. Am I better off?
What if we got to decide what technology to build instead of Google and the Pentagon?
Yeah, it's a tradeoff they have to make. A lot of "knowledge worker" unions decide to do this, hoping it's worth it for the institutional support they'll get. Some grad student unions were formed under United Auto Workers in recent years, oddly enough. I'm not an organizer, and I don't really have an informed opinion about whether it's worth it.
One hopes that these old unions could be revived with a bunch of new membership. What I described above is how they are now, not how they have to be.
Worth noting also that even unions with totally screwed up leadership often have passionate and talented organizers with a lot of experience and institutional know-how at the lower levels, just like tech companies.
When I did employee-side employment discrimination law, the stories from the union employees who worked at a giant US airplane manufacture were the saddest. Often with local union leadership being involved in the discrimination.
Eventually I learned to pass on cases that involved unionized employees because having a union involved made it much more difficult to prosecute cases.
But could that be due to just paying the lowest tiers more and highest tiers less?
Companies usually make salaries opaque, but say you have 9 software engineers. Your 3 underperformers are being paid $10 per year, your 3 average performers are being paid $15 per year, and your 3 top performers are being paid $20 per year. So average worker pay is $15 per year.
Now a union comes in and over the years the pay structure changes so that the most senior employees make the most, not the top performers. Now 4 youngest employees make $14 per year, the 4 middle employees make $16 and the most senior employee makes $18 per year. So average worker pay is now $15.3 per year, and you can now make the claim "workers in unions make more money (on average)", but I would argue this new structure is overall worse for the company since you are basically rewarding underperformers and punishing top performers in order to raise wages.
> It’s open to anyone working for Alphabet (besides, if it works like a typical union, management).
This to me kind of highlights the disconnect of unions in software engineering. In many companies including Google, there are parallel IC and management tracks. There are ICs in leadership positions but just without any reports. Does that mean, e.g. an L7 staff engineer can unionize but not an L5 manager?
And then it leads to me wonder, why can't managers unionize in a typical union? Even at a big old-fashioned manufacturing company with a union, the managers are still individual people who are separate from the company itself. Presumably the reason is that they already have better conditions, they're highly paid, maybe they're already aligned with company itself because they have an ownership stake or some incentive bonus structure. All of those arguments apply to software engineers as well.
This may be a cheesy analogy, but in some ways all software engineers in tech are already effectively the middle managers. They oversee the "assembly line" that generates the revenue for the business, which just happens to be software rather than people.
From my read of the situation (based on past union experience), this is not a normal union. They do not seek exclusive bargaining power for a contract.
It seems more like an association of employees who seek to influence leadership on specific topics. There influence comes not from the threat of a strike, but rather just numbers (eg we have X% of workers, all willing to put up 1% of pay, you should really listen to us).
In that case, for an average employee making $100k-$200k a year in base salary at Google, I can't imagine paying $1-2k a year for the privilege of raising concerns without any real teeth. They can already do this anyway in retros or all-hands meetings, signing on to open letters to the executive team, etc.
Not saying that the organizers here have malicious intentions, but if you did have malicious intentions then something like this could actually be a pretty good scam... Re-purposing the word "union" for something that is not really serving that role, and collecting money from people who will ideologically sign onto it without thinking because they automatically think "unions == good". Basically making money off of the current shift to the left in US politics.
At least in Canada I’ve seen two different unions at the same place. One Union for managers and one union for the other non-manager employees. I don’t think there is anything stopping managers from forming their own different union.
> 6. Yes, you’ll have to join the Communist Party of America and pledge allegiance to AOC in order to even join the zoom call, of course. Because that’s how unions work
You might say that as a joke but Unions have a long history of heavily pressuring or forcing members to vote one way and in turn using these "guaranteed" votes to extract "favors" from politicians.
Apple used to have easter eggs in its software, crediting individual engineers. Steve Jobs banned them, saying it would be unfair to give credit to individuals instead of the whole company, would make it easier for competitors to poach key engineers, etc.
At the time, Jobs was also running Pixar, which never seemed to have problems in its movies to credit everybody down to the hairstylist of the second unit's caterer by name. Hmm… could it be that… they were unionized and we were not?
At least part of the reason not to credit individual engineers is that it damages the myth of the genius CEO. Ask most people who invented the iphone, they will not say "it was the work of hundreds of people at a dozen companies inside and outside Apple", they'll say "Steve Jobs".
That is different though. Steve Jobs never claimed credit himself. As a matter of fact his autograph are extremely rare;
"Steve politely declined several times, stating that everything at Apple was a group effort, so he didn’t like to sign and take credit for everything. " [1]
And with every Keynote Steve will thank all teams who has been working nights and days, often using the phase "separated from their families". And constant and consistently reminding everyone that "We, at Apple." Not "Me, Steve Jobs".
I remember some made the observation Elon Musk is more about selling himself than Tesla or SpaceX. Steve Jobs is more about selling Apple himself.
But at the same time let's admit it, Apple without Steve Jobs is just different. There is no one to keep the balance between everyone. Jony, Eddy, Tim, Phill, Scott Forstall and lots of others. Steve often likes to refer Apple as the Beatles, where the whole is greater than sum of its parts, and they kept everyone's flaws in check.
It's also incredibly unfair to credit people not really related to the actual product. Should the names of all the employees of some bookstore in Wyoming be in the credits for Harry Potter books?
The credits for God of War PS4 were 28 minutes long listing pretty much every employ of Sony in all countries down to caterers.
Personally I find that insulting and unfair to the actual creative team that made the game.
Which is why credit appearance order and grouping is such a big deal and part of contract negotiation in films. Earlier appearances is supposed to signify importance (notice when a group of names isn't alphabetical), along with pre-title and marketing materials credits and the slideshow credits separate from the rolling credits.
Isn't the moral right of every (software) author that his name is mentioned next to the authored intellectual property (software)? This is even written in copyright laws of some countries...
Unless as part of your employment, you agreed to an implicit copyright reassignment to the organization. In that instance, a “(c) Alphabet ####” is allowed.
In countries that know true "Moral Rights", those rights are unassignable, so any such agreement is void. Your employer still gets all the money, but you get the "Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!" clout if you want it.
That's an excellent question. I believe non-visual moral rights are not recognized in the US, and I'm not sure they've ever been tested for software in any other Berne Convention signatories.
But they are still operating adjacent to a highly unionized industry, so parts of their products may have operated under union rules, and for others, they may have competed for employees that had a choice to work for unionized employers.
> For example, I've had people tell me that they don't support unions in tech because they'll be "paid less", or less competent engineers will be promoted faster.
Yeah, a bizarre line of reasoning. Footballers first unionized in 1907 and haven't looked back since. Today, your average footballer (plying their trade in the upper tiers of English football) makes more in a month than most tech engineers make in a year (granted careers are short and there are many more elite engineers than there are elite football players, but still, I don't think unionization had any effect on their salaries).
> Footballers first unionized in 1907 and haven't looked back since
Incorrect, the first footballer's union was from 1898 [1].
> I don't think unionization had any effect on their salaries
Despite the existence of the union, clubs could impose a salary cap on players well into the 1960s, and could trade them like slaves under the "retain-and-transfer" system [2] until the EU forbade that practice in the 1990s [3].
All in all, football is a very bad example for the success of unions. Unions helped jack shit to get players out of an exploitative situation - every improvement was hard-won in courts by individual footballers.
The NBPA has overseen a huge increase in NBA player's wages over the past few decades, both at the top and for the average or minimum player. Yes, there's a salary cap, but that actually helps the vast majority of players, because otherwise Lebron would get paid 200M/year and the minimum/average players would get basically nothing, and it also ensures competitiveness.
A salary cap is not a reason unions are bad when the salary cap is 800x the average person's income...
> and could trade them like slaves under the "retain-and-transfer"
Don't you see a little bit of an issue with this wording? Namely that said players were paid for their labor and could quit playing football at any time?
It had the effect of driving up wages for veteran players. Collective bargaining in Major League Baseball produced service time provisions that artificially limit the salaries of young players while driving up the pay of established veterans.
Seniority provisions are a common feature of union contracts and they’re a direct wealth transfer from younger, generally poorer workers to older, more established employees.
To be clear, nobody would argue that any of the players are starving, but the agreement is structured to reward seniority. That’s literally what I argued. The “real money” comes in free agency, access to which is restricted by service time.
It’s silly to compare tech unions to sports teams. There is usually only one major league in a country, and the team that signs you owns you like property. You do what the coach says or you sit on the bench until your contract expires and then don’t get re-signed. It’s not like tech, where if your Google manager so much as gives you a dirty look you can just walk over to facebook and have a new job by Monday. This alone is far more powerful than anything a union can provide.
For what it’s worth, Major League Baseball also has a union and one of its primary effects is to fuck over “new hires” by artificially transferring wages to older players based on seniority-based “service time” provisions.
There is plenty of evidence that I've seen firsthand in municipal government of unions protecting and promoting incompetent IT talent. It doesn't all fall to @#$& solely because government tech is often very slow to change, so mediocre workers can train on very specific applications and not need much continuing ed. I scarcely ever met one that would get hired at either a FAANG or a tech startup. I will qualify this by saying it's U.S. only. Maybe other countries handle this all much better, but we're dealing with Google U.S. in this story.
Given the amount of incompetent talent I've seen promoted without a union because they cozy up to management I have a really hard time believing the picture would be any worse with them.
Meritocracy is orthogonal to unionization, I think, though I doubt there's an employer in the world that doesn't believe that their decisions are entirely meritocratic.
The argument "[institution]* tends to towards corruption therefore we shouldn't have [institution]" is a logical fallacy in all cases, since all human institutions tend towards corruption but we still need them.
* replace [institution] with government, government department, police, corporations, unions, etc. and the fallacy remains the same.
I agree that government tech is usually pretty not great, but I am not sure if that has to do with unions per se or perhaps the government's antiquated pay scales/lack of civil service exam.
> When I talk to colleagues in tech about unions I hear a lot of misconceptions, seemingly based in stereotypes about what unions are for and who they serve.
This statement holds true regardless of which side of the argument you’re on.
The modern discourse around unions seems to revolve around a lot of stereotypes that aren’t entirely accurate.
Yes, unions can be effective for changing working conditions. However, it’s important to remember who those unions serve.
The most common misconception is that unions serve the general public in pushing back against the corporation. Not true. The unions serve existing employees of those companies, usually as prioritized by seniority.
This is a great situation if you are already a senior member of that company, but it’s not as beneficial if you’re a young person trying to break into that industry or move up within a company.
The screen actors guild is a flawed analogy because film productions are very time limited operations. This would be like Google creating a new company for every project and picking which workers to “hire” into the new company. This conveniently skirts all of the issues around seniority that unions tend to bring to a company, because people are only involved in productions at whatever level they’ve been hired into. It’s also not as easy to break into the SAG as you might think. Ask young actors about the hoops they have to jump through and fees they have to pay to get into the SAG at the beginning of their careers.
For examples of how unions don’t always benefit employees, especially younger employees, listen to This American Life’s podcast about how bad teachers can’t be fired due to union rules in some districts, so they’re kept on the payroll and placed into an empty room to avoid running afoul of the union. Now imagine how much better off we’d all be (kids, aspiring teachers who could take those jobs, taxpayers) if the unions allowed the school district to simply fire the bad teachers and hire good teachers without fighting the union.
Here in Germany unions (in tech) will for example make sure that older employees can't be fired, so the younger employees will be fired instead. So I don't think you can simply claim they are beneficial for everybody.
Unions don’t protect the general public against a company. They protect the ranking members of a company.
That means the union also protects members of the company from the general public who might be looking to take their job by offering to work harder or better or cheaper.
If you’re a young person getting started in this industry it might be fun to imagine working in a unionized environment, but remember that the union would be working to protect its members from you breaking into the company and entering the senior ranks.
Um... in germany works councils don't get rid of young people because they want to protect their senior ranks.
First: it's really hard to get fired in germany, almost impossible.
Second: they help formulate who gets laid off when, when there are layoffs, and prioritise people who can and will find a job more easily. So young people and people without families. This is because older people are more vulnerable to discrimination.
This is what a society does to protect each other and to use power against a company because the employer-employee relationship is adversarial. Unions don't exist to protect the brass, i don't even know what you're on about
First: that's awful because it means business don't have any flexibility to change. you're forced to work with people who don't work, because they can't get fired. The lower productivity of those workers becomes a drag on everyone else.
Second: this is the worst. Instead of shedding the dead weight it insists on protecting the people who've been paying dues the longest, at the expense of young people.
No this is not what I call a just society.
A just society is one where people doing more work get more pay. This exists fine right now. Workers have tons of companies to choose from. Companies have lots of workers to choose from. There's a vibrant market and most people end up getting paid what they're worth.
> First: that's awful because it means business don't have any flexibility to change. you're forced to work with people who don't work, because they can't get fired. The lower productivity of those workers becomes a drag on everyone else.
There are reasons why an employer may fire a worker. "Refuses to work" is one.
> Second: this is the worst. Instead of shedding the dead weight it insists on protecting the people who've been paying dues the longest, at the expense of young people.
Maybe if people did not understand "dead weight" when they read "older people" employers could be trusted to decide who to keep and who to fire.
> A just society is one where people doing more work get more pay.
That cannot be the only or even the main criterion else people who can't work starve.
Don't you notice that you contradict yourself? You claim they don't decide who gets fired, and in the next paragraph you explain that they will get younger people fired, because they are presumed to have an easier time finding new jobs.
"They" help formulate - I don't think the young people who get fired belong to the "they" very much. Otherwise, again, there would be no need for unions. The young people would just volunteer to quit for the sake of the old people.
And yet you've just generalised without looking deeper. "They fire all the young people" is a hot take, until you realise that young people will far more easily find a new job.
You inserted the "all", I did not write "they fire all the young people". It's also just an example.
It is also not a given that young people will have it easier to find a new job. Youth unemployment is at staggering heights in many countries.
And by your logic, there still is no incentive for young people to support the unions. They could just give up their jobs voluntarily, if they are so convinced that it is the right thing to do.
Is that why in Ford's recent deal struck with UAW, one of the sticking points for UAW was that there be a "Guaranteed path to permanent full-time employment for temporary employees"?
That would seem to be entirely contrary to the idea that union's goal is to make it harder for people to join these companies.
Divide and conquer - pitting one group against another - is a pretty standard union busting tactic.
Since unionization is essentially a fight for power with management and fights are, well, confrontational, its kind of a given that there will be casualties and fallout.
Whether that's worse than yielding all collective power to management depends on many variables, including how confrontational and revenge oriented management tends to be.
You are misinformed, in Germany/EU there is legal protection against age discrimination.[1] You don’t need to be a member of a union or even have any union representation at the company.
Boomers often have a major advantage in democratised situations, simply because there are more of them.
As such, it's still in your own interest to join a union and be represented. And, with Boomers retiring, this power imbalance in unions can be lessened or reversed.
In tech, there are more people with degrees than old people. It’s basic math of an expanding industry.
It’s definitely not the case that there are more “boomer” software engineers than younger engineers. One look at charts of CS degrees issued by year will clearly show why.
That's great, but the millennial generation had more births, and given all the deaths that the boomer gen has had since 1946, millennials are a much larger block at this point.
> When I talk to colleagues in tech about unions I hear a lot of misconceptions, seemingly based in stereotypes about what unions are for and who they serve
Agree, things that a union can address:
- Pay transparency, Have detailed info about pay bands, and ensure some new hire from a hot company doing the same job as you is not making 2-3x your salary.
- Broken promotion process, at my company promotion is completely broken with really talented engineers leaving all the time as they are not getting promoted(alot of politics at play etc), a union can ensure promotions are granted in an even process.
- Age discrimination, This one will affect everyone as we all will get older. Alot of companies abuse this one under the guise of "culture fit". A union will ensure that talented older engineers are not discriminated against either while working and being fired for being too old or at the interview process under culture fit nonsense.
- Interviews, I think most people can agree that tech interviews are pretty broken. They are designed to be extremely hard to encourage people to stay in their position and it usually takes months of practice to be able to pass one. Unions could fix this broken process.
- Working with bad actors, When google started work on a secret search engine with the chinese govt. googlers were outraged, a union could ensure its members do not work in any way with a govt that does not support common human rights.
I worked in a unionized IT shop for 6 years (now in SV) and here's my take:
Pay transparency: union mandated pay band helps - no 2x/3x pay for the same position that's for sure. Though I do think this problem could be solved without a union. It's really about opening up compensation information.
First of all, broken processes are not going to get better with a union. They will still be broken, just in different ways.
Union favors/protects seniority therefore the promotion process will still push out high performing employees because they need to "wait for their turn". In fact the running joke we had about promotion was that you could only get promoted if someone:
1. Dies
2. Retires
3. Quits
Age discrimination happens less than in SV tech companies but not by design. In general the workforce in a union shop is older but you also have a lot of low performing lifers counting their days to retirement. On the other hand, interview is far less rigorous since the key factor is "likability" (aka culture fit). Many interviews took place just to satisfy a policy when a pre-determined candidate was already chosen.
Will I ever work for a unionized IT shop again? Not a chance.
Thanks for this interesting bit of info. To be fair I think none of these issues has to have a union to solve it, its just the majority of tech companies are really not fixing these major issues and most likely will never fix them.
> but you also have a lot of low performing lifers counting their days to retirement
I see this as a huge issue with unions. But I feel you have the same folks in large tech companies, they fall into a large team, the company is profitable so its not looking for layoffs, the person/s fall under the radar and they contribute as little as possible.
Yes - if it's setup like Google's union. It's optional and at this point, simply does not have enough clout to make any significant changes to affect my experience :)
Is the problem really “we know how to fix tech interviews, but the upper management don’t like it”?
Going by HN discussion I thought that the problem was “There are tens of totally different interview methods, everybody thinks one method is obviously the best and all the others suck, but nobody can agree on which one method that is”, and I’m not sure how a union would fix that :P
Well, as much as people hate certification and standardization in this industry, even something as simple as "a tech union or the IEEE or Triplebyte produces a standard algorithms /data structures interview exam, candidates take that once and are certified for at least 5-10 years, and technical interviews then become more domain-specific or at least less academic", could be a nice alternative to the status quo.
Go through the Leetcode gauntlet once and get credentialed then, instead of every single time you want to change a job, with multiple prospective employers.
> Go through the Leetcode gauntlet once and get credentialed
The issue here is thinking that the Leetcode gauntlet matters at all in most jobs. A certification for Leetcode shouldn't matter when all I do is HTML, CSS, and JS to call various APIs.
I do agree with the general idea that some certification could prove some base level knowledge, where furthur testing beyond that could take place. The issue lies in deciding what is "base level knowledge".
Sure, but many of the Silicon Valley tech companies still prioritize Leetcode, and have that in common, which means a candidate will have to do it over and over again. Might as well turn that into a credential so the interviewers at least have to ask candidates to do something relevant to their work for the "show me how you think" whiteboard problem-solving sections of the interview.
> "...ensure some new hire from a hot company doing the same job as you is not making 2-3x your salary"
Given the number of young people in software and entering software, seniority based pay and losing the ability to job hop for increased salary is pretty much the last thing on earth they would want. It would also kill the company's ability to hire top talent by being able to offer more money.
My example is based in real life, we hired a engineer from facebook and they matched his comp, which me and a few co-workers found out was 2.5x what we made. This person did the same job as us and contributed nothing out of the ordinary, he was also the same level as us which really stung. Stuff like this is rampant across tech and having secret pay bands and not upping your pay for existing hires(to match market) as its too high of an increase per corporate(also another real life example) just sucks. Especially when the CEO's net worth goes up 5x in the few years at the company.
The SAG isn't a typical union. The SAG constitution [1] contains a special provision requiring a supermajority to ask for a pay cap or to call a strike. Acting, like tech, is largely meritocratic with a huge talent dispersion. A prohibition on pay caps is necessary.
I somehow doubt the Google tech activists will be copying the SAG's meritocratic philosophy. Every single thing I've seen from Google activists and their ilk is about prioritizing technical excellence way behind having the correct ideology. The people behind the Google unionization effort are not genuinely concerned about working conditions. They really want two things:
- to be gatekeepers that keep their ideological opponents out of big tech companies (even moreso than now), and
- to gain power to pressure big tech companies into punishing their ideological opponents (for example, banning advertising from certain websites, refusing cloud services to oil and gas industries, censorship intensification, and large donations to their favored organizations).
If you'd been at Google and watched all this unfold over the past few years, it'd be obvious to you what these people are really about.
Are you really holding up the film industry as a model that tech should emulate?
Because the median annual wage for SAG-AFTRA members is about $7500 [1]. And that doesn't even include members who failed to find any work during the year. 85% of members don't make enough to get health benefits through the union, which kick in if you make over $18K/year [2]. These are poverty-level wages.
Um, that seems like a consequence of the nature of acting, which is short term gigs with lots of competition rather than a consequence of unionization.
The only actor I personally know just does it on the side for some extra cash rather than it being her day job.
Of course wealthy Hollywood celebrities support unions: they make it harder for outside talent to compete with them.
And they absolutely do limit the work that union members are carrying out. To name a fairly recent example, that's how Dr. Horrible's Sing-along Blog came into existence, making it a web series allowed Joss Whedon to still make something without running afoul of the Writer's Guild strike rules.
> None of these unions are limiting the work their members are carrying out.
I don't believe that this is a truthful statement. Does Global Rule One in the SAG not limit the work that members can carry out? If they union doesn't want you to work on a production then you are not allowed to work on that production.
No, you’re completely misunderstanding the rule. Because the film industry works on a freelance basis, the union only has bargaining power if it doesn’t exist alongside a non-unionized body of workers who are willing to work for cheaper. By requiring that union members only work unionized jobs, they ensure that no non-union production can ever benefit from any non-union labor. This pushes productions to negotiate terms with the union in order to get talent, and that in turn helps union members get jobs.
It’s not about whether the union likes you or thinks you deserve to work. It’s about whether the production is willing to play by union rules.
I don't get it - isn't 'requiring that union members only work unionized jobs' an example of 'limiting the work their members are carrying out'?
If you're a member of the union, you can't work on productions without certain agreements, yes? Your ability to work on productions you want to work on is... limited... isn't it?
> For example, I've had people tell me that they don't support unions in tech because they'll be "paid less", or less competent engineers will be promoted faster.
This is something that has always amazed me.
Your typical tech worker does a lot of unpaid overtime under the guidance of a manager whose only merit to management is being friends with someone. It also has to retrain him/herself for free on it´s own spare time and by the time it reaches 35/40 it tends to be let go by not raising his/her salary anymore or by putting him/her in lower status position. (Not to mention working as a contractor for years, etc.). These are the kind of problems unions are expected to fight for.
But every time someone mentions unions they go after the salary cap, time of service, etc, discourses.
So these are really good examples, but I still don't understand what unions can do for 1% of someone's pay. They kind of look like subscription services, or worse places you have to join or else there are unintended consequences from other examples where they mention looking at union membership as an indicator of some experience (so kind of like a tax).
The screen actors guild and all the movie-related guilds seem interesting, but aren't those kind of like freelancers more than closer to fully employed people? I guess it would be beneficial for salary negotiation for non-software engineers and maybe contractos, but I don't really see the incentive to join one as a fulltime software engineer.
Maybe I have a bad opinion on unions due to how they operated in my country that's not US :D.
In theory the unions should be a place to organise employees, to help improve working conditions. But I suspect for most people the real benefit will be protection from miscarriages of justice.
I've personally seen people put through the wringer by HR teams, and even when the HR team acknowledges they've fucked up, there's no apologies or an attempt to make things right. Unions can provide protection in these case, whether that's access to legal help, or just having a 3rd party on your side sitting in on employee dispute meetings.
I think a lot of people don't appreciate how badly they can be screwed over by a HR team, accidentally or maliciously, until they find themselves in a meeting with three members of the HR team, with no one telling them what's going on. At which point, it's already too late to save yourself. A union gives you recourse and support, something invaluable when it you're up against the entire HR team.
HR works for your employer, they are not your friend and are not on your side; this should be common knowledge.
There are organizations that provide legal services to labour which do not require one to be a member of a union. It might be better for all if the money spent on dues was instead contributed to an organization that doesn't discriminate.
While not union myself watching how IBEW (international brotherhood of electrical workers) works, it ends up working well for all involved parties. For workers pay is kept higher, benefits stay active between jobs, and benefits stay unchanged between jobs at different companies. Companies also gain the ability to support surges/drops in manning requirements (without ruining life's of workers), and know workers have a minimum level of training (along with that training not leaving workers a debt addled depressive). I also see the best workers rising through the ranks, and bad ones either never actually entering the union or quitting when they realize they're not going anywhere.
Not every union strangles their company like automotive unions. Though those unions start to look better looking at nonunion companies like Tesla which somehow manages to pay their workers less, in one of the most expensive areas in the world, and maintaining an accident rate that would shut a union shop down.
Also it makes sense that Google would fight unions. Since the current implementation of unions for SV companies has been Kickstarter. And that union mostly exists to drive profit to their competitors by choosing what is allowed on Kickstarter. Something like that for Google would just end up making an easy paper trail for a prosecutor to follow for SV platform bias.
My experience with unions is setting up a booth for a trade show and being unable to plug into the outlets myself because I had to wait for a union electrician.
I've had that experience. Also the experience of not being able to carry a monitor to by both to replace one the broke because "only an authorized union person can carry things into the convention center"
Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe the union electrician is there because once upon a time someone setting up a booth daisy chained a bunch of extension cords of small gauge to run lights and demos and started an electrical fire in a crowded convention hall.
>I also see the best workers rising through the ranks, and bad ones either never actually entering the union or quitting when they realize they're not going anywhere.
This doesn't sound like an advantage for software engineers. Surely unions can't decide on someone's competency. It kind of raises a red flag about potential gatekeeping methods (e.g. the tax status where you have to join or else).
It's not the union choosing to promote, it's the employer for IBEW.
Also disallows noncompete clauses. So if your current employer says no, you can go to another. Which is how I've seen quite a few promotions. The latter of switching employers is far easier, since life changing benefits (medical/retirement) aren't tied to employers. (Considering SV workers get their "share" by switching employers every few years, that would be a nightmare scenario for big tech as well. Since it further reduces employee stickiness, if SV unions decided to offer benefits).
Arguably, unions are the best judge of someone's competency, because its supposed to be a group of peers. It's already how it works in tech, software engineers evaluate the skill of prospective software engineers, not management.
But yes, there are gatekeeping effects, as the union is incentivized to prevent increases in membership or decrease in collective skill. It typically works out great for those in the union (and things like the Bar or Medical Association), not so great for those kept out.
>Arguably, unions are the best judge of someone's competency, because its supposed to be a group of peers. It's already how it works in tech, software engineers evaluate the skill of prospective software engineers, not management.
I'd much rather have 8 companies with bad interviewers and 2 with good interviewers than 10 companies with the union who block me because I made one of their evaluators personally mad at me.
This just sounds like it is ripe for corruption and nepotism.
We already have corruption and nepotism, there are no regulations on the hiring process at all except for some impossible to enforce laws about protected classes.
Companies also gain the ability to support surges/drops in manning requirements
They have that ability already without unions - much more easily because they can reduce staffing without the entire company falling over due to strikes.
and know workers have a minimum level of training
They have that ability already without unions.
Not every union strangles their company like automotive unions
By and large the only unions that remain large and powerful in the west are those organising government employees, where strangling the host is impossible because tax revenues mean it cannot die. In most other industries they did indeed strangle their host industries until they declined.
Look at this thread. People keep talking about Hollywood as an example, apparently unaware of just how much business foreign film studios have taken from it, particularly the UK, due primarily to a much less aggressively unionised workforce.
My union membership more than paid for itself this year. My employer wanted to defer merit increase due to covid and all the uncertainty. The union called them on the bluff.
If a company defers a merit increase of their own employees for “other company investments” then I as a worker would absolutely want a union to call them out on it. A company wouldn’t even have money for those investments without the merit of the employees.
And the employees wouldn’t even have jobs to complain about if the company had not made the investments to grow large enough to hire them. So that’s kind of one-sided.
Just because the union made them do it, doesn’t mean it was a bluff or the right decision. And if those investments pan out, the stock gains are often worth substantially more to the employee than the token merit increase.
You make it sound like the management couldn't have communicated this to employees and that they wouldn't vote for what is beneficial; like, perhaps you think they're too naive to understand longer term interests, or whatever.
Sure, management have to turn realise they can no longer dictate what is solely in their interests, but in most companies they're probably up to the task.
Plenty of workers have forgone monies owed in order to keep their employees companies afloat. If both parties respect one another a lot can be achieved.
These people don’t respect Google though. They’re indoctrinated activists who fight invisible enemies, merely for the sake of feeling like righteous heroes. The union chair appears to have worked at Google for less than a year, having just moved to the US for college and freshly graduated. It’s a little entitled and ridiculous.
For the same reason little shops pay protection money to gangs. Just because the money went somewhere does not mean it was the best place. Absolutely, the company likely was acting in bad faith, but it is not guaranteed. Maybe merit increases means they have to cut something else that affects their ability to complete, or maybe it just means less bonus for executives. Just saying that there are two sides. It is not always an evil company. I guess this is an argument for collective bargaining. I’ve never experienced its benefits however, and have seen negative effects.
It's not like it's in the best interest of the workers to see the company go belly up. Or be less competitive. If the company can show that this is why they're defering merit pay there's no reason to believe that unions won't accept it and agree with them.
It gives employees leverage, and healthy competition in all aspects should just strengthen the company.
That really depends on whether the union is larger than the company it's making demands of. It may be in their best interest to bleed a company faster if it will yield greater benefits over the now-altered life span of the company.
There's a real consideration of whether X% of employee compensation over N years is better than the same over M years.
Well US auto manufacturers went bankrupt because the choice was: 1) agree to maintain unaffordable union benefits or 2) end up in a worse situation with a prolonged strike that hurts the business even more.
So they kicked the can down the road and chose 1 until they just went bankrupt and the courts allowed contracts to be renegotiated and high cost union employees to be replaced with younger employees at a far lower compensation package.
The film industry operates on a gig-by-gig basis. Imagine drafting a legal contract for every sprint. Because you're working at a different company every sprint. Or interviewing/hiring new people every sprint. Kinda how the film industry works.
Way easier to just have standardized union contracts, pay rates, and expectations for everyone involved and have the union provide benefits.
One thing I can see a SE guild improving is clarity and consistency with things like license compliance, unenforceable attempts to restrict of ownership and development of software created in ones free time, assistance in stock options negotiations, and other things that regularly come up here.
Ownership of free-time developed stuff is likely the only thing that has peaked my interest. maybe unions aren't that bad after all. Tho one would hope this type of thing would just be covered by the law without requiring an union to handle, but heh, world is imperfect.
I remember when working in games you couldn't even write blogposts about any type of unrelated to programming thing (e.g. not even about playing guitar) and that was super frustrating. Likely those clauses weren't enforceble but still anoying.
Firstly, unions prevent abuse. This includes unjust termination (for a million different reasons), handles disputes with supervisors where the individual employee otherwise has no power, such as the HN post the other day about the extremely abusive Apple team, or the many things we hear about sexism and racism. On HN and reddit, every time we talk about these issues the comments are always "find a new job", "don't bother with hr", "hr is not your friend". With a union, the union IS your friend and they make it so you DON'T have to find a new job. For devs, with our extremely painful and broken interviewing process, this is great.
Second, they negotiate for higher wages and benefits. Given that tech is churning out billionaire ceos, we certainly could be paid more. I have never met a dev who said "I don't want to be paid more". Yes, we make decent wages, but we still produce far more value than what we're paid for.
Thirdly, they negotiate for better working conditions. Examples from the past were things like the 8 hour workday, safety measures, etc. I suspect there's a lot of opportunity for growth here in the tech industry, through I haven't had enough coffee to come up with a list. The 8 hour workday is certainly one of them, as I've heard endless nightmares of people being forced to working extremely long hours. The lack of overtime in our industry is a big deal, and "get a new job" is a crappy answer and hard to do in practice, especially if you're being worked to death.
Here's a bit of an implementation detail question I have wondered about unionizing in tech, within software engineering specifically - how would a union work in a field where the lines between managers and employees are so blurred? Most companies have a parallel IC track where the most senior ICs are paid more and are more senior at the company than many managers. And there are tech leads/team leads that have no reports and aren't managers but are in leadership positions.
From what I understand, even middle-managers are usually not allowed to unionize or allowed to talk to other employees about unions. Where would the line be in tech? If you decide to switch from the IC to manager track, do you have to leave the union?
Just the mere fact that this seems like such an odd distinction, because IC software engineers are generally treated just as well as if not better than managers, makes me step back and wonder what problem we would actually be trying to solve by unionizing within the engineering track. What would the tangible benefits be?
On the other hand I'm already imagining of all sorts of potential downsides. A lot of tech companies tend to be very open about company details with employees. In my experience, most managers tend to work very collaboratively with their employees in terms of helping them set goals and figure out a path to getting a promotion. There often feels like there genuinely is alignment between the company and employees - if the company does well, employees tend to do well. Not just because they already own stock in the company, but also because companies tend to expand when they're doing well and this opens up opportunities to promote from within. I imagine all of these dynamics would completely change in a world with tech unions, where the employees and the company would be pitted against each other.
I don't see why the union would necessarily be pitted against the employer in tech. Yes their goals are not perfectly aligned, but that sort of work environment is something that both benefit from so I don't see that disappearing.
With a more centralized organization as a check on management decisions, the employer can find out earlier what the employees will tolerate by asking the union representatives (and not have the employees walk out when an unappetizing project is discovered). I expect the AWU would also fight against the reduction in transparency across the company, as that is a common concern among people I know that work there.
I object to unions because of past experiences in and interacting with unions. For me the 2 major problems with unions are:
1) there is an us vs them mentality. You are in or you are out. If you are out, it’s harder to get in. This also leads to dead weight staying around and people doing the bare minimum. This might be good for those already in the union, but terrible for anyone not.
2) a lot of politics / corruption / nepotism. Hired are made based on relationships, promotions are either tenure based or based on relationships.
Not saying these things don’t happen at non unions places, but from what I’ve seen they happen a lot more at unions. Some times the stereotypes are based in reality.
The misperception that unions are only for blue-collar workers is one of the causes of the decline of quality of life for the average American worker.
America made a massive shift from labor-backed economy to service-sector-backed economy, and in doing so, the percentage of workers in unions dropped drastically. Unions aren't for only labor; they're for any situation where there's an asymmetry in negotiating power between the company owners and the employees (which is, basically, every company).
How long will it be before I have to wait for a union React dev to open a PR on the frontend as a backend dev, and a union DBA to write a new SELECT statement for me, and a union CSS dev to shift a header three pixels to the right, and a union mathematician to approve my simple arithmetic ?
Because I don't want to be politically involved in steering the future of yet anther organization. I want to program. I have enough trouble staying informed enough to steer the futures of my state and federal governments.
I can basically guarantee that you will have both an easier time and a more rewarding outcome getting involved in a members union of like 250 people than with a state or federal government in the US
Yes but I don't feel a union is necessary in my case. I am happy with my wages, benefits, and working conditions. If not I'll vote with my feet, no union necessary.
Fair enough, and it's great that you're in a position to walk to if you don't like your employment situation. With that said, workplace bullshit can sneak up on you, and looking for a job can be pretty time-consuming. IMO a good union is a form of insurance. Usually you don't need it, but when you do it's very nice to have
> it's great that you're in a position to walk to if you don't like your employment situation
From a person who doesn't work in Google, or Big Tech, or even in SV. This is one of the reasons why these attempts at unionization from Google employees tend to annoy me slightly.
These are the few people in the world that would get hundreds of job offers in seconds. Yet instead of moving out if they don't agree with Google's projects, they would influence the projects and maybe affect the future of the company rather than give up their place for the hundreds like me who would gladly work on any defence-related project.
1. > These are the few people in the world that would get hundreds of job offers in seconds.
AWU is wall-to-wall, so not only are the cushy FTEs represented, but also all the less cushy contract workers, part-timers, etc (of which Google employs many!)
2. > Yet instead of moving out if they don't agree with Google's projects, they would influence the projects and maybe affect the future of the company
Isn't that their right? Shouldn't the people doing the work of the company get a say in that company's future? The "if you don't like it leave" attitude is so strange to me. What if they like their co-workers and parts of Google, and want to use their (supposedly) meritocratically-won power to exercise control over the things that are close to them? That hardly seems like privilege to me.
That's a great question. I don't know if it is. Unless they are shareholders of the company (granted, many FTEs are shareholders), what is it that gives them the right to influence a company based on their own personal values?
> Shouldn't the people doing the work of the company get a say in that company's future?
I mean if the outlook is for the company to continue to make profits. Sure. However, here, the profits are trumped by politics, and personal values. Why do the personal values of some employees get to decide/influence the future of a company?
> What if they like their co-workers and parts of Google, and want to use their (supposedly) meritocratically-won power to exercise control over the things that are close to them? That hardly seems like privilege to me.
It's called compromise. I have stayed in jobs where I wasn't paid enough but my manager was pretty awesome. I compromised.
Same for these employees. The "take-it-or-leave-it" attitude stems from the fact that the "contract" implies a give and take relationship. The power granted to the employee is only if that employee continues to provide value. If they stop providing that value i.e. provide their skills and knowledge to work on projects that benefit the revenue of the company, then that power is gone.
It seems to me that the personal values at play here are redefining what people seem to think of this. Let's pretend that the personal values were something else. Let's say that I, an employee of Acme Company, refuse to work on any work that is not FOSS yet also want to continue to be paid by the company. That sort of thing would usually not be defensible. I believe that most people would side towards the employer in that scenario.
Why is that essentially the same situation i.e. Employee refuses to work on projects based on "personal values" is somehow acceptable?
All the "ridiculously well paid" unionized blue collar workers I know are the people who work a ton of hours of overtime in an environment where their seniority permits them to get first dibs.
They are outnumbers ~2:1 by the blue collar workers I know who make that kind of money by working for themselves or by making themselves so indispensable to some employer that the employer pays them well above market to retain their experience in a non-union environment (e.g. the maintenance guy at a factory who's been there forever and a half and knows exactly why everything is the way it is, this maps pretty well to a lot of the highly paid "architect" positions that a lot of tech BigCos have).
I'm not sure how these situations map to a salaried workplace.
Unions control supply. It takes over 10 years to get into the longshoremans union, but once you do, you'll make $220k a year. It's because the union puts most of the work on the people trying to get into the union earning $14/hr so they can pay huge sums to the unionized worker. It's a cartel, like OPEC.
One positive byproduct is that union membership is a quality signal for both employers and employees. I.e., as a producer, I know non-union candidates will be less experienced; as an employee I know a movie using non union labor is not going to run as smoothly. Could be good for the startup market if this additional data point becomes reliable
No, you have no such guarantee that a union candidate will be any more experienced than a non-union candidate. Using Hollywood and IATSE(The Editors Guild) as an example, some requirements in order to be considered for membership are:
>"Editors must demonstrate 175 days of non-union work experience within the last three years, prior to the date of application."
and
">Colorists must demonstrate 100 days of non-union work experience within the last two years, prior to the date of application."[1]
Each of those is less than 3 months a year. I have many friends in that Union as well as SAG that have other pursuits but always make sure to do the minimum number of hours in order to maintain Union status in order to maintain the benefits. The only guarantee you have is that a union candidate has more hours that a non-union candidate working on union movie productions.
>"... as an employee I know a movie using non union labor is not going to run as smoothly."
Do you have any evidence that movie production in countries without unions runs less smoothly? For instance New Zealand’s uniquely non-unionized film industry has produced many blockbusters - the "Lord of the Rings Trilogy" and "The Hobbit Trilogy" being good examples. Is there any evidence that actual "boots on the ground" movie production ran any less smoothly? Would the latter trilogy have even been attempted had the former trilogy been so problematic as a result of it being non-union labor?
The unions (edit: film industry) require a certain amount of work experience to join and some have different levels of membership depending on how much work you do after joining.
Because everyone prefers union workers, it creates a situation where the non-union worker has to get noticed somehow (nepotism or exceptional work) to convince someone to take a risk and hire them to earn enough work to gain union membership.
It's worth pointing out that in those situations unions aren't better for all workers. Also notice there's a strong gig economy component to establishing professional credentials.
> The unions require a certain amount of work experience to join and some have different levels of membership depending on how much work you do after joining.
To users who are following along who aren't familiar, this is not how all unions works. Presumably the commenter is talking about "trade unions" which is one of many types of unions.
There's way more union members than there is work. So if the pay's the same for union or non-union (not much either way), why wouldn't you go with union labor?
The pay for union members could be higher depending on the type of production it is. For large scale television shows, if the show has gone into season 2, 3, etc, the pay scale will increase per season. For commercials and indie projects, it can be the same as non-union rates.
When hiring union members, there's more paperwork to fill out and regulations that the production will have. For example, union members must be paid within a certain timeframe or else there will be late fees the production will need to pay. This is not the case with non-union members. Generally, it is a lot easier and less expensive to hire non-union workers if you can get away with it.
At least for film production unions, there's a lot of gatekeeping for membership. It's not like a random camera operator can decide to sign up on their own.
> as a producer, I know non-union candidates will be less experienced;
The downside of unions is that they’re functionally a protection racket.
Getting into the union isn’t easy because union members don’t want to dilute their clout.
Being outside of the union makes it harder to get good work because the union will literally invest effort in shaming companies that hire you.
It’s fun to imagine the benefits of being inside a union, but we need to remember that creating the union will make life worse for those outside of it (young people, workers new to the industry).
What force prevents unions bosses from becoming corrupt and self serving; just like we can agree a corporate boss can become? It's silly to pretend they just "always work"
You state that "the union seeks out what the membership wants" and I note ( to no argument) that this surely only happens sometimes. Other times they seek other things; perhaps not to the benefit of their workers.
I'm not sure all teachers like the fact that seniority is king, and I'm also not sure that it is in fact a Net Benefit to teachers as a whole.
This doesn't make unions not worth pursuing; it just means that we should be appropriately skeptical and not make blanket statements about how they surely operate.
>Do I really need to add modifiers to everything I say to indicate that I'm not speaking in absolutes?
Fair and I do try not to do this wantonly. Here I feel that your gp argument breaks down in the absence of such an absolute. If indeed, we cannot prima facie trust that unions work in their members ( and their students') best interest; why shouldn't we use the troubles of unionized education ( or unionized policing...) as a caution against a possible bad outcome?
Perhaps I misunderstood; and this has just been another internet argument for the wind .
This isn’t true. It just creates artificial scarcity in the form of the union membership, similar to artificial scarcity of the Bar exam, and college degrees in general, but mere union membership has even less claim to indicate skill, competence, etc.
When unions function as an exclusionary fraternity, they are actually pretty horrible. A good indicator of a well-functioning union is: the union doesn’t have negative effects on people who don’t join, and they are free to do their jobs side by side with union members and nobody cares, nobody judges anyone for their personal choice, no one discriminates on pay or opportunities.
Except when the unions work to keep non-Union people from working or have ridiculous rules that make producing a film far more time consuming and expensive than it need be.
Have you ever worked on a film set? Want to drive film to the airport? Can’t get paid to do it unless you are in the teamsters. Want to sweep a floor? That’s the janitor Union. “Hey light guy, could you bring me that empty film canister?” Nope. The light guy isn’t in the camera Union. Hey camera guys, can you tape down that cord you keep tripping over? Nope. That’s the gaffer’s job. Are you a brand new sound recordist and want to worn on a Union production? Cant do it unless you join the union first. Need one guy to do a job? If the Union requires three, you end up paying three people to do the job of one.
Hollywood unions are better than the auto workers or teacher unions, but it’s far from “good.”
Random anecdote:
I remember in his book, Wil Wheaton talks about going to auditions and how the producers are supposed to pay a nominal fee to everyone, but no one ever collects it because it means you’d never get called for further auditions.
I wouldn't look to SAG as a good example. The format of that industry is very different from most "typical" jobs, specifically tech work. I would also suggest looking at the the recent SAG healthcare fiasco.
I think it's the exact opposite problem the tech industry has.
The film industry has way more talent supply than the employment demands, which naturally suppresses pay. The guilds/unions are a way to increase scarcity to maintain pay and ease hiring.
The tech industry has much less talent supply and much much much more employment demand. Tech might be better modeled after high skilled trade unions (which have a labor shortage) than the comparatively lower skilled film/auto/factory unions (which have a labor surplus).
I disagree with this point to some extent. Look at video game devs, who have similar problems where there’s a lot of labor supply enabling abuses. Also look at the abuse capable of h1b visa holders.
Companies are exploiting because united states want them to. There is a reason why a group of people(mostly Indians) are kept into the state of limbo. The fake fraternity angle is BS. Even the immigrant communities(demonstrated from Iranian immigrants protest against S386) want to keep it this way, so few can get bigger pie at the expanse of other. Everyone needs to know and understand the truth behind the so called fraternity. Would an Asian/Indian/Chinese would get same kind of protection as compared to their white/black counterparts. I doubt it.
It's an example that is fundamentally different from tech work, specifically google. It's a gig based industry with massively high income inequality. Not to mention it's an industry level/dominate union vs a company level union.
Yes, the idea for health benefits was great. But now we see that the SAG is just like corporation - cutting benefits because the highly paid big wigs don't want to pay for them.
I'm as pro-union as they come, but let's not pretend that the film and theater unions are an unalloyed good. It's true that the top is not limited for people who make millions of dollars, but the bottom is fairly restrictive, and that has a negative impact on many many actors/performers. For example, once you are an Actors Equity member, you can not do non-Equity work, except with special exemptions. You are also required to join equity once you do a certain number of Equity weeks - this means that I know people who luck into one Equity show early in their career, have to join Equity, and then are locked out of swaths of theatrical work because they're Equity. At the same time, though, they don't have enough of a resume to keep getting Equity work. SAG and AFTRA have similar policies.
I agree they've done a good job at curbing abuses, and again, I'm pro-union overall, but the film/tv/theater unions definitely force some tough decisions for the lower end of the worker spectrum
> This is because those unions are serving a very different purpose to the stereotypical union some engineers seem to fear. SAG, the DGA, and the WGA aren't guaranteeing hours or limiting pay: they're simply trying to curb abuse in what it a very abusive industry, and putting in place procedures to protect members and resolve grievances.
This is an important point, and one I haven't thought of before - I think Americans often think of Unions as organizations that prevent layoffs and gain ever higher benefits, to the detriment of the company. Indeed, this announcement confirms their goals are slightly different from a typical union's goals:
> Its goal will be to tackle ongoing issues like pay disparity, retaliation, and controversial government contracts.
So basically this is a political union forcing the company to adopt certain political stances (i.e. to force the company to refuse DoD or ICE contracts)
Hollywood makes a valid comparison for being nearby, but the more meaningful comparisons are to more unionized countries like in Europe or America in the past, where unions increased productivity, safety, and living standards.
Unions create artificial scarcity. This is good for themselves but bad for everyone else. If I'm not a member of SAG then I cannot offer my services at competing rates because SAG has cut me out, regardless of my skill level. This creates a moat between the poor and working class. They contractually protect themselves from being undercut by the lower classes, perpetuating wealth inequality.
My most recent direct exposure to film unions was the 2007 WGA strike, which was the initial source of many of my fears about unions. The WGA didn't just say "our members aren't interested in working under these conditions"; they issued angry denouncements of anyone who did work, sabotaged production company efforts to find temporary replacements for guild writers, and recruited friends in adjacent jobs to strike with them. For over four months, the industry was just on pause, and there was nothing anyone could do about it until the union monopoly and producer monopoly reached an agreement.
I have nothing but respect for the many workers who have to unionize, because they won't receive acceptable pay and working conditions unless they do. If the WGA feels that writers are in that position, I'm not going to tell them they're wrong. But I don't think software engineers are, and I have no interest in working in an environment where my coworkers might disappear for four months and demand nobody else step in to do their jobs.
I don't know much about Hollywood, but clearly the biggest examples of abuse in recent years were all the examples that came out of the #metoo movement. What exactly did SAG do for all of Harvey Weinstein's victims for all those years that it was being swept under the rug? If not sexual abuse, what other kinds of abuse in Hollywood have these unions put a stop to?
I think Unions could go a long way to ensuring engineers get a fair (meaning transparent) equity deal.
I've certainly been taken for a ride before, with one Series C+ company's board delaying all equity grants for a year because they didn't want to pay for 409A valuation until they raised more money ( they never raised more money, everyone got screwed).
Hollywood is in the content business. As an informative precedent in context of a professional union’s unintended consequences (or misused powers), we should look at what role (if any) has the AGU played in censorship, uniformity of views propagated, negative ethnic stereotypes that persist in Hollywood product content, etc.
Thing is tho leaders of any organization can always be bought even if you can't buy each and ever leader all you need to do is
a) put democratic process
b) buy majority of the leader or minority is veto is available to influence a particular decision.
A large fraction of a group can easily be bought by direct or indirect transfer of common human motivation like wealth, power, social validation, sex (maybe given them access to your currated harem), maybe promise them after retirement job or give referral to one of his kids or pay for his education abroad.
The transfer doesn't need to be direct so many times it's hard to trace what got what and why they influenced a particular decision.
This is why such organizations where you elect leaders will never give you those who want to do good for the society at large.
SAG covers things like pension and healthcare which Google employees already have. It’s necessary because of the piecemeal nature of work in film. Not every actor is wealthy - that’s an edge case.
The funny thing about unions is that the HN community believes that every other organization and industry can be disrupted...EXCEPT unions.
It’s hilarious. The comments are usually all anecdotal with some story about an uncle or father who was “screwed over” by his union back in the 80s or 90s.
We are capable of creating a new type of union and making collective bargaining better than what previous generations had in this current era of the greatest wealth inequality since Rockefeller and Carnegie.
What do the tech elite and robber barons have in common?
- They are all anti-union and collective bargaining.
The HN community doesn't "believe" that—people have different opinions, as on many topics. As evidence you don't need to look any further than the massively upvoted subthread that you replied to. It's at the top of this page because a large slice of the community obviously supports this view. That many others don't agree is evidence that the community is divided, not that it's lined up against you; it's basically a variation of sample bias that makes things feel that way [1].
Would you please review the site guidelines [2]? They include this: "Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community." One common kind of sneering is this sort of supercilious dismissal of everybody-else-in-the-community and their dumbass "hilarious" opinion—this is an internet genre we need to avoid in order to have real conversation.
If you're posting here, you're as much the community as anyone else is.
I understand what it's like to feel surrounded by enemies/jerks/assholes when you constantly run into comments saying things you strongly disagree with. But it's important to understand that this effect is largely a consequence of the fact that everyone is crammed into one big room here—there's no self-selecting into silos the way other sites do it (follow lists, subscriptions, social graphs, and so on). If you don't understand that, this place will feel much more fractious than it actually is [3], and the consequences of that are pretty stark: one ends up feeling surrounded by demons [4], and tends to retreat to things like defensive sarcasm, putdowns of others, etc.
What can be done and what will be done are two entirely different concepts, though. What makes you confident that this time it will be different or that this union would be immune from the same issues that occur in other unions?
If we’ve reached the point where the strongest arguments for unionizing is that maybe this time it will somehow be different than other unions, that’s not encouraging.
Precisely - I'm not anti-union, but I've seen the worst of unions (where they become boss #2 instead of being the collective voice of the worker). Anyone planning on starting a union should look at cases where unions _failed_ and avoid creating a union structure that resembles the failures.
I like this framing. This sounds a lot like how entrepreneurs should also look at failed companies rather than only successes.
One thing that every disliked union seems to have is the goal of permanence for the union itself. Maybe instead of having elected or long-term leaders in a permanent union, some should try a sortition process in a conference-like structure that reconvenes when enough employees vote to convene, then disbands until called upon again.
And so why would tech workers, who presently are generally in the upper decile of compensation, want to join an organization that may seek to diminish income disparity?
I was pretty darn clear in saying wealth inequality, not income inequality. Also, inter-industry disparity doesn't matter in this case: your argument would apply equally to NFL players who are unionized, but it doesn't matter that their compensation is high relative to the average American, what matters is getting a higher share of the profit from management/owners in a highly profitable industry.
Similarly in tech, unions can be a way of gaining greater profit sharing for the high-skilled workers necessary for the business to function. Where tech workers lie in income percentile is irrelevant and distracting to this question.
Income and wealth are not disjoint concepts. Income begets wealth, and wealth begets income.
From a societal standpoint, it doesn't particularly aid widespread inequality if a small number of tech workers receive a bump in income; the union may cause the situation to worsen, as the union has an incentive to keep the supply of employees restricted in order to maximize their compensation. The unionized employees would be protected from public competition.
Having pro-sports players in a union hasn't exactly improved widespread inequality.
Not disjoint, but different especially when over half of all money in the US is acquired via inheritance rather than earned income during one's lifetime [0].
Moreover, much wealth (especially at the top) is held in equities, often that aren't sold before being passed on to inheritance. That means:
a. that this wealth isn't counted as income
b. that decreases in equity prices due to unionization (and corresponding decreased expected returns to owners/shareholders) will burden the non-working rich disproportionately.
Sure, it won't solve wealth inequality - but where there is a zero-sum tradeoff, that tradeoff will mostly be from rich tech owners + management to affluent tech workers, not from the rest of society to the tech workers.
Because income disparity has larger effects that will in the long-term screw over tech workers as they have the rest of society. In the Bay Area alone, income disparity coupled with housing shortage has contributed to mass homelessness; cue highly-paid tech workers Tweeting about having to step over human waste on the way to work. On a national and indeed international level, income disparity leads to political upheaval as populist movements capture discontent from slipping standards of living in diminishing middle classes.
Mass homelessness isn’t related to income inequality. That’s entirely caused by a failed local government that will not permit housing fast enough to deal with the demand.
Zuckerberg making $80 billion instead of $1 billion has literally no impact on the homeless in the bay. He only buys one or two houses at most. If the Facebook employees made even more money, that would only exacerbate the housing crisis because they could bid prices much higher (thousands of Facebook employees vs 1 Zuck).
A more effective change for the Bay Area would be for tech workers to leave, not unionize. The issues spring from the market pressure that the hoards of highly-compensated tech workers place on the community.
Given that there seems to be an exodus in motion, even as unionization efforts begin, it would seem like this is an industry that can walk and chew bubblegum at the same time.
I suppose the union could aid the exodus by lobbying against any new positions opening in the bay area, and lobbying for existing positions to be relocated. I'm not sure how popular that would be with wealthy tech union members who like living in the bay area, though.
One thing that's been brought up in the past is that prior to this pandemic-driven WFH present (and probably is still true) is that secondary and satellite offices tend to not have limited openings or paths towards advancement. While a union might not be the best tool for the job, that seems like the sort of thing that organized employee opinion can try to influence. Maybe a lot of workers want to live and work in Austin, and management needs to invest more in the satellite office there, allow more career development opportunities, etc. This industry often seems to led by hidebound opinions that the rank-and-file often disagrees with. Fixation on Bay Area HQs, along with rejection of WFH and obsession with open offices, are examples of such policies which are seemingly only changed by something drastic as the threat of unionization- or more realistically- a worldwide pandemic.
> the HN community believes that every other organization and industry can be disrupted...EXCEPT unions.
The thing about this is, when other organizations and industry are "disrupted", according to the usual west-coast definition of "disrupt" this typically means exploiting a market to the benefit of shareholders by eroding labor standards. What does one erode while disrupting a union, when those same standards are that org's goal?
The only thing I can think of that the modern form of "disruption" would do to unions is to allow them to "screw over" their members more efficiently.
Sounds good. Tech unions can exploit a market to the benefit of shareholders by eroding labor standards.
- The market is labor
- The shareholders are the union members
- The labor standards are the current status quo, which made Apple, Google, Intel, and Adobe owners and managers believe this (https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2015/01/16/37...) was acceptable until the government forced their hand on it. "Erosion," here, would be a disruption that makes the status quo worse for company owners... Makes that kind of one-sided back-room dealing no longer safe for the companies that engage in it, since they no longer fear merely government intervention, but their own employees banding together to say "Knock it off."
We might well be capable of creating a new type of union, but that's not what these organizers are doing. They're seeking to join a branch of the CWA, one of the existing union powerhouses.
The details of the initial organization aren't public, but it's likely that it went in the other direction, as part of the pre-existing project CODE-CWA trying to convince software developers to unionize with them. There's no reason I can see that they would have had to join the CWA.
The advantage of affiliating with a larger organization is their weight becomes a part of your collective bargaining strength. That is, if Google does something the union doesn't like then the entire CWA might get mad at them. I don't know that there are any clear disadvantages from a union's perspective, which is why basically all organizing efforts do it.
From a bird's eye perspective, the disadvantage is that there's no meaningful competition or innovation, because all new unions see themselves as part of the traditional union movement where solidarity is prized. If someone else formed a competing union with a clever new idea for how to organize Google workers, the CWA-backed union would denounce it and demand that Google refuse to talk to the second union.
1) a substantial part of your dues are passed on to support the larger organization
2) some member services are delegated to the larger union, and some larger unions are better at member services than others
3) some larger unions spend a lot of money on political activism instead of member services
4) less independence of action, as larger unions might have different priorities than what ground level members want (e.g. wanting to get a contract settled instead of fighting for more; external organizing over internal organizing)
IWGB and UVW (International Workers of Great Britain and United Voices of the World) are examples in the UK. IWGB in particular has done great work representing some of the most precarious workers in the gig economy, a risk that bigger unions cannot or will not take. Partly this is due to the UK unions playing it safe with direct action such as strikes, since labour laws in the UK were made rather stringent since Thatcher and the NUM had it out in the 80s.
This is a great article about them. Maybe paywalled, sorry!
If you Google "IWGB deliveroo" or "UVW St. Marys" you will find interesting case studies where each have represented delivery riders and nurses and won concessions where a bigger union wouldn't have bothered cos of the risk involved. Echoing the comment a few levels up, this can definitely be seen as a "disruption" of what a union is or is expected to do.
I'm not sure a lot of this is really relevant in this situation. From the articles I've seen, the employees forming a union are the activist employees. So the fear for a non-union tech worker in this scenario would be if the union behaved like many others and demanded a certain ratio of union to non-union workers since the dynamic in this context would boil down to deprioritizing applicants who don't have the same political views as the union employees which seems wildly toxic for society.
Boeing has software engineer unions. They start at like, ~$70k and after a few years can get up to ~$90k (someone correct me if I'm off, but I don't think I'm very far off).
My first job at a defense contractor in the midwest started at $70k. This was an employee owned company, but my understanding is that salaries are fairly similar at other defense contractors. Interestingly, it got to the point where the government employees we worked next to made more than us. Usually the deal is they get great benefits, but lower pay. However, pay seemed to be pretty stagnant at my contractor (nice folks though).
Taking the same salary to live near Seattle (Everett, I suppose, but the point stands) is a substantial pay cut.
I now work at a different defense contractor, across the street from said Boeing plant and came in with ~3y experience for ~$110k. Certainly much lower than a true "tech company", but it was tens of thousands of dollars higher than where I'd fall on the Boeing pay scales.
I worked at a different defense contractor/research place with a union and was making a decent chunk of change more than the numbers above without much seniority (not FAANG money, but enough to buy a place in a high COL area). IMO my company's union also did a better job protecting retirement benefits than Boeing's.
I see that time and again - people lump ALL unions in with the WORST unions for some reason. It's like any union that's had some success isn't really in the news.
The movie industry unions definitely sounds more appealing than those of the steal industry for instance. But of course it's easier to rally for a cause in an industry that is doing well. I think unions need to be rethought and I'm curious how it will look like if the Google union actually happens.
At the same time the Hollywood unions obviously were not there with all these scandals of the last years. Essentially it was both traditional and social media that helped with that.
Hollywood unions work because they force an artificial monopoly. SAG requires productions to hire a certain percentage of union actors, which screws over non-union members. Without this market manipulation, unions are largely useless because the market will always have room for non-union members.
This doesn't matter too much for Hollywood because plenty of people are willing to write/act for peanuts, but I don't want to see these in-group/out-group in tech.
The point of unions is obviously for employees to unite in order to strengthen their bargaining power.
Engineers at Google are very well paid and have very nice perks (at least that the general perception), so I think what many people might wonder is what better deal do they feel they need strongly enough to unite in order to get it?
>Engineers at Google are very well paid and have very nice perks (at least that the general perception), so I think what many people might wonder is what better deal do they feel they need strongly enough to unite in order to get it?
Also hope to gosh that there is a membership rate cap.
1% of every Google engineer's salary every year is an absurd amount of money. I don't understand why Sally Joe making $200k needs to pay more for her protection than Billy Bob making $150k.
The article is quite clear: they don't intend to unite to strengthen their bargaining power.
"Arranged as a members-only union, the new organization won’t seek collective bargaining rights to negotiate a new contract with the company"
It's not really a union. It's a political faction that calls itself a union to benefit from laws protecting union members from being fired for "organising". The assumption was that unions would "organise" to benefit their workers via better pay or conditions, but that isn't the case here.
Presumably in their case a union offers a better way to voice their concerns over eg. objectionable business practices, or just affecting the role out of more routine policies - eg. around time tracking, remote working, childcare, etc.
> You have vocally supportive multi-millionaire card-carrying members of the Screen Actors Guild, the Writers Guild, and the Directors Guild to name a few.
I'm not familiar with that industry (nor the US) but those sound more like professional bodies than unions? I am a Member of the IET; I wouldn't join a union.
While I would prefer a union in the US, I do believe it will be extremely toxic itself in current SV manner. I am situated in a country where unions are common, but tech doesn't have one because working conditions are good due to it being a sellers market for work.
Tech companies behaved in a way that they deserve uncompromising worker representation. But I believe it will currently end in a group of sociopathic individuals that will put a strain on tech. I don't mind to be proved otherwise, but I don't see the wrong people getting elected to represent workers.
For some reason, the most vocal aspect of tech workers tends to be this libertarianish pure merit based persona that is insulted by any type of collective bargaining.
I think that attitude rules the day because tech related industries are in an extended growth period, and the more “legacy” aspects of the industry use offshoring and guest workers to maintain total control. (The armies of programmers churning out Java at banks, etc.)
While rockstar engineers exist, and everyone on the internet is a genius, the reality is that almost nobody has meaningful negotiation power over a big tech company. I’ve seen more than my share of top talent at big tech companies get dumped in hardship roles or be mistreated because their big boss/sponsor retired or moved on, and they were held hostage by vesting periods, etc.
Growing up, I had family who were steamfitters, firemen and operating engineers. All of them were treated better as skilled labor or with clear work rules than the bullshit that I’ve been forced to deal with in my career. Not complaining -- I've lived a charmed work life in many ways!
I personally am very happy with my job, and when I raise any kind of grievance it is listened to. If I were unhappy, I’d go to another company. So I just don’t see what I’d get out of it personally.
I find really, really baffling the general position in the US regarding unions. It is like there's a general discourse that they are a bad thing, just like with "that other" thing (cough socialism cough).
This is even more strange when you find out about police unions - that are widespread -, and what their power is. From my point of view actions of police union are usually borderline "mob-like" (as in, I mostly hear about them when they save the necks of abusing and / or corrupted officers). It's like people think unions are generally bad, but then they have police unions everywhere and nobody bats an eye... even when their actions are on the shadowy side of things.
I didn't know about the film industry, thought (Even thought I remember about the writer's guild strike of a few years back).
Just like democracy, unions might be the worst solution, except for all the others.
Just a few opinions here, focusing on the negatives to try to explain the 'general discourse that they are a bad thing'.
It's in part because the US has a storied history of corrupt unions and their affiliation with the mafia and organized crime.
There's a related facet in that, to an outside observer, the UAW chased American automakers out of the country through unsustainable demands for wages and benefits.
Another part comes from the direct experience of many Americans as members of unions and some portion (we can argue percentages) of those people arrive at the conclusion that the union at best isn't worth the dues and at worse is pathological, in some cases by protecting underperformers and in others by lacking a spine when it is needed. This is where my personal experience the Teamsters and vicarious experience via my wife's membership in the NEA landed me.
It's also in part because many Americans have direct experience working alongside unions and some (again we can argue percentages) become frustrated with the rules and the pace. I've had some experience with this in the HVAC industry and in home building. I was already tainted a bit by my experience as a member above so I'm sure there was some confirmation bias here.
Lastly America has a pretty strong ethos, or myth if you prefer, of individualism and some unions and union members lay on a very thick collectivist twang in their communication that can be off-putting.
I'm not ideologically opposed to unions in any way, I just haven't seen one do a great job in the US. I hope Kickstarter is able to pull off a good example and am all for workers shooting their shot if they feel it is a good idea. I'm just not particularly optimistic.
> I find really, really baffling the general position in the US regarding unions. It is like there's a general discourse that they are a bad thing, just like with "that other" thing (cough socialism cough).
I'm from the 'birthplace' of US Auto unions. This part of your reply is actually a good place to start the explanation, because that's actually the perception of some other unions, and at times there is historical context to that.
> From my point of view actions of police union are usually borderline "mob-like" (as in, I mostly hear about them when they save the necks of abusing and / or corrupted officers).
Two points:
- The UAW and Teamsters in particular had ties to actual mob organizations in the past. "Jimmy Hoffa" is a name to look up if you'd like an example of what some people think of when they think of unions.
- The examples you give of corruption/status quo in police unions are present in the Auto shops as well; whenever I heard a story from an auto worker about why 'they' did not like the unions, it was usually a story like what you said; a worker getting 'protected' by the union when their actions were unsafe. IOW even some of the people -in- the union see it as a broken institution.
The mafia influence over the Teamsters Union was at its height in the late 1960s, early 1970s. Well, well after Taft-Hartley.
The UAW and related issues absolutely killing the domestic US auto industry is late 1970s, early 1980s. It wasn't just unions there, but that was a major contributing factor.
Taft-Hartley was a decisive stroke in the effort to defang and depoliticize labor unions in the US (e.g., outlawing solidarity strikes and political strikes, expulsion of communists). Should we be surprised that kneecapping the militant labor struggle led to the corruption of its leftover power structures?
We should definitely abolish police unions, though.
Hey, sorry for not replying in a timely manner. I made the comment above and then was dragged by work for the last 3 days, and completely forgot about this.
I got a lot of good other comments, but the reason I'm replying to you is this: You miss understood what I said. (My bad?)
I was not saying that unions are good, or that unions are bad.
I was just stating how contradictory the opinion on unions is on the US. A large % of people think that unions are bad, but they accept as a matter of fact that police unions exists.
The fact that _they_ exists, means - IMO - that their associates get benefits from that, more often than not, considering how widespread police unions are.
I don't think that unions are inherently bad or good; I think that depends on the culture of the country.
In my country, almost everybody is in a union, and they do a general good job of fighting for salary increases on a yearly basis.
The downside of unions here, is that the truck drivers unions have lobbied extensively over the years against new rail roads, and that goes against the well being of the general population.
I follow a "UK Legal Advice" subreddit [1] (I don't live in the UK, but I work for a company there" and more often than not the advice given there is "Adhere to a union". Basically, unions good / bad depends on the country.
This is a fascinating example. Thanks for the additional perspective! My gut instinct was that I've worked in a union and I wasn't a fan of it. I am in Canada, so it's possible that union vs non-union employment doesn't have as large of a gap as it would in America.
I'm no expert on unions nor am I an expert on labor economics or game theory, however, I had a few thoughts that I would love references to explore.
1. the union is for employees in Canada and the US. Google employs economists. Is there some game theory solution that would show google should end up transitioning all labor overseas over time? With remote work caused by the pandemic is there really a barrier to eliminating US and Canadian jobs?
2. what's the distribution of google's labor force? As best as I can tell, google has 223,000 total workers. About 45% (102k/223k) are full-time, the rest are temps and contractors. Where are these jobs? What percent are in the US?
3. I have seen employers in the US close up entire businesses and relocate to Canada when the US business unionized. I've seen Canadian businesses close up and move to new provinces when the employees unionized. When the profit loss caused by unions exceeds the transition costs, transitions happen.
4. how many employees are truly irreplaceable? I know a lot of people like to think they can never be replaced, but companies move on. is it like for like? not always.
5. how much of this extra profit employees think they deserve is enabled by google and google scale? i.e., if you're saving google 1 million per year and you think you deserve a large chunk of that, what happens when you try to go to a company that has 1/1000th the scale of google? Note: these union doesn't seem to be aimed at capturing value for them (full-time), but instead seems to seek to distribute the full-time benefits to the part-timers and temps. That's commendable.
6. I'm sure there are more unions than the oversimplification that follows. The google union doesn't seem to be a collective bargaining agreement type union for salaries. Salaries are still up to individuals.
Let's roughly define CBA (collective bargaining agreement) unions vs "superstar" unions.
Superstar unions:
- Hollywood and professional sports have unions where they have minimum salaries and working conditions, but the stars can end up negotiating a huge salary (some sports have salary caps across a team). Will tech workers start taking on agents to negotiate tech contracts on their behalf?
- Sports has drafts and minor leagues, will the hoops to get hired at google become even more outrageous? Look at the meat market that is the NFL combine [2].
CBA unions:
- contractors and temps still exist in these situations. Now full-time jobs are split into permanent part-time (PPT) and full-time (FT). Permanent part-time meaning you can get 40 hours a week, but you have no benefits. This can take years to move from PPT to FT.
- Teaching and nursing unions enforce a minimum level of credentials. Trade unions do too, in the form of apprenticeships, which still require formal education.
- in the negative extreme, the Vancouver longshoreman union jobs are nearly impossible to get. you need to have a family member (yes, these are passed from grandpa to father to son) endorse you to join the union. union call for new members happen every 1-3 or more years. if you're endorsed, you end up in a raffle. if you're lucky enough to be drawn, you still have to wait your turn before you can work and then become full-time. it's a many year long process. or, supposedly, you can buy endorsements for tens of thousands of dollars.
- jobs get opened up internally before being opened up to external candidates
- companies have to provide training to get internal employees who are more or less qualified up to a level suitable to accept the next jobs.
7. There has been mention of other fields such as accounting, law, and medicine. I don't think these are the same types of unions. In Canada anyway, you have to go through certain education, professional exams, and professional development in engineering and accounting. At a first level, you need to get professional licensing. That doesn't seem to be the same type of union presented here. If anything, moving tech towards accounting, engineering, law, medicine, etc. will add more gate keeping, and I've seen lots of arguments against gate keeping on HN.
8. Canadian engineering has three levels. Technician (1-2 years of post-secondary education), technologist (2-3 years of post-secondary education), and engineer (4+ years of post-secondary education). Typically these roles are not interchangeable. It's very difficult to transition from one to the other without going back to school. The education (there may be exceptions) levels are not stepping stones. Technician can ladder into technologist, but technologist to engineer often means 4 more years of school. Maybe this will start to break the different SWE roles up.
9. Anyway, this is probably all for the betterment of employees working in tech, so it's commendable that some in such an envious position are leading the charge. If this is the start of "professionalizing" tech, then it'll be interesting to see how this impacts innovation (no more move fast and break things) and educational / meritocratic diversity in the long-run (professionals require licensing and other credentials). Maybe that would be the big kicker to make an impact in the outrageous costs of US higher education.
10. I hope I'm wrong, but this could be the start of tech salaries in SV (a couple of other American cities and some Canadian cities) regressing to the mean of professional engineers. They are still good salaries, but it's not like you can decide to move to a city and 2-10x your salary / TC like you can with tech and SV. Tech seems to be a good way to have social mobility, but if the salaries regress to the mean, there will be even more inequality and less mobility in America.
[1]
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/28/technology/google-temp-wo...
"As of March, Google worked with roughly 121,000 temps and contractors around the world, compared with 102,000 full-time employees, according to an internal document obtained by The New York Times."
Unions are "Red scare" for many. I thinks it comes down to ideology.
Pro capitalists view unions with skepticism or hostility because challenges the system, pro socialists view as a way to fight the power structures and injustice.
Other people just don't want to be involved in unions because is a sensitive topic and are afraid to lost their jobs.
Nobody in this union is going to fight against "injustice". Look at their list of demands. It's indeed a red scare because they are really, really red. For example, refusing to work with the defence industry - which country in the world would benefit most from a damaged US/European military? China!
We can see what kind of union this is by the fact that:
1. They aren't going to try and bargain collectively
2. Their announcement claims Timnit Gebru was fired and that was terrible, instead of the obvious truth that she said made obnoxious requests and said she'd resign unless she got them, then was told "OK, we accept your resignation". They're a brand new organisation and they're already misrepresenting reality.
In other words it's going to be nothing like the IBEW or whatever. It's yet another left-wing campaigning organisation, pretending to be a union to try and make the members un-fireable no matter how nasty they become.
The whole point of unions is that no one is subject to the vagaries of summary termination. But don't worry, I'm not holding my breath on this.
But the left/right pendulum swings both ways. It would also protect people from the next kerfuffle over Cancel Culture.
People should have the right to not be threatened with the removal of their livelihood for arbitrary reasons. I mean, there's nothing unreasonable in that position, and its merits can be examined outside of the left/right lens.
The justification for its existence is to propagate cancel culture - read what they've written about their goals! A part of their mission is to cancel whole customers and let's face it, if they think Gebru was "fired" they aren't going to stick up for James Damore are they?
Any manager at Google who wrote and distributed what Timnit did about diversity efforts (that they're pointless and should be stopped) would be fired on the spot. Every manager at Google knows this.
> I've had people tell me that they don't support unions in tech because they'll be "paid less", or less competent engineers will be promoted faster.
I am such a person. For most workers, you're right that a union will probably increase wages. But for me, it will do the opposite. In most jobs I have worked, I ended up paid significantly more than counterparts in the same job. I usually was better at my job and put in more hours, so this was warranted. And for promotions, I don't see how this is wrong: most every union of which I'm aware ends using seniority as a factor in promotions, which I generally resent.
I never liked the mandatory nature of unions, either. If they're that good for workers, quit trying to force the whole company to join. I also hate the idea of being forced to strike.
As far as my interests are concerned, a union would end up taking money and promotions from me and giving it to others. So, I will always vote against them. If one shows up at my workplace, I will probably move because someone else offers better terms of employment.
I'm skeptical of unionization in tech, but the one thing I can imagine unions would fix is the constant unpaid overtime that's associate with tech jobs. In a union situation, you'd be paid more if you were working more hours period, rather than hoping somebody would notice and give you a pay raise at some indeterminate time in the future.
It's not a huge stretch to imagine the following scenario play out though:
1. Tech workers unionize, negotiate with employer that any work > 40 hours / week get paid overtime.
2. The company now has two choices: A) Pay their employees more than their competitors for the same work. Or B) Don't authorize any overtime.
3. In scenario A, they're either running at (much) higher cost than their competitors, and thus a disadvantage. In Scenario B, they're either slower to ship products, or there's a bunch of "off the books" work done by engineers trying to ship things anyways (which is basically the status quo today, except now it would cost you 1% of your salary).
I could see the first scenario potentially attracting better talent for the significantly higher pay in the short term. But it's also a perverse incentive structure where if my 8 hours of work suddenly takes 9 hours, I get paid more, so why would I finish it early? Oh and because I'm in a union, it's now much harder to get rid of me, even if I'm half-assing it.
Why is it harder to fire people that don't meet performance standards of they're in a union? Which union members are striking to support poorly performing colleagues aren't union members and bosses aligned here - in general people don't want to carry their colleagues (if they're performing badly because they're lazy/incapable)?
One unfortunate consequence in A is that it may cause the unscrupulous to delay work in order to work overtime at a higher rate. This was sometimes an issue with (non-software) maintenance
Salaried employees usually get paid straight time for overtime rather than time and a half. (That's my personal experience - I've always been paid straight time for overtime) That at least takes away one incentive to delay work to work overtime - you still get paid more, but you don't increase your hourly rate.
B) is basically what we have already. Contractually only required to work 40 hour weeks, no [official] pressure from management to work more, but anyone who does will most likely have higher output / receive better performance bonuses and recognition, etc.
The only thing a union brings to the table in this situation is now I'm either explicitly forbidden from working more on a project even if I want to, or I have to hide what I'm doing and go all cloak-and-dagger about it, probably breaking some kind of labor laws in the process. All for 1% of my salary. Doesn't seem like a good trade for me?
It seems like in the scenario B) has the added teeth of deterring leadership from forcing unpaid overtime, as some management do, though it is possible even with the union-enacted mandate they will still try to sneak it in, as you suggested.
> I'm either explicitly forbidden from working more on a project even if I want to
This sort of nitpicking is always cited as a reason for why unions are bad but would a union really get up in your case over something like that? And furthermore, would a tech union birthed natively in this industry, created and populated by tech workers who have also worked spent evenings or weekends voluntarily to work on projects they themselves were passionate enough to finish, really penalize its all members for doing the same? Wouldn't they, you know, have an insider's insight of the needs and interests of working in tech?
I think not. The idea is to guard against when management oversteps its boundaries, not to police other workers. And if the union inevitably does fall short and do the latter, then by being part of a union, you would have the power to make changes within it.
To be fair, there are other avenues to fix this. I came into a job that just settled a lawsuit over this for the very small number on non-union workers it applied to. From then on, that small group received increased overtime pay despite being non-union
On average, sure, unionized workers may make more; I explicitly acknowledged that. But it also reduces the higher wages the top performers are paid. I've generally been in that group.
> No one is forcing you to work a union job.
They kind of are. While this one is a minority union, those are usually steps towards mandatory ones. I shouldn't be forced to join a union because enough of my coworkers voted on it; they have no say in a private agreement between me and my employer.
I think we can just end the whole thread with this comment (the parent’s). It’s perfect.
To summarize: unions might in general be good or bad, but any talk of tech unions on HN will be controversial because of how massively—and this cannot be overstated—, stupendously better the average HN reader is compared to the average tech worker. Thread over.
The irony of this reply is I can't tell if it's a tongue in cheek piece about the hubris of the HN community or 100% serious.
I think there's something to be said about quality, but if we look at unionization at just the company level, you are likely to get a much higher average at some companies. Even if the assumption on the average HN reader's ability is true, this doesn't end the conversation: it refocuses it onto other levels than a union over the entire industry.
Yep, that is an accurate summary of every thread I've read on software developers and unions since I first joined Slashdot in 2000. The only thing missing might be "better and whiter" lol.
Tech already uses seniority as a factor much more than they want to admit. I resent it too, but don't act like it's not already basically the de facto standard.
As far as pay goes, the ubiquity of software engineering roles is already causing a down pressure on salaries. In the next decade it's only going to get worse. We might as well get ahead of the curve and use our current leverage to put us in a better position when it inevitably arrives at our door.
My concerns are that it will have licensing requirements to be a computer programmer. Also I like to work a few years and then take like a year off, I don’t think unions allow for this not working all the time structure.
Don't think we've ever seen Hollywood in the modern era without unions, so not sure how you can claim it's "undeniable" the industry is better off. We basically have no clue if it's better off or not.
Unions are intended for industries where a worker doesn't have a marketplace of options as there is a single or just a few employers (e.g. Hollywood, teachers, coal mining towns, hospital staff, etc.). Unionizing at Google makes no sense, as there are thousands of tech companies hiring engineers in the valley -- engineers can "collectively bargain" with Google by simply leaving and working somewhere "better".
The reality is that Google is an easy place to work relative to how much people get paid. People don't want to leave a cushy job for one where they would have to work harder for their money, so instead, they are trying other means to have their cake and eat it too.
> People don't want to leave a cushy job for one where they would have to work harder for their money, so instead, they are trying other means to have their cake and eat it too.
You're saying this like it's a bad thing. Why shouldn't employees expect, and get, better working conditions?
> engineers can "collectively bargain" with Google by simply leaving and working somewhere "better"
How is individuals leaving "collectively bargain", it's the complete opposite, it's individual bargaining, with all the perils that entails.
> Unions are intended for industries where a worker doesn't have a marketplace of options as there is a single or just a few employers (e.g. Hollywood, teachers, coal mining towns, hospital staff, etc.).
This is just a mis-conception, look at Germany where every industry has unions, regardless of size, and unions has a say in how companies are run, and what direction they head in. They make sure that shareholders and employees get input into the highest levels of leadership, ensuring that shareholders can't force decisions that benefit shareholders at the detriment of employees.
Finally Google looks like the perfect place for a union. Any company that rewards senior leadership for sexual harassment clearly doesn't consider it's employees important, and those employees should absolutely make it clear who generates most of the value in a company, and ensure they're treated fairly.
Employees can ask for better, but when you already work at the company that pays and treats their employees like Google, I'm not sure what more you are entitled to. It seems clear to me that these are people who are unwilling to sacrifice some of the money they earn to follow their ideals and principles, so they are trying this instead.
There are very few perils of leaving Google - a top tier company in an industry that is continuously struggling to hire enough people. If you are an engineer at Google and can't get a job somewhere else, I don't know what to tell you.
Comparing Germany to USA is pointless, very different government, history, culture, business climate, etc.
It seems clear to me that these are people who are unwilling to sacrifice some of the money they earn to follow their ideals and principles, so they are trying this instead.
Employees pushing for change from the inside is probably the only thing that could ever make Google change, so this is absolutely a good thing.
If you are an engineer at Google and can't get a job somewhere else, I don't know what to tell you.
Something few people seem to understand about massive companies is that they employ some of the most niche specialists imaginable because they're literally the only business that needs those skills. Working you way up and getting more and more specialized can be very lucrative, but also very limiting in the number of employers who want your skillset. Leaving usually comes with a big step down in terms of money and title. You're essentially dropping back down to where you were before you specialized. It's not hard to imagine a lot of senior engineers at Google might feel a bit trapped there.
Oh, the perils of having a 600k TC job and having to step down to a job only clearing 250k while you climb the ladder again. Oh those poor senior Google SWEs.
That’s not being trapped. That’s being greedy. There’s nothing wrong with trying to preserve massive TCs with the WLB of Google but let’s not pretend there is actually any plight here.
I find it so hypocritical that so many people espouse the "American Dream" of working your way up and earning more and more, they get so upset that someone might want to protect what they've earned.
The truth is, many Google software engineers are unhappy with the political choices that Google are making. Yeah, they could vote with their feet and quit, but would you take a massive pay cut and financially destabilize your family as the first course of action? I wouldn't; I'd try to exact change from within, whilst protecting the benefits I'd earned in the workplace.
And all that's just looking at the individuals benefits. Unionising would mean that I, a straight white man, could help support policies that empower my minority co-workers.
> The truth is, many Google software engineers are unhappy with the political choices that Google are making.
This defense will be relatively easy for Google's leadership to counter. To the extent that it's used, the leadership will be able to say that the unionization effort isn't about working conditions. Instead, it's about political differences (and political differences that are distinct from what almost anyone thinks of as "working conditions").
I could be wrong, but "Google SWEs are unhappy with the leadership's political choices" doesn't sound like a winning rhetorical strategy.
When I was at Google, I'd have been very tempted to join this union, if it was actually focused on improving compensation, bringing more objectivity to perf and promo, and workplace issues. But this new one seems primarily focused on... whinging about Timnit. Even that would be a big positive, if they were focused on getting protections for workplace freedom of speech for all workers and a structured dismissal process, but for some reason I'm skeptical that they'd be standing up for Damore.
Unions are inherently political organizations, and so are corporations. A winning rhetorical strategy is saying that you oppose your employer's blatantly self-serving political actions.
That fantasy depends entirely on the unionization having no blow-backs. A union that has to approve all business decisions going forward could very easily accelerate Google’s loss of relevancy and eliminate or reverse Google’s stock growth (which is the majority of an engineer’s comp).
On the flip side, this nightmare scenario is also currently a fantasy in an industry that has had minimal union activity, in a country where union power has been slipping for decades. This is slippery slope catastrophizing.
Well there has never been an example of a democratically run company that makes good decisions so far.
It’s a classic principal agent problem. You want to take the voting power away from those with the financial stake and expect the people without a financial mistake to make good business decisions.
What is your standard for "good decisions"? Is your standard maximum profit and growth? In that case, sure. Is your standard general customer and employee satisfaction, along with stability? In that case, no.
I'd say the second criteria is infinitely more useful, and empirically it works. The most stable bank in North America is democratically run by both customers and employees, I'm a very happy customer, and I know of many happy employees.
Why decry the Software Engineer preserving a toe hold in the upper class income bracket vs. the leadership team making 10-100000x that amount? ( The 100k multiplier is the real maximal difference between what a Senior Engineer at FAANG makes and the owners of FAANG in a good year )
The problem is a few companies pay very well, at senior+ levels, Google, FB, NFLX, AMZN, etc, If you work there for a few years and want to leave comp will be an extreme drop which given the cost of the bay area is a hard pill to swallow, why not try to unionize and fix a broken company?
You can leave for another FAANG or high paying company. There is a decent sized pool of competitive paying companies out there, it's not just Google and Facebook.
Tomato. Tomato. (This doesn't work on the internet.)
No doubt it's a trap of their own making but it is a trap nonetheless. The idea of giving up the fancy things that you've worked hard for, maybe having to sell your house, take your kids out of a school you pay for, etc just so you can leave the company you work for and go somewhere 'better' is a hard choice that no doubt feels selfish. The decision has a significant and material impact on other people after all.
Very few of us would prefer to earn a 250k salary that comes with the freedom to move to other companies, even though that's a lot, if there's a 600k job on offer instead. We'd all take the higher paying job and maybe regret it later. I don't think it's very fair to suggest those who are in that position are wrong or stupid to have put themselves there.
> We'd all take the higher paying job and maybe regret it later.
I had the good pay at Google and I left. I had to give up early retirement goals to do it but there are things more important than just money. You can still live a very comfortable upper middle class life in the Bay Area on 250k.
Additionally, most Google engineering positions are not that specialized and getting a position at another FAANG or hot startup with TC higher than 250k would not be very difficult.
I’ll take the devils advocate position for the sake of the discussion.
I think what’s being stated is that if you can’t manage to be happy within the top 1% income bracket, maybe focusing on more wealth isn’t the way to find fulfillment. It’s not about being wrong or stupid, it’s about misunderstanding what needs to be optimized.
I would fully encourage any FAANG employee to be as greedy and disruptive as possible. Anything that weakens the massively increasing power of these companies is a good thing for the population at large.
Or conversely - if intelligent people with experience from around the world in the best scenario possible feel that right now a union is needed - then that is a shot in the arm for all those others people in far worse situations who can't hope to start a union because they would be busted faster than I can write this full stop.
The only entity that stands to lose from their greed is one of the largest monopolies in the world. Why do you feel they need to be protected from greed?
It's OK, once Google gets a union then you'll lose your 600k TC job and get moved back down to the 250k job because you haven't been at the company long enough and promotions and pay ranges can be based on tenure because that's more equitable.
> It seems clear to me that these are people who are unwilling to sacrifice some of the money they earn to follow their ideals and principles, so they are trying this instead.
This phrasing is disingenuous. If you don't like what's going on you can stay and fight rather than giving up and leaving. The people unionizing are of the "stay and fight" variety. Where does this false dichotomy come from that your only options are to stay and shut up or leave and be vocal?
So when a company tries to squeeze as much labor out of as little compensation as it can, it’s a shrewd business move… but when employees try to get the most compensation for the least labor, they’re lazy? Do you see the double standard here?
It's not a shrewd business move! Companies should pay well and treat their employees well, both because it's good for business and because it's the right thing to do. The adversarial model of employment where passionate employees fight against penny-pinching bosses is neither natural nor inevitable, and I think everyone who can avoid it should do so.
What if paying their employees who work in their warehouses as little as possible and tracking them to maximize productivity is actually what maximizes their profits?
What if they don't have a shortage of labor but do employ a large number of people in a town?
Should the company continue to provide awful working conditions?
What should motivate the company to treat their employees better, if not the employees getting together collectively to say "we're not going to take this anymore"?
Are the employees dependent on their plight becoming a national scandal that shames their employer? Or should they be able to cause the change they need themselves?
Respectfully, I just don't understand what your stream of angry questions is about. As I said, what should happen is that companies just provide good pay and working conditions in the first place. If workers are being mistreated, I have no objection to them collectively organizing against it.
And respectfully, despite the fact that Google is an objectively good place to work for many people (good pay, good opportunities for growth and advancement, etc), there is an abundance of evidence in recent years that for minorities, and for teams under specific leaders, Google has not been a good place to work.
Unions aren't just about wages and workloads, it's entirely possible that employees of tech companies (and shareholders of tech companies) that are unionized could be protected from the impact of shitty leaders through the power of collective bargaining and action that demands that abusive leaders and managers be held accountable.
Different commenter here: I have no objection to workers organizing.
I do think that unions are both the kind of mechanism that eliminates the worst workplace abuses ... but contributes to a workplace being policy driven and stifling.
There's already reasons why larger employers institute lots of policy and remove individual team, worker, and manager autonomy. But a counterparty demanding a lot of these to be committed to in contract forming its own parallel bureaucracy can multiply these effects.
I think one might reasonably say that a company like Google is already stifling with its bureaucracy. The problem is that the existing bureaucracy protects the company and managers and not the workers
Yah. I just have bad memories of not being able to move my monitor from one end of a desk to another without a worker in a union filing a grievance. Just because you have lots of bureaucracy doesn't mean you can't have a bunch more.
To be clear, that's about moving equipment, right?
(I've had that issue as well, where the people who managed the equipment were in a union)
Note: I think that's a misapplication of their grievances - it's one thing if your employer makes you move your office equipment to avoid hiring movers, a single person updating their desk or location should be an explicit exception
But I agree with you!! Unions can cause bad policy, and this is a reasonable example.
I think unions should be just about wages and workloads. It's not obvious to me that collective bargaining is a good way to handle more complex questions about how things ought to be, because rhetoric of solidarity and workers rights can be very easily subverted to serve the personal and ideological goals of union leaders.
When I negotiate a starting salary, I don't just stick to "salary and workload."
I keep everything on the table. If there are any benefits that they can provide me that are outside the scope of salary and workload, it's possible I'll be able to get something more valuable to me while being more favorable for my potential employer
Eg I might negotiate team size if I'm coming in to lead a team, I might negotiate benefits if I'm going to a sufficiently small company, I might negotiate how frequently I'm expected to travel for the company
Being able to negotiate quality of life is important because many employers offer _what looks like_ a generous package but then shove their employees into dangerous working conditions.
Remember that unions are always less powerful than your employer, and you can influence the union more easily than you can influence your employer (caveats on seniority in which case a union isn't for you), for better and worse
Why is it acceptable for the leaders of companies to subvert the company to serve the personal and ideological goals of the company leaders, but it's bad for the employees to do the same when they are often the ones who are called on to do the work for those goals, and are less likely to have the freedom to simply change jobs (especially during an economy melting pandemic).
I recognize that in general, the leaders of a company are the folks who are either selected by, or are the investors or founders, but at the end of the day, the impact that those investors or founders can have is strongly limited by the talent they can attract.
The entire tech industry is a shit show from a human rights perspective because of the ongoing imbalance between the folks who are making decisions, and the folks who are executing those decisions (see: the coinbase affair, the recent Uber ad spend revelations building off disclosures by other adtech researchers, the whole mess with Susan Fowler, the way Timnit Gebru was fired, and any number of issues that seem to come up on a weekly basis)
Unions can be problematic, but it is blatantly clear that tech investors and founders are basically the robber barons of our generation. In the pursuit of power and profit they have advanced us towards the type of cyberpunk dystopias most of the folks posting on this forum grew up reading, and most of the people posting here are the cogs that enable some of the atrocious privacy and human rights violations that are happening on the regular.
I am a strong believer in the role that unions play because I grew up in a community where unions literally saved lives because managers at a smelter wanted to maximize profits and workers didn't want to die from a massive cauldron of liquid copper or zinc exploding on them, or wanted effective safety gear when prying plates of zinc deposit from cathodes. It may not be quite the same degree of physical risk, but the folks who screen objectionable content on social media platforms certainly deserve protections. Gig economy workers deserve protections. Startup employees deserve protection. If government regulation isn't doing the job, then unions are the natural organizations to step in, as they have during some of the most prosperous times in history.
Virtually all of the concerns that folks have about shitty unions (and shitty leadership) can be solved through transparency, but it is incumbent on the leaders selected by constituents of those groups (union members and investors/founders/executives) to choose transparency.
My point is that your claim that "it's good for business" to treat employees so well they don't benefit from advocating for themselves is clearly false in one of the largest tech companies.
If you don't understand that, your view of corporations is rosy-eyed
I don't disagree. But it's kind of a moot point, because the adversarial model of employment is what many people have. Google in particular recently settled a lawsuit about an agreement they had with other tech giants to depress their employees' salaries: https://time.com/76655/google-apple-settle-wage-fixing-lawsu...
> The adversarial model of employment where passionate employees fight against penny-pinching bosses is neither natural nor inevitable
Very few people would continue working their jobs if they didn't need to to survive. The legal, cultural, and competitive structure of corporations demands paying employees as little as possible for as much work as possible. Barring serious cultural and political change, I don't see how this could result in anything but adversarial employment for almost everyone.
Treating employees well is bad for business outside certain bubbles, and "the right thing to do" doesn't factor in to these decisions.
Should they still endeavor to avoid this adversarial relationship if the alternative is to not be treated well, or to see the company they work for do immoral things.
If the alternative is to sit down and shut up, I think it's time to be adversarial.
EDIT: just saw your reply to another commenter and it seems you are pro-union if needed. It didn't come across that way to me when I read your initial comment.
It’s like politicians saying that $600 is significant. How would they know? Google unionizing is like politicians asking for free parking. They seem to just want to unionize as a way to force their beliefs on others.
That’s a very black-and-white way of looking at it, you do know that? How is unionizing and asking for reasonable demands “forcing your beliefs on others”
The company is not some helpless animal that just rolls over when a union appears. Especially if you regulate it well, like in Europe.
So when the mlb & mlbpa negotiated stricter covid protocols (which both allowed them to complete the season and improved player safety), you're saying that provided the players no benefits?
Unions are involved in more than pay negotiations. Sure I can work hard and earn a promotion and pay raise. Working hard cannot, for example, get me out of signing a non-compete agreement. Unionized employees could collectively bargain to ban non-compete agreements.
They also can, under certain circumstances, collectively demand that the company stops hiring anyone outside the union, and make other unsubstantiated demands such as mandatory membership fees, that benefit the union itself and not high-skilled individual employees who know how to beneficially sell their skills to the employer without third-parties involved. Also, contractors with individual LLCs usually don't sign non-compete agreements, so you don't need a union to be able to benefit from an expertise that is currently in high demand.
Yes that can occur. Lots of things can and do occur.
If we think unions are bad because they do bad things under certain circumstances then that should also apply to corporations, no? Worker exploitation, ignoring externalities and such?
So, we could get rid of corporations and unions? Or ... have both, since like any human institution, both are fallible.
> Yes that can occur. Lots of things can and do occur.
so, what's your solution to the problem of fallible unions?
> Or ... have both, since like any human institution, both are fallible.
You are yet to prove that unions solve anything in the setting that you outlined.
How about just having corporations and a small government that doesn't prevent new players entering the market by restrictive laws and quotas, in place of those that fall prey to corruption, fraud, and short-sighted destructive practices? There's more than two options to consider.
My point is simple. These are all human institutions. They're not "problems" with "solutions".
And, to answer your second question, I believe the scenario you idealize creates externalities like environmental pollutions which kills citizens, and creates conditions where companies exploit workers (consider what the food industry, meatpacking plants, etc, would look like without OHSA).
Precisely because you've added a redundant argument of fallible corporations to the thread that makes a case about corrupt unions that negatively impact law-abiding high-skilled professionals. This was the concern I initially raised.
> My point is simple. These are all human institutions. They're not "problems" with "solutions".
I think they are, unless these institutions have no purpose and do not set any goals.
> And, to answer your second question, I believe the scenario you idealize creates externalities like environmental pollutions which kills citizens
For that we've already got a court system that is capable, after a proper due process, of fining and criminally charging everyone who is proven to be guilty. I'm not advocating for dispersing them, I'm advocating for separating state affairs from economics, in the same manner and for the same reason why religion and church was separated from the state in the western world a few centuries ago.
> consider what the food industry, meatpacking plants, etc, would look like without OHSA
what responsibility do OSHA, FDA, SEC, etc inspectors and supervisors carry for regulatory failure? I know what happens to the producers and owners of those plants who fail to provide safe environment and products, or who commited fraud and got caught, I've never heard of government inspectors and commitee members going to jail for any of those cases that led to citizens' harm. At most, and in very rare cases with a lot of public pressure they get permanently banned from holding similar positions in the future.
> I know what happens to the producers and owners of those plants who fail to provide safe environment and products, or who commited fraud and got caught,
Um it is the government that catches them and punishes them?
I had a difficult time understanding your comment - could you try expressing it another way?
Yeah and network effects add value, coordination adds value, individual contributors can only do so much, a well oiled group of engineers has outsized production, and by bargaining collectively, leverage their productivity for better compensation.
Most are convinced they are “special” or otherwise immune from anything that would warrant union representation.
At least until they maybe sustain an injury that makes them less productive, or even simply grow old enough to face age discrimination.
It’s always the privileged and somewhat myopic that discount the value of collective action. We act together to lift each other up. To extract the best conditions for our work and the most support from our employer because the ‘free market’ has given us coordinated wage suppression among tech giants and a mountain of sexual and racial discrimination in the workplace.
Together we are stronger. America used to get this more in the early 1900s. Then the ruling class got better at controlling the narrative and crushing class consciousness.
To the kids reading this who think they don’t need a union - nearly every positive workplace condition you have is a result of collective action in the past.
So mistaken. My union has done so much for me and my fellow workers. Any time I have a meeting with management my union sits at my side. If I was wrongfully fired my union would fight it and even hire a lawyer. Why would I not want those protections? How is that not needed in a modern world? And finally what do you do for work that hour industry needs no union I am very curious?
I full on support their goal to clean up their yard before moving somewhere else. Employees are stakeholders and can use their leverage as they please. You somehow cast a negative moral light on workers for using this leverage when every other stakeholder, managment, stockholders, board members, government agencies, voters all use their leverage to change the ecosystem.
Entitlement?
You are entitled to what you can get the world to render for you. Not asking is allowing others to over entitle and enritch themselves at your loss.
This shows how deeply ingrained right-wing ideology has become in America.
Outside America it is obvious that billionaires, oligarchs and CEOs wield power in their own self-interest, and that workers benefit from collective action in their own self-interest.
But inside America the billionaires, oligarchs and CEOs are mythologized as benevolent actors, and workers should be thankful for the gifts graciously bestowed upon them.
No compensation is too high for billionaires, but if some workers make a good salary, that's seen as extravagant, and the workers should be extra grateful and stop asking for better working conditions, too.
It's bizarre how Americans celebrate ruthlessly competitive markets when workers compete against each other for food, shelter and medical care. But it's a cultural taboo to use those same competitive market forces for the benefit of workers.
Don't know why this is down voted, because it's spot on.
It's what gives us advantages in areas like medical/technical research, powerful mega corporations that can effect global markets, and schooling. All at the cost of the lives of people that crank the cogs forward to maintain it all.
I was actually agreeing with that comment, but I can see how it got misconstrued. There really aren’t any good arguments against a union, if done (regulated) well.
You mean a note written to help determine the value of a stock focuses on the effect of a decision on that stock rather than something else that you (a non-shareholder possibly?) find important? Do you really find that surprising? Should be no more surprising than the idea that an internal union communication would focus more on benefits to workers instead of benefits to shareholders. Neither of the above is meant to be some kind of ethical treatise, why would we expect them to be so?
This comment does not deserve these downvotes. Not only is it not aggressively, negatively contentious or malicious, but it’s a thoughtful commentary on the state of worker/owner relations that has direct and specific relevance to tech work in general.
I disagree that this is clearly indicative of anything.
>But inside America the billionaires, oligarchs and CEOs are mythologized as benevolent actors, and workers should be thankful for the gifts graciously bestowed upon them.
I've spent my life living in different parts of America, and this sounds very out of touch.
> But it's a cultural taboo to use those same competitive market forces for the benefit of workers.
Forming a union is not competitive, it’s the opposite. When you gather up all of the suppliers of something (in this case employees are supplying labor) and collectively fix a price that is exactly what anti-trust legislation is trying to prevent.
It’s not a cultural taboo to be pro-union on the left because it’s not free market. It is a cultural taboo on the right precisely because they are seen as discouraging competition and rewarding tenure over competence.
> Forming a union is not competitive, it’s the opposite.
Yes.
> that is exactly what anti-trust legislation is trying to prevent.
This is so muddled.
Anti-trust and pro-labor policies are not at odds. Corporations and the people who do their work for them are not cut from the same cloth. When the owners of the world's productive capacity collude to fix prices, that's a trust. When laborers who (by definition) do not own the productive capacity, it's not. It's a union. These are two different words for two different concepts about two fundamentally different kinds of entities (capital and labor).
Thinking of the wage relation as a bargain between equals is a cope. You're not as powerful as Google.
There is a reason we don't talk about employers (especially enormous ones Like Alphabet that are becoming so deeply integrated into modern life and politics that it's now difficult to fully conceive of) and individual working people as if they are the same kind of thing.
One is a supranational bohemoth that owns an enormous productive capacity, the other relies on wage labor to live. (That's not a sob story, just a true fact. You can rely on wage labor and still live pretty comfortably. I do.)
Yes because to actually produce the way Google produces you need more than a bunch of laptops. Think about all the kinds of capital Google owns from IP to massive data centers.
On top of that they have huge sway with governments and a hand in control of cultural production.
It's easier to start a software company than an oil company because it takes way less fixed capital but the same rules as the rest of political economy apply on the whole.
You also need a developer community, standards bodies, universities, regulatory bodies. You are made valueable by the interplay of all those institutions. Guess who makes your laptop and provides access to your internet, its directories, and communication channels, the same companies you have to work for.
Yes, this is the commodity fetish in action. The laptop seems to just appear before me when I fork over a thousand bucks, conjured out of the ether of "the market." But of course there are long (often blood soaked) supply chains, all with their own interesting international, political, developmental history, that brought the thing to me. But the details are mystified by the complexity of all the actors and processes involved.
The feeling that tech work is mostly mental and somehow "immaterial," like we're just beyond all that concrete meatspace stuff, is really an illusion.
Intra-union competition is a thing as is the ability for the company to not sign a contract. What they often lose out on is the ability to retain the previous union employees and with it lose all their training, institutional knowledge etc.
A company does not have to sign a union contract but those losses are part of the leverage unions use to balance the power structure
Unions are cartels by design , which is anti-market in and of itself. The only way unions could exist while being pro-market is if they competed with each other, which they don't. There is only one teamsters. There is only one auto workers union. There is only one longshoreman's union.
Following your logic, if your ISP has a total monopoly, and you sign a contract with them, that is pro-market transaction. Of course, we both know it isn't. Contracts aren't what makes a market. Competition is. And unions have no competition with each other.
Except a company does not have to enter a contract with a union as well as the fact there are more right-to-work states than not. Extending your analogy, if there is no monopolistic suppression of competition, entering a contract with an ISP is not anti-competition. The contract is not the determining factor, the anti-competition is. Lack of competition shouldn’t be conflated with suppression of competition.
Unions don’t have to compete with other unions to still have competition. They have to compete with non-union workers. There are laws prohibiting strike lines from allowing non-union workers through, for example
The company can choose not to, but they will be unlikely to procure the amount of labor they require. You can also choose not to get service from your hypothetical ISP monopoly, and you wouldn't get internet access.
If the UAW went on a full strike tomorrow, GM and Ford would not be able to continue production. There just aren't enough non union auto workers. There is no real competition. This is the problem. It creates a situation that allows for rent seeking.
>The company can choose not to, but they will be unlikely to procure the amount of labor they require.
That’s...exactly the point. Collective bargaining (aka freedom of association) swings the balance between of power intentionally, but that doesn’t automatically make it anti-competition. That’s why it’s often in the company’s best interest to work with a union rather that not; they know there is a cost to bear for hiring and training new employees. There is the chance for rent-seeking, but it isn’t a forgone conclusion.
When rent-seeking does occur, it’s mitigated by mutually assured destruction. If unions get too greedy, they can drive the companies out of business so it’s in their best interest to renegotiate their contracts and pare back their demands. This is exactly what happened in Detroit after the 2007-2008 recession and why unions may have tiers of employee benefits.
To your point about it being a cartel, you’re right to a certain degree but I don’t think it has the distinction you think it does. Cartel, Co-op, Corporation, Cabal... they’re all groups working together for their own interest and there’s nothing inherently morally wrong with that as it derives from the individual right of association. The major distinction that makes one anti-competitive is when “the few” work to against “the many”. Unions are the direct inverse of that.
> That’s...exactly the point. Collective bargaining (aka freedom of association) swings the balance between of power intentionally, but that doesn’t automatically make it anti-competition.
You can’t have it both ways. Either a single organization has the power to completely deprive a company of the labor supply it needs or it’s competitive.
There’s some nuance that may not be getting communicated clearly. Unions do not “completely deprive a company of labor supply”. As has been stated elsewhere, they do not prevent a company from hiring non-union (or different union) workers. If they prevent workers from crossing a strike line, that would be anti-competitive and depriving a company of its labor supply. That happened in the past and it was wrong but there are laws against that for that very reason.
If there are only a handful of people who intimately understand Microsofts kernel, it’s not anti-competitive for them to band together to ask for higher salaries because they aren’t actively prohibiting MSFT from hiring someone else. Having leverage due to a constrained supply of labor is not the same as being anti-competitive and not illegal except in a few edge cases (like what we saw with the air traffic controllers in the 1980s, for example)
But a union doesn't have to set a price for work. And the company can often hire outside of the union if they want (many are opt-in for employees).
Moreover, the free market still has checks and measures to ensure workers are treated fairly and equally. Unions are just another implementation of that - the only difference is that they're employee run not government run.
>It's bizarre how Americans celebrate ruthlessly competitive markets when workers compete against each other for food, shelter and medical care. But it's a cultural taboo to use those same competitive market forces for the benefit of workers.
yep. Class consciousness exists in the US, but predominantly among billionaires and celebrities.
That's not always the case though. There's plenty of industries and workplaces the world over that benefit from unions whilst still maintaining the discretion to hire who they will.
I've worked in a company with both union and non union staff and I believe the union benefited all of us without limiting the company in any meaningfully negative way.
Contrast this with shareholders and C level execs who have immense power and often world it to the detremen of the workers.
That same company was literally bought out and our office was shuttered.
Unionising allowed us to collectively bargain for better severance pay and allowed us to prioritize those of us who had additional family/visa considerations.
Interestingly, (nearly) all of the Canadian government public servants are unionized. When you get hired, you can decide whether you wish to join the union or not, but the union will still collectively bargain on your behalf no matter what you choose.
The union is (mostly) in place to work on ensuring benefits such as sick leave, parental leave top-ups, overtime limits, etc. They also are there to ensure that management respects the rules when dealing with the workforce.
Why should the buyers of labor be forced to compete amongst each other but not the sellers of labor? In order to truly even the playing field, Facebook, google, apple, and the rest should unionize together to effectively negotiate with labor.
Good question. From my point of view it's because megacorps are already too powerful entities with whom individual workers have little leverage for negotiating or influencing business decisions in favor of improved working environment and socially responsible company conduct.
If FAANGS were to unionize together the field would be even more imbalanced. For instance, Apple already makes US$ 1.9 million per employee [1] which is 19x its average worker salary [2]. Nothing wrong about that, it's a profitable company, but it doesn't strike me as if they're in a unfavorable position.
If a company is forced to use a union to hire workers (cannot hire non-union workers), then the union is the monopoly supplier of labor. It's a matter of perspective, unions certainly don't like to think of themselves that way. In some US states, there are right to work laws which allow for multiple unions or people not affiliated with unions to compete with unions to supply labor to the hiring company.
Nothing says you can't have multiple competing unions.
Given that capital is overwhelmingly concentrated into a few hands, the job "market" is also a monopolization. You can get a different job but the owners are always the same
Why don't unions compete with each other? They should be forcefully broken up by the DOJ if they are not competing with each other, just as Standard Oil and AT&T were.
This is sort of the heart of my complaint, they are allowed to function as monopolies. The AFL-CIO has rules like "no-raiding" for affiliated unions that are anti-competitive in that sense as well.
“Workers” aren’t some monolithic group. Individuals can certainly optimize for their own best interests. We don’t see ourselves as victims in a collective but individuals all pursuing our own goals. My goals aren’t necessarily the same as the person sitting next to me. Why should that guy have a voice in my compensation?
Yes they are. We're all individuals and have different goals, wear different clothes, read different books, code in different editors, whatever, but objectively we all have something in common by way of being workers in the first place: we rely on wage labor to live.
And crucially: we don't own the means of production (or we'd be owners and not workers).
Why should "that guy" have a voice? Because our fortunes rise and fall together.
Frankly it boggles my mind to no end that tech workers, just because they're contingently pretty comfortable while riding the wave of an advantageous labor market that gives them a lot of (contingent) leverage at the moment, don't understand that they (as single, individual people
!) aren't standing as equals against like Alphabet, Inc. an institution that brings in double digit billions per year, increasingly has its hands on levers of policy and culture around the world, etc.
You're going to have to break that down for a 21st century software developer on a SV messageboard. Aren't the means of production increasingly our own brains? Can't computing resources be rented cheaply enough for the average person to bootstrap their own business ideas if they're worth pursuing? I'm puzzled to see stuff like this in the present day, I thought it had been discredited within Marx's own lifetime.
I wish there was a term for "means of production" that was clearer or more succinct but I don't know one. The term is sometimes a discourse killer because it triggers a kind of (understandable) reflexive distaste for extremism and a certain kind of annoying radical personality or whatever.
But whatever synonym we use for it, MoP is a concept that you can't really dispense with if you want to talk about this stuff productively. You don't have to buy into a Marxist worldview to use it.
I'll take a crack at a definition: The means of production is the conditions required for making the things that the economy makes, whatever that is. For oil production, it's land and mineral rights in oil rich areas, oil derricks, trucks, private roads, refineries, all the plant equipment to make a refinery work, tools, maintenance equipment, barrels..., I'm sure there's 65,000 more things...whatever happens to be required to convert dead dinosaurs into 10W30.
It sounds Marx-y, but it's a simple, straightforward idea.
In tech, MoP is things like intellectual property, data centers, etc. The lines are blurred a bit because when work takes place inside a worker's brain instead of in a mine or on a factory floor where workers push things around with brute physical force, it's not exactly clear who owns what. In my view that ambiguity is something employers have used to mystify the relationship between employer and worker. They try to convince us that we are all just working together to make the world better, and anyway, we're paid well enough so why complain and rock the boat?
But in the end the rules are the same. You can't make it in this system unless you own some means of production (or get access to them by starting a company of your own and becoming a capitalist yourself--which is fine, but by definition not everyone can do it), or you work for someone who has them.
A related point is tech production is not actually as ethereal and abstract as it sounds. Yes, code is just a bunch of immaterial mental abstractions, in some sense, but it's useless without a shockingly large array of computers, buildings, massive data centers which are expensive, difficult and labor intensive to secure and maintain. They suck up a ton of electricity and water and require armed guards, etc. There's a huge amount of hidden physical infrastructure and somebody is going to own it. Whoever does will wield a ton of power in our society, especially as we become increasingly reliant on tech in our everyday lives.
As for whether Marx was "discredited" in his own lifetime, I don't know where people get that idea. I hear it or something like it all the time. Like him or not, he's a hugely influential thinker even today. So are most of his critics. It's hardly a settled issue.
But the idea of MoP isn't even part of the controversial parts of Marx. It's just a description about how part of capitalism works, as he saw it. The ideas he draws on in that analysis come largely from Ricardo and Smith, hardly "discredited" radicals.
> becoming a capitalist yourself--which is fine, but by definition not everyone can do it
This is where I was disagreeing in the comment above; I think the barrier is now so low to entering certain markets (eg. SaaS) that it's meaningless to talk about some of these concepts in terms that are artefacts of the 19th century. I also think that there are far more people who don't want to do it than who want to do it but are prevented from pursuing a more entrepreneurial lifestyle by their economic circumstances.
Datacenters are complex and expensive, but it's now very cheap (in some cases free) to rent resources in them, because they have been commoditized, so I don't think it makes sense to talk about them as a "means of production" that the dispossessed masses have been alienated from achieving their productive desires through. Free Software is another area over the last few decades where barriers to entry in technology have been removed. I doubt that there are too many budding entrepreneurs who are put off solely by the fees to license certain non-free codecs of private datasets in cases where these are the only codecs or datasets that could be used for their business idea.
Exceptions to this that I see would include regulatory moats that big incumbents are happy to help build, and a more general tendency for governments to favour regulating private enterprise and then to show partiality towards larger businesses in an attempt to simplify the resulting administration.
The barrier to entry to those markets rises proportionally with saturation. By definition, it is completely impossible for everyone to become an entrepreneur, even in fields such as SaaS - as soon as it can be expected that competition will require you to scale to a level where you need one subordinate person to work for you.
Also, barrier to entry is a term that is also an artefact of the 19th century. Should we drop it? Of course not, it's useful. So is the distinction between owner and worker.
Empirically, for all this task about barriers to entry falling and everyone becoming an entrepreneur, the average size of a company has stayed about the same. Market and social forces are so that we will likely never have a society where everyone can be an entrepreneur. The reasons for this are complicated and go beyond "means of production", but it turns out those were also figured out somewhere in the 19th century, like many useful things.
This is such a strange neophilic reflex that people have. So the words are from the 1840s. Frankly a bunch of the concepts are even older than that. And yet other concepts that are still pretty useful--geometry, say--are even older. We don't need to re-invent language every decade, and thank God for that. No inherent virtue in novelty.
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It's easier to start a software company now. No one will dispute this. But there is more to the world economy than SaaS entrepreneurship. Covid has provided us with a great unwanted, illustrative example here: capitalist production still works basically the same way in 2021 as it did in 1848. Some of our supply chains are extremely fragile now though, in part due to their computerization and "rationalization" over the last decades.
Suddenly we need thousands of masks and ventilators and they're nowhere to be found. What the hell happened!? Perhaps we just didn't have enough PPE SaaSes yet?
Now we have a few different vaccines (which is great!) but we're having trouble producing and distributing them fast enough in high enough quantities. There is a NYT article out today on this very problem that did well on HN.
How could our economy which is, on paper at least, vastly more productive than it was 50 or 100 years ago, fail us so badly? I mean look how many SaaS entrepreneurs we have! Look how low the barriers to entry are!
The point I'm trying to make here is that the basic relations of capitalist economy still hold despite all the changes between the 19th century and now, including any new developments in centralization of tech infrastructure (you can call cloud computing "democratizing" if you want, but it's really centralization). It's just easier and cheaper to become a small capitalist by renting some of the means of production (it's still MoP, still has the same economic function, even though the centuries have changed) from big capitalists. So what. If you're not a SaaS entrepreneur (and I keep saying this: not everyone can be) and you want a say in the workplace, you still need a union.
But again, the demand for SaaSes and SaaS entrepreneurs is, well, shockingly high, at least to me, as it turns out, but it's not infinity. If everyone could just become a SaaS entrepreneur and we didn't ever need any normal industries with normal employees anymore, you might have a point. But in the real world people still have jobs and still need unions to bargain with employers that would always rather pay them less and give them less say.
I agree with you that SaaS entrepreneurs are not the dispossessed masses. If I have seemed to make that argument at any point, I regret the error.
> It's just easier and cheaper to become a small capitalist by renting some of the means of production...from big capitalists
Just to clarify: I really don't mean to sound like a nihilistic radical by pointing this stuff out. Capitalism has given us a lot of good and a lot of bad. That it's way easier to start a software company today and make a good life for yourself really is great. It just doesn't mean that anything fundamental has changed about the system.
> You're going to have to break that down for a 21st century software developer on a SV messageboard.
I love Wendy Liu's explanation on this, it's the best I've found:
"The Silicon Valley model of technological development is structurally flawed. It can’t simply be tweaked in a more socially beneficial direction, because it was never intended to be useful for all of society in the first place. At its core, it was always a class project, meant to advance the interests of capital. The founders and investors and engineers who dutifully keep the engines running may not deliberately be reinforcing class divides, but functionally, they are carrying out technological development in a way that enables capitalism’s desire for endless accumulation.
Consequently, fixing the problems with the tech industry requires revisiting the economic assumptions that underpin it. If technological development is to be truly liberating, it cannot be funded and developed by an imperial machine, driven by the hare-brained schemes of growth-hungry investors, and owned by a miniscule clique not accountable to broader society.
What’s needed instead is a movement to reclaim technology: to prevent its capture by capital, and direct it towards creating social value. Of course, the tech giants are not going to cede this ground easily. This is why the demand of the future will not be to tame or reform Silicon Valley, but to abolish it. For it to serve society, technology will have to be liberated from the constraints of corporate ownership and subjected to democracy.
If this is hard to imagine, it’s probably because we’re so used to the way technology works in today’s economy that most of us are unable to see beyond its horizons. But it’s time we started seeing Silicon Valley for what it really is: not separate from the economy, and not its saviour, but instead capitalism on steroids. All the negatives we associate with Silicon Valley — useless gadgets that no one needs, companies with billion-dollar valuations going up in smoke, exploitation of precarious workers — are a microcosm of a broader economic system. Abolishing Silicon Valley, then, means more than breaking up a few corporations; it’ll require a fundamental transformation of the economic structures that govern society.
Transformation
In the coming years you’ll read a lot of columns agonising over how to ‘fix’ Silicon Valley. Most will be technocratic, evacuating politics from the discussion. This is, after all, the framing that allowed Silicon Valley to grow so powerful in the first place: a binary choice between technological development on capital’s terms, or remaining stuck in the past. But structural problems require structural solutions. Rather than relying on ‘ethical’ founders or investors to change the system, we need collective action to challenge it.
This will mean undoing the labyrinth of intellectual property rights, which are intended to protect corporations and commodify information. It will mean revisiting the funding model that gave rise to the ‘go-big-or-go-home’ culture responsible for so many wasteful start-ups, shifting away from the return-driven venture capital model, and towards a state-backed social entrepreneurship with public responsibilities.
It will also mean building worker power, within the tech industry and beyond it. Within it, the long-term goal must be a union culture encompassing all workers involved in production. That means not just the highly-paid software engineers but contractors packing boxes for Amazon, or driving for Uber, or cleaning offices in Silicon Valley should all have representation in decision-making structures. And beyond the confines of the industry, a wider-organised labour movement needs to offer resistance to technology being used to facilitate increased worker exploitation through surveillance or regulatory arbitrage.
None of this will be easy, of course. Reclaiming the emancipatory potential of technology will require prying it from the clutches of capital. But that is a worthy fight. If the task of politics is to imagine a different world, then the job of technology is to help us get there. Whether technology is developed for the right ends — for the public good, instead of creating a privatised dystopia — will depend on the outcome of political struggles." [1]
I mean, I agree with most of the content here, but it's written in that confident left-wing manifesto style that is probably more convincing to the already convinced than to the undecided.
If I kind of saw myself as at-one with the basic Silicon Valley ethos, like I used to, this would definitely put me off before I fully ingested the argument.
I wish I had an example of an introductory text in the style I would like to see. I will try to find something like that. I'm sure it exists, given how much writing there has been on this topic over the last decade.
I think I sorta get where you're coming from. To me this style represents the urgency to end capitalist exploitation, considering the immense suffering it has caused and is still causing currently.
In that sense it gives voice to the anger of the oppressed, the downtrodden. It's pure solidarity. Marx' critique is ammunition. Ammunition to unshackle our chains and claim our communist freedom.
> If I kind of saw myself as at-one with the basic Silicon Valley ethos, like I used to, this would definitely put me off before I fully ingested the argument.
Would you be willing to share which bits speficifally put you off in this text(or would have before you didn't see yourself as at-one with the ethos)? Are there maybe any specific words or labels?
> I wish I had an example of an introductory text in the style I would like to see. I will try to find something like that. I'm sure it exists, given how much writing there has been on this topic over the last decade.
Yeah I would love to see that. Please do share if you want to and if you have it at hand.
I think being in the bourgeoisie sucks for the bourgeoisie, and I'm curious to what extent it is possible to describe the alienation experienced by the capitalists/dominators (who are consciously dehumanizing proletarians their whole lives). Class traitorism should always be encouraged (Engels, Geuvara, etc.), and I'm still exploring narratives that support it.
It is absolutely hilarious how you think that the voice of your colleagues in collective bargaining is somehow less aligned with your own interests over those of your company's executive body.
And you are free not to join. But you are lacking understanding of market forces if you dont think your colleagues dont have any say in your wage. Them being there is part of an ecosystem that supports your value to the world. Unless you can produce professional software and competitive speeds all built from the ground up by yourself.
If you work in javascript, the javascript environment has given you your value, companies have bought into that talent pool and must court it to compete. Unless you provide value to the world without that ecosystem and without that company, your wage is necessarily impacted by those stakeholders.
You are free to press for your own goals, just dont be so sure those goals are divisible from your coworkers.
You realize that actors are all in a union (SAG). I don't think Tom Cruz's pay is affected by how much an SAG extra is being paid. In the case of SAG, they set the minimum floor for pay, but have no say in the upper bound.
> but when you already work at the company that pays and treats their employees like Google, I'm not sure what more you are entitled to.
Google made something like 300,000 in profit per employee in 2019. There are regular complaints about benefits and pay multipliers being cut back. Why shouldn't workers seek to capture as much of their labor as possible? People don't seem to complain when businesses do that.
Employee compensation is tied to profit in the form of RSUs. A decline in profit would substantially decrease the value of those RSUs and thus compensation. You can't just decrease profit in a vacuum and hand that revenue to employees, you have to consider the second-order effects.
It's more complicated than that, but it would in the end be close to 300k salary increase. The correct way to think about it is, what if the company was entirely owned by employees? How would income change, then?
> Google made something like 300,000 in profit per employee in 2019.
Isn’t this roughly the same order of magnitude as many Google developer salaries? If so, how much more expensive can any employee be before he is too expensive to employ?
Its pretty much the same number. An L4 at Google makes $250k and an L5 makes 340k on average according to levels.fyi. My experience with countering Google offers would indicate these are a bit low.
Edit: Then you have to factor in the free breakfast/lunch/dinner, buses, electric car parking and the fact all my Google friends seem to rarely work > 40hrs per week.
That being said, all the 'grunt' work at Google is done by contractors, who are paid far less and while they get the free food they do without things like PTO and Sick time.
> Why shouldn't workers seek to capture as much of their labor as possible?
Yes. This is the correct way to look at it.
Another point I don't see so many people making here is it's about more than just raw compensation. A lot of people at Google don't like some of the things the company has sprawled out into doing now, e.g. war and surveillance tech.
A union is about creating some collective agency so labor can get what it wants, instead of being led around by the nose all the time by managers and owners who are motivated only by profit (or are at least not obliged to consider any interest, economic or moral, that laborers might have).
A union would give some strategic agency to labor--that is, the people who do all the work--at Google. If a majority does not want to make war robots anymore or whatever, they can assert their agency and get what they want, and stop making war robots or whatever.
It's not. Both sides want money. Currently, a small minority of authoritarians (management is authoritarian by nature - and that's okay) get to decide how much of the company profit is shared with employees. Now, employees get to decide alongside them. This reduces the power differential between the groups. Now they can decide what fair is on a more level playing field.
This is simply about improving the power differential between management and labor. If that means more money, so be it. It may well not. It might be more about working conditions or projects.
I guess my question to you is why do you demand democracy in government, but accept authoritarianism at work no questions asked?
Fewer people seem to be demanding democracy in government. ;)
I am not OP, but I’d say the reason authority is acceptable in a managed organization (not necessarily for profit - any managed organization whether the military, or NGO, or business, or charity) is because it ultimately has a narrow function: either fulfilling a mission, or increasing the wealth producing capacity of the organization.
Democracy at that granularity is somewhat irrelevant: either you’re doing the things (objectively measured), or you are not. Voting doesn’t lead to better policy decisions, just freer ones.
Of course the best performing companies aren’t managed in an “authoritarian” manner in the usual sense of strongman rule, because one person (or even a small group) doesn’t have all the answers. Labor/management collaboration and recognition of the importance of human capital is essential. This is why management doesn’t have as much power as it used to in modern industry: it is dependent on human capital retention in its labor force, which is very expensive to replace (far more than just skilled labor).
Collective bargaining becomes less about power disparity (when labor can make as much money elsewhere and management needs labor more) and more about pressure on systematic policies that are difficult to change without sustained external pressure: pay disparity, bonuses to sexual harassers, etc.)
At the bigger picture, life is a lot bigger than missions or profit, and democracy is essential. (Unless one’s mission is to own the libs, then I guess democracy isn’t so important)
As for democracy - because companies are somebody's property. Do you demand democracy in your home? That is, can I decide on a new wall color in your kitchen? I vote for you to paint your kitchen pink, how about that?
Employees can also vote with their feet, if they don't like their bosses, they can leave.
> Employees can also vote with their feet, if they don't like their bosses, they can leave.
That's an absurd take because your boss suffers no consequences and you do.
It's not about fair, it's about exercising the power you have.
Besides, each part of the country is someone's property, but government gives you a say anyways. I would counter that the equivalent would be saying "why should anyone vote? why bother changing things? if you don't like your country why don't you go find a different one." We don't tend to accept that argument in government, why accept it in private enterprise?
If your boss suffers no consequences if you leave, then your job is superfluous and you should leave, or your boss should be allowed to fire you.
Exercising one's power - sure, employees can do that, and I support that. I just don't think they should deserve special protections and rights for doing that.
If I had an employee and they would tell me "I think your management is shit and I want to make the rules now", I would like to be allowed to fire them.
I didn't say they shouldn't be allowed to fire me, I didn't mean to imply that they would suffer no consequences however the consequences of 100% of my income is way smaller than whatever tiny fraction I make up of a 50,000 person company.
Did you consider your management may be shit and maybe the person should make the rules now, not you? If you were harassing them, for instance, or bullying them, they may have a point and your single point of control over the enterprise may be harmful not just to the worker but to the company.
Just because you would like to fire them doesn't mean you should, as after all, the fiduciary duty is to the company and not to you personally.
That is specifically the value that the union would provide in this case.
Sure, management can be shit, but then the company should simply go to ruins. Likewise, employee decisions can be bad, too. It's mostly magical thinking to assume with unionized employees there will be better decision making.
If I had a company, I would like to have the right to make bad decisions. And who defines good and bad decisions.
With unions, in the end you have courts decide on economic decisions. That's bullshit.
Employee decisions aren't necessarily right, but who's to say that management should deserve unilateral power to make their decisions with maybe the board reining it in. And in tech specifically, we've been seeing more companies where the founders/existing leadership retains enough of a share that they can ignore the board, never mind their employees.
Unilateral control over a business's destiny can doom it if the leadership is making poor decisions even when the rank-and-file oppose them. It's all easy to say the company should simply go to ruins but why should it? What if the good or service is solid, should the customers and the market suffer because the failing company has deprived them of it? Should the workers be punished because they had insufficient leverage to oppose those decisions? Should a ton of money and effort be wasted for an apparently pointless enterprise? If we live in a society that seeks to maximize life expectancy, and if corporations are people, why should we not seek also to prevent avoidable business failures, at least for those enterprises that are building useful products?
Fiduciary duty is to the business not to the leadership, and to replace bad management. An employee-backed check bolsters this fiduciary duty.
> If I had a company, I would like to have the right to make bad decisions. And who defines good and bad decisions.
Feel free to do that in a company of 1. As soon as your company exceeds 1 person, you lose the absolute right. You lose the right when your decisions impact the livelihood of those around you. It doesn't drop to zero instantly but it is attenuated as the company grows.
Why do I lose that right? Back to the example of your kitchen: you hire somebody to redo your kitchen. Why would they have a say in how you want to have your kitchen redone?
If you work for a company and you feel they are making bad decisions and perhaps your job is in peril (because the company may go down), it is high time to look for a new job.
And again, who then decides what is or is not a bad decision? Courts will get to decide on economic decisions. But lawyers have studied law, not economics. How does that make sense?
Someone you hire to redo your kitchen isn't employed by you, they're employed by their employer, where everything we talked about makes sense. That's why there's a distinction between an employer-employee relationship and a contracting relationship.
They of course get a say in how your kitchen is done: if it's not up to code, or dangerous, they absolutely have a say. And frequently. When I redid my kitchen my GC pointed out all these things to me and modified I my plans.
> If you work for a company and you feel they are making bad decisions and perhaps your job is in peril (because the company may go down), it is high time to look for a new job.
You're re-stating how it is today, but there's no reason it need to be this way, and it fails to meet the fiduciary duty to the company and its shareholders.
> And again, who then decides what is or is not a bad decision? Courts will get to decide on economic decisions. But lawyers have studied law, not economics. How does that make sense?
You don't need a law degree to know harassment is wrong. In fact mandatory training is part of your, wait for it, fiduciary duty. You don't need a degree to recognize bad management.
Somebody doing your kitchen doesn't have to be employed by somebody else. They can simply have a contract with you. You pay them x in exchange for them going y in your kitchen.
Of course they can have opinions or refuse to do things in certain ways. But they can't force you to have a pink wall color, or other things. At most, perhaps if the see something dangerous or illegal in your kitchen, they may have a duty to do something about it.
Likewise, an employee can refuse to do things by simply quitting the job.
Harassment: again, quit your job, apart from that, general laws about harassment should apply, independent from you being an employee or not.
"fiduciary duty" - where does that come from? Why does somebody suddenly have a duty to take care of you? I am self employed. Why do you get people to have the duty to take care of you, but I don't? Who should have the duty to take care of me?
Suppose you pay me to renovate your kitchen.
Now what is your duty towards me? Is it now your duty to see that I earn a living wage and have job security forever? All just because you simply wanted a new wall color in your kitchen?
Their employer isn't you, it's themselves. You have hired them in their sole proprietorship capacity.
> Of course they can have opinions or refuse to do things in certain ways. But they can't force you to have a pink wall color, or other things. At most, perhaps if the see something dangerous or illegal in your kitchen, they may have a duty to do something about it.
You're not their employer, you're contracting their employer.
> Harassment: again, quit your job, apart from that, general laws about harassment should apply, independent from you being an employee or not.
No thanks, that's an objectively worse world.
> Why do you get people to have the duty to take care of you, but I don't? Who should have the duty to take care of me?
Because that's what running a business is. Since you're self employed you have that responsibility to look after yourself.
> Now what is your duty towards me? Is it now your duty to see that I earn a living wage and have job security forever? All just because you simply wanted a new wall color in your kitchen?
Governments take a % of my income. Democracy gives me a voice in how that pool of stolen money is spent. Businesses are private property owned by the shareholders. They can run their biz anyway they see fit, within community standards. I.e. no slavery or child labor, reduced pollution, contracts are binding, etc.
Unions are to protect the interests of employees that have no bargaining power. Big tech employees don’t need this. I can, however, see tech employees using their shares and influence to bargain for a board seat. I think Germany does this.
Ultimately it comes down to the relationship white-collar employees have with their employer. I work at a Big Tech co. I see myself as a hired-gun who is full-time because the taxes and benefits are easier to manage. I don’t care one bit about the company’s mission or values or whatever. I write code, they give me money. Either one of us can dissolve this contract anytime.
> I guess my question to you is why do you demand democracy in government, but accept authoritarianism at work no questions asked?
Because employment is a freely associated business relationship. I don’t demand democracy in my business relationship with in-n-out when I order a burger nor do I demand democracy when a company pays me for some software development.
I do demand democracy from a government that makes laws I cannot opt out of and controls the courts which enforce all disputes in my life.
Even the largest companies in the world can be avoided by someone who doesn’t want to do business with them. The same is not true of the government.
But employment is still an asymmetrical relationship where employees are submitting themselves to the authority of employers. And if you're putting yourself in a situation where you're under another's authority, wouldn't you want to maximize your own autonomy underneath it, via democracy? Even in "freely associated business relationship" you seek the power to negotiate and maintain your own preferences. In-n-Out has a customizable menu. Contractors negotiate their contracts for flexible terms.
> Even the largest companies in the world can be avoided by someone who doesn’t want to do business with them. The same is not true of the government.
There's still the right of exit, as the libertarians call it. One can switch citizenships, or choose to relocate themselves to the few remaining frontiers where governance is minimal. Changing one's residence can be very difficult, but how is changing employment any less so?
> In-n-Out has a customizable menu. Contractors negotiate their contracts for flexible terms.
I have no say in what’s on their menu. Contractors negotiate but I can’t force them to do anything with a vote like I can in a democracy.
> One can switch citizenships, or choose to relocate themselves to the few remaining frontiers where governance is minimal.
Not without moving and significant impact to life. In all but company towns (which are basically non existent now), it’s trivial to not have any meaningful relationship with a particular business.
"authoritarians" - is that what they call entrepreneurs these days?
Personally I think the category "employee" should be forbidden. It is a pure social construct. Why is anybody entitled to be an "employee" and bitch about "authoritarians"?
Everybody is an entrepreneur. If you have nothing, you sell your body and work hours. But that's just a contract like every other contract.
In any case, if those workers don't like the authoritarians, they are free to start their own companies. Then they get to call the shots.
> "authoritarians" - is that what they call entrepreneurs these days?
Yup, and I don't think it's a bad thing, necessarily.
Of course they're authoritarians, you do what your boss says or you get out. That's authoritarianism. That doesn't mean it's wrong or bad or ill suited to the task, necessarily.
Singapore is authoritarian, and I'd say things are working pretty well there.
> Personally I think the category "employee" should be forbidden. It is a pure social construct.
Don't know where you are, but in the US, the category of employee has different tax implications for both the individual and the employer. In addition, depending on the industry and role, employee status is often correlated with significantly better benefits.
> It's still a social construct - all the laws, even nations, are social constructs.
So? Social constructs have a lot of teeth in the real world, and always have. Wishing them away won't have any effect.
> I'm saying there should be no special benefits for employees
So are you arguing that those benefits (i.e. health insurance) should be universal? Or are you making the argument that only those in a position to pay should have access to those things?
I don't which is why I support socialized single-payer medicine.
However, to address your question more directly, contractors are employees as well. It's not the job site's responsibility to provide health insurance, it's their employers. Contractors still have employers, you know.
Actually, your point reminded me that a great many employees don't receive health insurance through their employer. Those people are disproportionately low wage workers. Before Obamacare, they had no option but the very expensive individual health insurance market.
In your terms then, just let everybody be self-employed and contract them, rather than employ them. That's the same result I want, that people are responsible for themselves and making a contract with somebody to do some work for you doesn't come with any additional baggage. Just plain money for work.
That would be doable if the U.S. had a robust social safety net for all these contract workers, namely health insurance for those in between jobs. Right now relying on employers for insurance has been a terrible hassle.
A manager can terminate a work contract. In most parts of the world, the worker on the other side of this contract also has that same ability to terminate the work contract, so I'm not sure if I would consider that a "special benefit."
> Everybody is an entrepreneur. If you have nothing, you sell your body and work hours. But that's just a contract like every other contract.
This is a fake world. In the real world there is history, capital and labor, and politics which is an expression of the unavoidable, built-in antagonism between the two. We don't all own an equal share of the means of production and just sit around issuing contracts to each other all day.
Do you understand that the econ 101 libertarian world of homo economicus rational agents is fake and we live instead in the real world with its institutions and conflicts?
> Well you could become an actor, and film makers could use your body to make movies they sell for profits.
Then I would be a laborer. The film company would be using my labor as well as the director's, in conjunction with all the capital they own (cameras, sets...) to generate a profit.
> they could really move your body around and position it in poses to take photographs.
Labor.
> I think your distinction of "capital" and "labor" is fake and completely useless
Ok.
It's not "mine" though, these are centuries old analytical concepts.
> unclear why you insist on it.
I insist on it because it's a sensible and already established way to talk about this stuff.
You guys are the ones making the weird nominal excursion by asserting that labor and capital are identical because you read in a Tim Ferris startup manual that "every man is his own capitalist!" or something.
You don't have to be a radical to just use these terms in their original way. I promise you that pro-capitalist theorists also talk about labor and capital as distinct.
I think you misunderstand the power of a union at Google. If management says no, what are they going to do? Strike? I mean ..hundreds of them, will have zero effect. This Union is nothing more than a paper dragon. Democracy works in government but in a company that you don’t own, why do you think you deserve to make any of the decisions? As Obama said “you didn’t build that” and yet you want to feed at the trough.
It's not about deserve, it's about exercising the power your actually have. Management doesn't do any of the typing. I stop typing they're gonna have to replace me. I guess my retort would be why shouldn't I exercise the power I have? It's not about fair, it's about boots on the ground.
Replacing your workforce is much harder than you make it out to be. All the institutional knowledge, the entire stack, how things fit together, how the tools are built, run, used. All that leaves with you.
You are likely right that this union, at this juncture doesn't have much say. I'm speaking more about unions in general, and this does feel like the thin edge.
IMO this isn't the highest value proposition place to unionize, that would be video games.
This is an IS/OUGHT distinction. Who cares what labor "should" do under the employer's ideology. Not too surprising they want us to think of ourselves as equal players making fair contracts with each other, while one side holds the entire world in their hands.
Since we're not out in the streets starving we're supposed to shut up and be thankful, no matter what, because the ruling ideology says they've given us enough (money as a wage, though little other power). All the crying about "contracts," "greed," "entitlement," etc is just pure ideological smokescreen trying to get you not to notice the obvious, fundamental conflict between worker and owner. They want us to look at a long running historic power struggle and see something other than a power struggle so we won't fight for ourselves. Ridiculous.
Why do you think you deserve to make any decisions? What makes you special? Absolutely nothing. But in a million tiny ways, you still try to have your say in the world, as much as you can. Even this comment is an attempt to spread your ideas to others, and make the world reflect your thinking just a little bit more. And that's perfectly natural. But don't be surprised when others do the same.
I disagree, particularly as someone who worked fror a firm making over 1000000 per employee.
It's hard to square that kind of return only benefitting shareholders. You'd be hard pressed as an employee to get a 3% raise or whatnot to keep up with inflation, or you'd have the call center people making pennies, or micromanaged down to the second, but over a milkion per employee was earned.
There is a certain point where one has to stop and reevaluate the nature of the value transfer going on. That same business ate years of my life keeping it afloat, but at the first opportunity for equity holders, dropped the floor out by sellout. Not that I'd want to go back given the business model but it does lead to somber reflection and a heartfelt contemplation of tge advantaged position held by the middle-man.
I hope you didn't intend it, but the comment comes across as critical and judgmental. The comment doesn't show that you are curious about the broader context.
Would you consider thinking about this from a different perspective? For example, try thinking and asking about what history and experience underlies this. In my view, someone who writes "That same business ate years of my life keeping it afloat" has a story to tell.
Think about this possibilities: comments are with real people, not abstractions. Every comment brings the opportunity to get to know someone's situation and experience.
The "they will work harder" argument is bullshit. If that would apply, companies giving their employees more say and shares would be more successful, and drive away the others, all without the need to form unions.
I mean it is possible that shareholders will work harder. But that is not an argument for unions.
Also, some employees are people like cooks or janitors. Will they really work harder, and what would that even mean? What if they just do their jobs? Does a janitor at Google really deserve more money than a janitor somewhere else? What makes them the "chosen ones"? Just lucky to work for a successful company?
> Does a janitor at Google really deserve more money than a janitor somewhere else? What makes them the "chosen ones"? Just lucky to work for a successful company?
Google makes a ton of money off of each employee, and could probably afford it.
Google, like much of Silicon Valley, regularly puts forth the messaging that it represents the future, not only in terms of technology but in terms of society. ("Making the world a better place." "Don't be evil.") Forward-thinking often lends itself towards democratization, and of personal empowerment. So if Google wants to portray itself as futuristic, and its employees so lucky to be working for such a futuristic organization, then it would follow based on their own company line that janitors at Google might be entitled to more money at more traditional, hierarchical, less worker-empowering companies.
If Google didn't want their employees to set fires, then maybe they shouldn't taught them them the Promethean secret. Perhaps tech companies should cease pretending to be so much nobler than every other traditional form of business. The people running Google created this culture.
No matter what revenue they generate, I find it hard to argue that a janitor at Google deserves more than a janitor somewhere else. Presumably they are all doing the same kind of work. Doesn't mean Google shouldn't pay their janitors more, just that they shouldn't have to.
True about Google creating that culture themselves, I don't pity them. I just reject the sentiment in general.
There is a point of view framed in things being equitable too. The motivations are more broad, balance of society, etc...
Then again, the members may simply need more too.
Costs and risks relative to income can change, or are not well balanced. This is a standard of living, needs argument.
What differentiates it from greed is the fact than an answer can come from either side of the equation. Lower costs and risks can work the same as more compensation does.
None of this, nor my earlier comment speaks to whether greed is good or bad. It can be, or not and context matters.
The unspoken assumption behind this line of thinking is "if an entity/person can afford to pay more, the entity/person on the other side of the deal deserves more". This reasoning is applied to arguments about other things as well, such as taxes.
The problems with it become apparent when you realize that the standard isn't applied everywhere and is really impossible to evaluate fairly, so the conclusions are derived from personal ethics and concepts of "fairness" instead.
As an example, "they can afford it" is often used as an argument in favor of higher taxes on "the wealthy" (whatever that means), yet nobody says "you can afford to pay starbucks more for your coffee". You could have certainly afforded to pay more for your car or house or macbook, so why didn't you if "you can afford it" is the bar? Likewise many SV tech workers could "afford" to take pay cuts, but nobody's arguing that - why not, if "you can afford it" is the measure?
There's the asymmetry at play; with their immense wealth, these corporations can more easily pay employees more and have less effect on their bottom line- though perhaps simple math will prove this point wrong- than individual workers choosing to take pay cuts. But while this is a good discussion, I don't see how any of this differentiates being greedy from being a rational actor or homo economicus.
It's rational in the sense that you'd seek to maximize your comp. But the reasoning of "they can afford it, therefore I should get more" is not a rational argument because (1) it makes enormous and unstated assumptions about what a company can/will/should do with its money and (2) the conclusion doesn't logically flow from the premise. It's underpants gnome reasoning, and I have yet to see a compelling argument that fills in the "???" step.
But for the individual, it is rational to try to maximize their own share of the profit, is it not? And since we're talking about immensely wealthy corporations, some of which have nice margins and billions of dollars of cash in reserve, it's a bit of an intuitive step. To go back to your previous post, deserve's got nothing to do with it. The rational individual would seek to optimize their share, even if it involves questioning accepted wisdom.
> But for the individual, it is rational to try to maximize their own share of the profit, is it not?
Depends on how you measure the profit. "Profit per employee" is an abstract measurement and for most people has little bearing to what they themselves do daily. Just because a company's profit per employee happens to be $x doesn't mean you personally generated $x - you could have generated a lot more, or perhaps been a net cost instead (projects fail and get cancelled all the time). You could make an argument that if you build a wildly successful feature you should get a big share of the profit, but only if you take a pay cut when things go poorly. Who wants that? This already happens to an extent in big companies btw, people on successful projects get promoted and more cash & stock so in a way they are sharing in the success.
> And since we're talking about immensely wealthy corporations, some of which have nice margins and billions of dollars of cash in reserve, it's a bit of an intuitive step.
This is just another way of saying "they can afford it", which I discussed previously.
>And since we're talking about immensely wealthy corporations, some of which have nice margins and billions of dollars of cash in reserve...
A majority of Americans face cost and risk exposure that exceeds their income. This state of affairs is unnecessary, and unacceptable. I would also argue it is lowering our general standard of living, ability to compete globally, and is expensive, due to the general savings associated with cost and risk prevention or management being significant compared to dealing with one or both post fact.
The discussion becomes about ending the unnecessary and undesirable mismatch between income and cost and risk exposure. It also centers on needs, leaving wants for a later time.
When this frame is in play, few people actually care how wealthy corporations are, margins, cash, or any of it really.
What they do care about is whether their income makes sense. Is the product of their labor, assuming they can even find jobs right now, appropriate given their cost and risk exposure?
It also becomes about "they can't afford it." And a majority of the nation can't. This is true for more Americans every year for decades now, and that all adds right up.
Today, the numbers are hard to ignore. COVID escalated things too. Not helpful.
No matter what any of us actually thinks is equitable, market rates, or any other thing, the hard fact is those costs and risks come due.
Someone pays or people die, suffer losses, harm. And those things happen because "They can't afford it." And for any given person, there are only so many labor hours available too.
Until trends change, and material improvements happen, the number of people as well as their zeal to improve will only grow.
People in this scenario really don't have options. If they did, we would not be having these kinds of discussions, nor see the ongoing escalation of them as we are today.
But we are having them, and they are escalating.
To be perfectly clear, some of this discussion is about people whose cost and risk exposure is well beneath their income. That is a wants discussion. Nothing wrong with wants, nor people getting after them however they can.
That is also not inclusive.
Very large numbers of people face costs and risks that exceed their income, and that is a needs discussion. There is a lot wrong with needs being unmet. That is the unacceptable and unnecessary part too.
Both should be represented in these labor discussions, and often they are not.
What remedy makes sense?
One idea was all this growth, innovation, wealth accumulation was supposed to make it cheaper to live, exist and show up for work.
That has not happened.
Cost and risk exposure exceeds income for most people. Sure, there are ways to manage it cost wise, but risks, and in particular, medical risks have grave consequences.
So how do we make it cheaper to live? How do we reduce risk exposure?
Or, maybe that is simply not possible to do.
How do we match income to costs and risks then?
Either will work. Higher income or lower costs and risks. Could be a combination too.
Which is it?
Notably, however it goes, success means far fewer people will actually care about wealthy corporations and such because they have a reasonable life to live and are quite happy to live it.
Is it really 'greed' when the capital ownership class want more money? That's not the narrative I hear pretty much everywhere, I simply hear it rebranded to: growing the economy, improving life, creating jobs, etc. It all depends on the argument and who wants what.
Ultimately, capitalism drives greedy behaviors in everyone either by choice or by necessity. At some point if you don’t adopt similar behaviors to the greedy, you will be taken advantage of, guaranteed. One of the flaws of this system is that competition is what props it up and gives it stability, so everyone has to play the optimization game as much as the most optimal are optimizing, otherwise they're 'losing' in our economic system, relatively speaking.
So yes, it's the same optimization like behaviors Google and other giant businesses in the capital ownership class are utilizing. Are the motives different (greed, survival, sense of 'fair' compensation)? Maybe, maybe not, but if you don't play the game it doesn't matter because you're being taken advantage of and the state will only decline.
I for one applaud Google employees pushing this and hope they can set a precedent for the entire industry. There is widespread rampant abuse in tech no one talks about or just ingore and it's often waved away because '...but money' and employment mobility. None of these fix the underlying problems and are often merely excuses made to allow abuse to grow and fester.
"everyone has to play the optimization game as much as the most optimal are optimizing, otherwise they're 'losing' in our economic system, relatively speaking."
If a person is happy with their salary, are they really being taken advantage of? Just because they could perhaps get a better salary, doesn't mean they are forced to go for it. I suspect such cases are also rarer than one might think. I would expect most people to occasionally check their market value.
"greed" is just a negative way to frame it. Ultimately, striving for optimal outcomes is what stabilizes systems and makes them healthier and more efficient. Competition is the only known way to ensure fair prices. Every other approach can and will be gamed (corruption), but you can not fake prices.
It's also all nice to talk about being social, but I think many employees are less happy in reality when they find they have to compensate for their unproductive colleagues and even get less pay. That gets people riled up quickly in the real world.
No, what "entitles" them is that they do the work and generate the profit and therefore have the power to organize themselves into a coherent, self-interested group that can withhold their labor if they don't get what they want.
As long as they get no special rights to form their unions, fine. In my country, unions get special protections by law, which is not OK.
If workers simply choose to monopolize, of course they can do that. Of course laws against monopolies in general should then also be abolished, though.
You can not be in favor of unions, but opposed to monopolies, as unions are also monopolies.
In that sense, no, I don't care what they feel entitled to - there should just be no obligation to give them what they feel they are entitled to.
I wouldn't say that unionization of software engineers is a public good. It won't solve poverty or make the world a better place. It is a conflict between engineers and software executives to make money in the way that they want.
I'd wager that most unionization supporters at Google also support high taxes, a social safety net, and widespread unionization so other laborers can capture more of their own output.
I wonder if the company will respond to this sort of incentive by hiring hundreds of thousands of new employees to absorb the “profit” rather than pay employees far in excess of market rate.
Isn't there a massive 'labor shortage'? If that's already the case, that proposal seems even more impossible. You could hire non-tech workers and pivot to other industries where you can employ other people.
I suppose they could try outsourcing again/more and see how that works out.
> Why shouldn't workers seek to capture as much of their labor as possible?
That is not a fair framing. Labor is not the sole cause of profit. Imagine a company that spent billions to automate every process requiring only a single human to push a button every 10 minutes to produce its output. This company would be making "billions per employee", but it wouldn't make sense to pay that employee billions for that job.
All of that capital was produced by labor, except what fraction of the value derives from raw natural resources pre-extraction.
So it is absolutely a fair framing to state "why shouldn't workers seek to capture as much of their labor as possible?". If their labor produces capital which produces profits, why are those profits not fair game to bargain over?
In your example, it wouldn't make sense to pay the one remaining employee all of the profits, but it would have made perfect sense for all the employees who produced the perfectly automated factory to negotiate for a share of the profits.
> all the employees who produced the perfectly automated factory to negotiate for a share of the profits.
if they were employees, they would've been paid compensation for making such automation. Unless they are a shareholder (either by investing initial capital, or by negotiated compensation in the form of equity), they are absolutely not entitled to any profit from their output.
Not all capital is the result of labor. Economists put around a third of modern capital to be the result of labor, around a third from leveraging capital, and around a third created by technology.
Labor, investment, and technology all drive new capital creation.
Yes, labor is a component. So is capital. And, recursively, so is technology. That is why economists don't claim all value is created solely by labor, and why econometrics measures the contribution of various components.
Where does Labor come from? From being taught skills - and that took capital to train someone before their labor could add value. All pieces are interrelated, and modern economies cannot work by ignoring that all pieces are needed.
>The labor of knowledge workers, which is what software engineers are called by economists
And those knowledge workers did their labor with zero capital investment before by an employer (or themselves)? Computers, tools, infrastructure all were provided so the knowledge worker could work, and those pieces required capital before the knowledge worker could produce labor.
I have hard time understanding why so many people cannot accept that capital is a valid and necessary input to creating things, including creating more capital, which can then be invested in yet further productive pursuits.
Technology can be reduced to labour, capital, and previous technology. Capital can be reduced to labour, capital, and land.
The first unit of technology was the product of labour and capital.
The first unit of capital was the product of land and labour.
If you operate recursively until the first unit of capital and the first unit of technology you end up finding that all value is the product of land and labour.
There are certainly a great many economists that agree with this definition. Actually, a famous economist gave a talk at Google that made this exact point!
>If you operate recursively until the first unit of capital and the first unit of technology you end up finding that all value is the product of land and labour.
That's simply untrue. When a stock tanks, billions in value is lost. When a stock surges, billions can be gained. That sudden change is not the product of labor, nor the destuction of labor, but a capital multiplier from belief.
Also, arguing that since the first of any process happened in some manner implies that everything later in the process is created the same way isn't true.
>There are certainly a great many economists that agree with this definition
A great many are Austrian school, and would argue things like this, but this is overall a tiny fraction, and none are among the world's top economists. Do you claim the majority or even more than a small fraction of economists would agree with this definition?
>Actually, a famous economist gave a talk at Google
Name?
If what you're arguing for is the Labor Theory of Value [1], which it sounds like, it's widely and almost universally discredited. Every model macro model I can think of creates value in the manner I described above. Some intro examples [2]
Here's another take hitting more modern economics [3]. The "land and labor" is an ancient and not very tenable argument from this modern viewpoint.
I don't understand why you refuse to engage with the argument. Yes, capital can create value, and the inefficiency of price discovery in stock markets can lead to fluctuations in the price of a stock.
But ultimately, that capital came solely from labour and natural resources. If you follow the chain of value, you invariantly end up at labour and nature, because those are the only two things that can actually create value from nothing else.
And no, this isn't the LTV. Read the comment carefully. Even if you admit that capital can create value, the capital still had to come from somewhere, and ultimately that somewhere is labour.
So confused. The argument is simple. Something of value requires effort to create. That effort is called labor. One way we quantify the value created by the labor of people is with money.
I think the argument can be boiled down to, “What is an army without soldiers? Or workers to maintain the robots?”
This. At the bottom is someone doing work, i.e. labor. Capital is a force multiplier of labor, so to speak, and also capital is originally created by labor.
I'd argue that most of their capital comes from their employees, not their hardware. Any company can buy hardware that's functionally equivalent to Google's. Even with a massive pile of cash and being able to buy the same amount of hardware that Google has, it would be useless without the software that makes it run, and that software is made by their employees.
There are definitely sectors of the industry (such as manufacturing or insurance) where capital and automation drives value generation, but Google is in the business of writing software, which isn't really automatable.
In this somewhat reductionist approach, would it be fair that CEO overseeing that process be paid billions of dollars?
I think this is a decent thought experiment for ownership of an AI sufficiently good at a hard and profitable problem. Should that company be able to collect those billions forever even if they no longer have to do any work?
Automation may also improve consistency, or quality.
There are two basic outcomes regarding labor:
One is to reduce labor and ride on productivity / efficiency.
The other is to work differently, better. Head count may or may not change.
In terms of which is better, there are strong arguments either way.
Everything costs something.
The first scenario is easy. Margins go up, labor costs go down. However, cost of change, maintenance, quality, business expansion may carry much higher costs and risks too.
In the second scenario, margins likely increase, but not as dramatically. People are free for other work, training, to innovate, etc...
Why not? They're doing the labor. You're just assuming your conclusion here. Your premise is that "having capital" deserves a reward and "doing work" doesn't, and so your conclusion is that having capital should be rewarded and doing labor should not be. But if you change your premise, the results can change too.
>Imagine a company that spent billions to automate every process requiring only a single human to push a button every 10 minutes to produce its output. This company would be making "billions per employee", but it wouldn't make sense to pay that employee billions for that job.
Why not?
Why should it go into the shareholder's pockets instead of the people who actually do the work and create the value? What if the people actually working were to, I dunno, seize the means of production or something?
To be clear while I understand that there are many reasonable objections to socialism it bothers me that your comment presents capitalism as self-evident. Even if you believe that it's the best (or at least least worst) system, you should always question it.
If a company generates billions in profit the question of how this profit is divided among the owners and the workers should forever remain an open question I think.
> Why should it go into the shareholder's pockets instead of the people who actually do the work and create the value?
Proponents of the shareholder value model would argue that the point of a business is to maximize that value, and that it's better to return that value to shareholders instead of giving it to employees.
In the case of the button pressing employee, if they can find someone that would press the same button for minimum wage instead of billions per year, with functionally equivalent output, then from that perspective it would make sense to replace that expensive employee with a cheaper one, as that would maximize shareholder value.
In practice, things aren't as simple, since value maximization can have all kinds of perverse effects (eg. in that model, dumping sewage into a lake is a great idea if the fine is smaller than the resulting shareholder value) and shareholder value is kind of detached nowadays with profitless companies and many companies not electing to pay dividends.
Well the original example was obviously flawed because if all that's left for the employee to do is literally just press a button, then it would've been automated as well.
In a company like Google the argument that the workforce is effectively just a commodity that could be replaced easily and at will is obviously not applicable. Most of Google engineers are not button pushers.
“Value creation” is not in the labor of pushing a button. It’s in the human capital, management that led to the creation of the system.
This example is nonsensical as a bunch of behind the scenes contractors and management presumably set up the system. Except that as soon as the contractors leaves, you’ve lost your primary factor of production: the knowledge of how the whole thing works. the days where management doubles as knowledge workers are long gone.
As for profit sharing, that is a longer conversation, but most of the largest companies today do profit sharing in the form of stock grants, pension and share purchase programs.
Imagine something that doesn't exist and then claim it's "fair framing" to argue as if it does?
One of the most depressing things about the US is the corporate authoritarianism that many employees seem to suffer from.
Of course shareholders should have priority over workers because... that's just the "natural" order of things?
If a company fails, shareholders risk some small percentage of capital they can mostly afford to lose, while workers risk poverty and homelessness?
It makes no sense at all to me. Not just from the point of view of comp, but from the point of view of democracy. Because you can't have a functioning democracy when you have huge power differentials between different castes.
Unions - including board representation for unions - are one way to shrink those power differentials. They're not the only way and they're not infallible, but when they do work they're guaranteed to better than nothing.
They not only redistribute income, but they also give individuals collective pushback against corporate bullying and abuse.
Or perhaps you'd rather continue to grumble that HR is always there to take the company's side, but do nothing about it?
They absolutely should. And companies/management have a fiduciary duty to give them as little as possible. This is the competition that gives rise to capitalist efficiencies.
The concern from people like myself is that another word for a union is a cartel. When companies form cartels and engage in anti-competitive behavior, we penalize them severely (in theory at least...but that's another issue). Yet when labor colludes, we simply call it a union.
Tech is especially interesting because the usual claims of "workers have less power individually" (which is always true in all industries) is really really not a great argument in tech. The labor market in tech is so unbelievably competitive, and the average worker has leverage that is only seen in the upper echelons of other industries.
> And companies/management have a fiduciary duty to give them as little as possible.
This is a popular myth but if you do any research you’ll learn it’s not true. There’s no such requirement because there’s no way to reliably predict the future impact of decisions: for example, does paying “too much” for employees lower turnover and avoid them starting competitors? Skimping on maintenance, outsourcing jobs, or taking on debt will definitely “maximize” shareholder value for a little while, until the bill comes due.
Think for a minute about how you’d argue any of those points in court and you’ll understand why the real laws have significant deference to executives’ judgement. Neither side would have any trouble finding people to say their decision was best, and even after the fact there are inevitably many factors which people can point to when explaining whatever happened.
Try to find a legal statement to that effect. You’ll find a lot of people claiming that but there’s nothing binding for the reasons I gave: nothing is certain in business and people will reasonably differ about the best ways to produce growth over any non-trivial time scale. Remember all of the people who very confidently said that Apple was wasting its time with phones and would never overtake Nokia?
Sure, but will these salad days continue forever? I feel like most of HN is too young to remember the dot-com crash.
Seems far better to unionise and try to institutionalise and lock-in better pay and working conditions then to count on always having a hypercompetitive labor market and obscenely profitable employers.
Nor is a union the economic or legal definition of a cartel. A union is closer to creating a company that acts as a negotiating and protective apparatus for its employees as they do contractual work for other companies.
That isn’t a cartel and there can be multiple, competing unions working for the same type of workers in the same industry.
an association of manufacturers or suppliers with the purpose of maintaining prices at a high level
That's the definition of cartel. Unions exist to maximize the amount they extract from buyers of labor. This is rent seeking plain and simple.
What's more, they don't compete with each other, which is what corporations must do. Why does the UAW get to enjoy a monopoly on the sale of autoworker labor? Should Ford and GM and Chrysler be able to unionize together to keep wage costs lower?
You absolutely can. Managers will push back with "rules" that only apply if management doesn't want to pay you more. Or they will go to HR to get an exception if they think you are worth that exception (that is, if they aren't worried about not being able to match an offer for an employee that they really care about). You can absolutely negotiate.
In the past, I've been quite open when I thought that I needed more money to my manager, and have even given specific ways of making me "not distracted by money concerns". Sometimes they can meet those goals, sometimes they can't.
Personally, the offer as you've given it is probably more adversarial than I'd prefer. Something like "I feel like I'm worth more to the company than X, I feel like I'm worth Y, and here is a list of reasons, here is my career goals, etc etc". Then if they don't match it, you can accept that other offer. But YMMV.
Because they are workers. If they want to “capture” some of that profit, to start their own company, or work at a different company. Unions today are more about punishing the owners for making too much profit than it is about keeping anyone safe or fair. Just because you work at a company does not give you “ownership.”
* but when you already work at the company that pays and treats their employees like Google*
Oh how quickly we forget. It wasn't all that long ago that Google was involved in a massive wage fixing scandal (along with darn near every other major player in the "big tech").
> It seems clear to me that these are people who are unwilling to sacrifice some of the money they earn to follow their ideals and principles, so they are trying this instead.
So you missed the part of the article that explained they will commit a portion of their salary to fund the union?
They are working for a company known to hire union-busters, fire employees trying to unionize or point out issues, and you want to argue that this is the safe way to try to follow their ideals and principles? This doesn't make much sense.
> Comparing Germany to USA is pointless, very different government, history, culture, business climate, etc.
What nonsense. Comparing two countries is not the same as equating them. Of course we can compare and contrast the two, taking into account the differences. To suggest we cannot compare two different things is to deny a crucial tool of abstract, critical thinking.
> Employees can ask for better, but when you already work at the company that pays and treats their employees like Google, I'm not sure what more you are entitled to.
Alphabet makes $1.7 million per employee. Its clear that those employees don't necessarily individually have that level of contribution. Nor is it that the business model that sergey and larry made would necessarily be possible with any given number of people who aren't sergey and larry. Its much more about the ratio.
The business idea + investor money is the original capital for the business. Sergey/Larry and the investors deserve to be compensated, and are, wildly. No problem there. Basically everyone believes that inventors and creators have all sorts of rights to be compensated for that. The question is how much, since they utilize the labor of others to realize their goals.
That is exactly what unions do. They setup contracts with the employer to ensure protections and compensation using collective bargaining to balance out the power of the employer for the employer.
Collectively bargaining for hundreds or thousands of employees is obviously more powerful then a single individual bargaining against the same employer, especially when you factor in the information and resource asymmetry that exists in the latter situation.
As the article says, that is not the kind of union they set up. They set up a "members only union" which is voluntary to join or not. Either you are unhappy with conditions and need protection so you join for the the support network, or you are happy with conditions but join anyway out of solidarity with the lower classes of employees. https://tcf.org/content/report/members-only-unions-can-they-...
Or not join at all, which is fine, but punching down and across at your coworkers comes across as not being a team player.
Couldn't agree more. I wouldn't work at Google for a few extra bucks, because I know the price of these few extra bucks is payed by society as a whole.
If you're a talented professional at Google, and want to make a positive impact in the world, join a company that cares about making a positive impact in the world.
This is exactly the point, I really don't know what is the parent arguing for here. Companies try to maximize the profit they can extract from employees. Why does parent try to paint employees doing the same in a negative light? We see that big corporations will not shy away from outright law breaking behavior if the payoff is likely to be greater than the fine. When the employees exercise wholly lawful means to maximize their payoff that somehow becomes icky?
This mindset in the US that workforce empowerment is bad has to stop. It feels like the middle class in the US is fighting ferociously alongside the mega-corporations in obliterating the middle class. Corporations are not your friends. The C-suite at corporations, and the shareholders are not your friends. They are not enemies, but because they are more like an amoral hivemind than a single benevolent entity, they'll naturally gravitate towards maximizing their payoff, even if this is at the expense of the workforce. Again, I'm not saying there is outright malice there, it's just the natural optimum state for the a group of entities who currently hold most of the power.
The US is basically a feudal society in everything but the name. If the Google employees manage to get traction and their efforts spread to the other parts of the industry, and perhaps even other industries, and the balance of power tips even just slightly back towards equality, that's already a win in my book.
>This is exactly the point, I really don't know what is the parent arguing for here. Companies try to maximize the profit they can extract from employees. Why does parent try to paint employees doing the same in a negative light?
The difference is that people associate a union with forced membership; people who wanted to work at Google and to negotiate directly with Google, rather than accepting what the union negotiated for them, wouldn't be allowed to. If the union membership was entirely voluntary I imagine most people wouldn't object.
That's fair, but if such a union does not represent the will of the majority of Googlers, it's a bad union. It doesn't mean that unions are unconditionally bad. I'd even posit that such a union is unlikely to arise if indeed this is against the will of the majority of Googlers, since the union members would vote against such a mandate.
The other aspect (and I'm not trying to make a strawman here), is I'm getting the "temporarily embarrassed millionaire" vibe from your post. People would object to a collective under the pretext that they are special among the 120k googlers and would somehow be able to negotiate a higher comp than what a hypothetical collective agreement would force on them.
What I found downright comical is this objection comes before the union is formed, before any details about how compensation would be handled is even discussed. So again, it feels like the very people who would be empowered by this move (since it is them who the collective would represent), object to the concept before even discussing the details. All under this uninformed notion that they'll be prevented from partaking in outsized compensation in the future when they inevitably rise to the top echelons of Google.
I call this uninformed, because unless any of these objectors have information, they can't know what the comps would be, since it was not discussed to the best of my knowledge. Nevermind the fact that by definition, most Googlers will not rise to the very top echelons because space there is naturally limited.
The article mentions that the union membership will be entirely voluntary. I don't think there's much reason to be concerned about this changing; they'd need a majority of employees to establish a mandatory union, and their initial organizing efforts didn't get very close to that.
Many people don't know how to negotiate (well), so they are at a disadvantage when entering compensation negotiations with a prospective employer who has HR/management that have the knowledge/skills to be able to negotiate lower compensation.
In addition, even assuming someone is a good negotiator, they generally can live without work for far less time than a particular employer can live without an employee filling a particular role. So people will often take a less-than-optimal compensation package because a job today that pays the bills is far more valuable than a job tomorrow that has the "best" compensation package.
I'm not saying collective bargaining is the only -- or even the best -- solution to this, but it's not as simple as just saying people should negotiate more.
Being someone who is likely closer to bad negotiator than good negotiator, this is something that can be learned. I am pretty sure there are hundreds or thousands of books on the subject.
I would assume that based on the amount of money that is at stake, most software engineers would try to become extremely good negotiators. A 1% improvement in salary for a SWE could easily be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars over 10 years, so it is really silly to not try to understand how to get that money.
Good thing patio11 doesn't demand a percentage for the millions and millions of dollars he is responsible for people collectively getting in increased salary/comp.
> If collective bargaining allows employees to negotiate more, then shouldn't they negotiate more?
It is not clear whether these employees are actually in a good position for negotiating. The idea behind unions is that an employer is not willing to lay off all the employees that are unionized (because this would lead to a sharp decline in productivity and thus KPIs). I consider how many products were scrapped by Google as quite some evidence that Google would be nearly as successful if it fired the unionized employees and continued working with some "core team".
This does, of course, not mean that I endorse this reality, but when you negotiate, you better know what leverage you actually have.
> The idea behind unions is that an employer is not willing to lay off all the employees that are unionized
I think this is a slight perversion of the truth. A union that relies entirely on industrial action (a.k.a. strikes) to get a company to change, isn't a good union. If a union walks into every negotiation with just an ultimatum, then very quickly the otherside is going to get fed up of their bullshit.
Ideally a union should be working closely with senior leaders to find win-win situations for both employer and employee. An an obvious example would be preventing Andy Rubin from getting a $90mil payday for sexually harassing people. Clearly that's not only a serious injustice, but was ultimately always going to end up public and damaging Google brand.
A union could help senior leaders find a better solution, part of that would be providing representation to those sexually harassed so they could bring a stronger case, and make it much easier for other senior leaders to throw Andy Rubin to the wolves.
>
Ideally a union should be working closely with senior leaders to find win-win situations for both employer and employee. An an obvious example would be preventing Andy Rubin from getting a $90mil payday for sexually harassing people. Clearly that's not only a serious injustice, but was ultimately always going to end up public and damaging Google brand.
If the solution is already of economic advantage for Google itself, you simply don't need a union since it is already in the economic self-interest of Google to apply the solution. Employees unionize to have leverage against the employee for topics that employees have an interest in, but are of economic disadvantage for the employer (historically in particular salaries)
This assumes that leadership has perfect knowledge of the situation, which is just never the case. Unions can be an additional source of information about the state of the company, for things that are not being communicated via the usual management structure.
That last point is key: a union exists outside the management hierarchy. There are countless examples of situations which are well known but ignored for political reasons because everyone involved reports to someone with a vested interest in the status quo. A union can be extremely useful for forcing things into the open and doing so in a context where people feel safer commenting because they’re not the only one drawing attention.
How are moral, ethical or legal quandaries EVER of economic advantage to resolve?
Doing crime, cheating, being abusive, generally are more profitable than not doing it, in the absence of consequence. 'The economic self-interest' of Google is to be absolutely monstrous, if and only if it can get away with it.
> I think this is a slight perversion of the truth. A union that relies entirely on industrial action (a.k.a. strikes) to get a company to change, isn't a good union. If a union walks into every negotiation with just an ultimatum, then very quickly the otherside is going to get fed up of their bullshit.
If those unionized googlers are worth their salt, can't they use more aggressive negotiation tactics, at least like a DDOS?
> A union that relies entirely on industrial action (a.k.a. strikes) to get a company to change, isn't a good union. If a union walks into every negotiation with just an ultimatum, then very quickly the otherside is going to get fed up of their bullshit.
You must have not met the publicly employed unions we have in other countries. Teachers, nurses unions in my country for ex. threaten (and sometimes they do) all the time to down their tools to relative success. Sometimes the only way to get a point across your deaf employer is the way of the iron fist.
> The idea behind unions is that an employer is not willing to lay off all the employees that are unionized (because this would lead to a sharp decline in productivity and thus KPIs).
> Employees can ask for better, but when you already work at the company that pays and treats their employees like Google
I think one important aspect is this union includes their contractor workers, which are treated far worse than Google SWE's, this allows the union to do collective bargaining on their behalf. Which I do think is a pretty worthwhile goal.
Entitled? Who's talking about entitled? I thought we were talking about negotiation and leverage, since, you know, corporations are all about money and profit.
Is there some theoretical upper limit on what employees are entitled to?
It clearly states in the article they are not looking for better pay for fulltime staff. The things mentioned are the contractors/vendors, huge severence payments for sexual harrasement and unethical government contracts.
>Comparing Germany to USA is pointless, very different government, history, culture, business climate, etc.
Ah there it is. The libertarian's go to when one compares the US to any country with better institutions such as universal healthcare, unions, etc. We couldn't possibly do that here, no, American 'exceptionalism' only goes so far it seems.
Unions will only help the rest & vest culture. I worked at Google and trust me there is so much fat that can be trimmed there. Especially the ones who have been there for 7+ years..
With unions it will get harder to fire them and at the same time they will need to be compensated equally.
Software is not a profession where output is proportional to work hours like blue collar jobs. This will demoralize engineers to work smarter & harder.
Yeah, so much of Google's culture is already about slowing down work so that it takes 10 (5 eng ICs + lead, analyst, manager, PM and PgM) to do the work that 2 engineers would do with identical quality in any other company, and the old-timers are the absolute worst in terms of keeping that status quo in place. I can't recall seeing a single team there that was properly sized and wouldn't function better with half the team and an eighth of the process.
There's a good argument to be made that a big chunk of the value of an engineer to Google is strategic, simply that they
are locked up and aren't working at FB, Amazon, Apple or Microsoft. I was never at a high enough level to have a view into the data that would confirm that, but it certainly felt like even if you weren't particularly productive in the environment everyone up the ladder was perfectly happy to let you malinger on the payroll forever, as long as you weren't so bad that you did damage to someone's pristine art project of a codebase. So maybe inability to fire isn't really such an issue - even now, seeing anyone fired at Google, let alone an old timer, is extraordinarily rare.
On the other hand, it may potentially "kickstart innovation". The driven engineers will be more likely to flee to smaller companies where they can work their magic.
> This will demoralize engineers to work smarter & harder.
This is, of course, why Germany is famously an engineering wasteland with no notable impact on the global economy.
In reality, it all comes down to contracts: union employees can have performance incentives just like everyone else. The primary difference is that they’re above board and consistent because they come from a legal agreement rather than private negotiations between individuals and companies.
Germany's concept of unions are far better than the American model that just ends up controlled by mafia families (they still are in NY) or union administration that pad their salaries because the way unions are structured and protected by the NRLB basically encourages hostile centralization.
>This is, of course, why Germany is famously an engineering wasteland with no notable impact on the global economy.
I suppose you're only referring to _software engineering_?
Because in traditional engineering Germany is a powerhouse, with countless market leaders in their individual niches, plus the ubiquitous car and machinery industries.
I was being sarcastic — Germany's union system is an existence proof that the claims made about unions in the U.S., to the extent that they're even true here, are artifacts of a bad system rather than inherent to the concept.
Do you have any sources that support that from the countries that have unions for software development. Because that is something I would be very interested in reading.
For a recent example on why tech needs unions, look up N26 (German modern Bank) and their employees attempts at creating a Works Council. The way management handled it was nothing less than despicable, including filing 2 restraining orders against 2 of their organizers, and reporting them to the police because of health (covid) concerns (the police came, everything was safe and in order, then left). https://www.worker26.com/
In no way is this relevant to anything related to American tech companies. I don’t know how the plight of German bank employees suggests anything one eay or another about the need for tech unions.
Not sure who told you that. Most employees with either have options (which can become shares, but aren't) or Restricted Stock Units (RSU's) which are useless till vested.
Either way their holding will be miniscule, even in aggregate, compared to other shareholders. Even if it wasn't miniscule, they would still need to organise, maybe form some sort of coalition, or "union", in order to leverage their collective voting power against other large, unified, shareholders.
Google gives out Class C stock options to (most) employees, so even when they vest they can't vote. They're certainly not alone in that. So, no, probably not?
Even were they, the voting capability of such a share is ineffectually small; this is the "why you can just not spend money at MegaMart if you care so much" [because singular action doesn't work but we can make it sound just viable enough that you go away] argument tilted a little.
My friend just moved to Germany. They make WAY less than SV engineers (working at the same company). Granted, they don’t have to work 24 hour oncall shifts. I’m not saying the less wages is because of unions, just pointing it out.
Honest question: how do unions help with sexual harassment? The me too movement seemed much more focused on hollywood. Unions didn't seem to stop Weinstein.
I am not against unionizing. But Hollywood's unions did not stop sexual harassement, in fact we've seen it was the norm with several names in the industry recently convicted for sexual harassement, assault and even rape.
> This is just a mis-conception, look at Germany where every industry has unions, regardless of size, and unions has a say in how companies are run, and what direction they head in. They make sure that shareholders and employees get input into the highest levels of leadership, ensuring that shareholders can't force decisions that benefit shareholders at the detriment of employees.
Well, well... Germany it's far from being true unions working. They are more like "labor rights consultant company".
Most union power comes from solidarity. If the Google people feel they don’t need unions, then all other lower unions are weaker. The power comes from the industry wide union. People at small startups can stand up for something because even the Google people stand up for it. Otherwise we’re divided and carry out the dog eat dog world.
Edit:
To all the skeptics, look, out of all the thousands of tech companies, how but one of you just try it. Can we just try it? Like, all of you join it, and just try it out, so we can actually have one real world example to discuss in this fantasy ‘to union or not to union’ debate.
I’d like to at least see one attempt, one example, that way we can all point to and say ‘oh shit, google sucks now’, or ‘oh wait, it’s still a multi billion dollar company and the world didn’t end, here are the pros and cons and the overall conclusion’.
We can’t even do that because the damn thing doesn’t even really exist for any of us. This actually working out means it spreads industry wide, the implications are bigger. So could we try it? Just try, nothing more. Please? Pretty please?
Yes. I’ve worked at places that don’t give a 401k, only 2-3 days off including the federal holidays, I’ve worked at places that don’t extend any benefits to part-time workers that reach into the 30 hour range (multi year workers), I’m pretty sure I know full time workers that don’t get health insurance at some of these places, I’ve seen corporations relegate workers to temp status via actual legislation (Uber/lyft), I read the history of human-kind of labor abuse. And this is what I’ve seen as a ‘knowledge’ worker, and was raised by blue collar workers that have seen much more.
I wanted to be civil, but I just have to ask, are you fucking stupid or something?
> Yes. I’ve worked at places that don’t give a 401k
Oh wow, you’re right, that is abuse! You poor thing!
> I wanted to be civil, but I have to ask, are you fucking stupid or something?
I’m not offended, but it doesn’t look good when you completely fail to read the question, answer a different question, and then call the other person “fucking stupid.”
It sounds like the answer to the question that I actually asked you would be “No, absolutely not.” Otherwise, you wouldn’t make the laughable suggestion that lack of a 401k is in any way abusive.
And obviously the experience of blue collar workers is going to be different. This is a thread about tech companies like Google.
And the Companies in Germany pushes more and more the workforce to outside of Germany. The company that I work for has moving massively the workforce to Czech republic, China and since 2019, Bulgaria. I could imagine Google doing the same.
U.S. has been outsourcing to cheaper countries for decades now, and while workers rights here aren't necessarily bad, unions have definitely been weak. As those countries are enriched and developed, eventually they will become more expensive for production, and might have their own stronger labor organizations as well. And then the cycle will continue until eventually you run out of countries/labor markets.
> Why shouldn't employees expect, and get, better working conditions?
have their cake and eat it too is absolutely correct. And the reason why we want to keep it the way it has been, is that the status quo productivity maximization is what has resulted in our current high pay and quality of life.
> individuals leaving "collectively bargain", it's the complete opposite, it's individual bargaining, with all the perils that entails.
The benefit of market rate is that it's fundamentally sustainable, and fair. When businesses collectively bargain, we call them "cartels"
>look at Germany where every industry has unions, regardless of size, and unions has a say in how companies are run, and what direction they head in. They make sure that shareholders and employees get input into the highest levels of leadership, ensuring that shareholders can't force decisions that benefit shareholders at the detriment of employees.
Because shareholder need to make decisions to improve shareholder value even if it means it's going to suck for employees. That's an important part of the system. You need to let go of deadbeats. Go ahead look at Germany. All their companies are very old. There's no room for startups. The only halfway relevant company they've produced in decades was a complete fraud. If the USA was like that, Google wouldn't even exist.
Shareholders provide real value. For the most part from the fact that the business wouldn't even exist without them. How much they provide is supposed to be determined by the cost to replace them, the shareholders, by starting a new company and competing with the old one.
> employees should absolutely make it clear who generates most of the value in a company,
This would be hilarious. Only a tiny fraction of Google employees work on a part of the business that actually makes money.
Most of the value google generates comes from their monopoly on search, not from workers. It would be trivially easy for google to crush the unionization efforts, sack more than half their employees, and increase theor profits.
The idea that leaving equates to collective bargaining is false, and even if it had a ring of truth it would be ineffectual at FAANG companies.
Leaving changes nothing, it just accelerates the bad behaviour because the obstacle to the bad behaviour removed itself. A single person, even a team of engineers, leaving a FAANG company will have near-zero impact on the behaviour, functioning or profitability of that company. The action will not change management or ownership's perspectives on anything. They'll simply hire someone else, and promote internally if they need too. Even when you have a celebrity engineer like Tim Brey leave Amazon, publicly explaining why, outright slamming some of their behaviour, nothing will change. Mozilla seems to think it can function exactly the same as it did before (in terms of mindset) having let go of 25% of its staff. In the UK we recently had several politicians leave their senior positions within government or their party over disagreements in policy... and nothing meaningful has changed.
Unions are not just for protecting jobs, they're much more about staff having a voice, if not a seat, at the executive table. Unions can help influence senior decision-making. Most of that is about job protection, pay, quality of life issues because in blue-collar jobs those are the key issues. But in white-collar jobs a union can represent the opinion and aims of staff in a way that isn't obvious without them.
The entire post talks about effects on the company. If we’re trying to be unreasonably obtuse, it doesn’t change conditions for a worker either because a person not working is not a worker.
What I meant is that it does change conditions for the worker as they leave for better conditions. I think working in tech, it’s been a luxury to line up a new job and go to that job with zero down time. I’m not suggesting people do brash stuff like walk out without new employment lined up.
This is a huge change, the biggest I think, as I can change all of my conditions by finding a company that gives me what I want.
I think to a lesser extent since I’ve frequently seen that smart people leaving for specific reasons changes company policy.
I was just trying to show a simple contra to parent’s comment saying that leaving changes nothing as that seems simply false to me.
>What I meant is that it does change conditions for the worker as they leave for....
As they leave for, perhaps, a unionized job?
I was with you on the parent comment, but then had a think about it and I agree above, someone who leaves the company is a non-worker for the purposes of this argument
I think it’s important to consider that the plight of the worker is important both to the individual directly and to understand the motivations of employees.
Thinking that benefit to employees isn’t relevant because they don’t exist for purposes of the argument will leave out many interesting possible solutions.
I don’t think the goal is to maximize for a single company as it’s possible to maximize for the system that has both the company, other companies, and other workers.
I suppose the contra seemed a bit hollow, as the bit you quoted has an implicit “in the company” attached based on the context of the post. It was less that your statement was strictly false and more “Well yes, but that isn’t really addressing the actual topic”.
I should have provided more thought in my response. I was trying to reframe that the actual topic shouldn’t be so limited.
But it’s not reasonable for me to assume that readers would get that from my quip.
I think that I try this to try to break out of the paths where we inappropriately limit the scope to the point we can be sound in designing a solution that fits our narrowed scope but missed the goal that we were trying to achieve. I think in this case that the assumption that the goal is to fix google leaves out the individual who has mixed duties to the organization and themself. I probably get too emotional when I frequently see discussions that try to box me into being part of the solution and I see this quite a bit in product design. I see discussions around products where a complaint is met with discussion around the need to provide a solution. So the discussion spirals around kind of assuming the only options for users are: 1) propose solutions, 2) keep using. But there are three options: 1) propose solutions, 2) keep using, 3) stop using. And assuming that all users operate with only the first two options makes it more likely to only design around those two.
The biggest thing for me, also the worker, is being able to negotiate against abuse in an industry that Eg. Uses h1b to abuse employees on the regular. These employees cant leave.
I'd say thats one big advantage to unionization and the political leverage that it can bring. Not sure it helps in California where you have a blue state. Getting rid of the cheap exploitative labor that H1's bring in and restoring the H1's original design which was to bring in the best and the brightest or the most skilled.
It’s hard to leave when your children have already made American friends, when they would suffer immensely going to a country they have no familiarity with. The disruption of money and emotional safety of moving to another country with no employment prospects is a horror I don’t want anyone to live through.
Just because you aren't literally a slave doesn't mean you have to choose between two options you don't want instead of trying to get the third better option.
I’m not sure what you mean. I’ve worked in management and staff roles and in both there’s tons of externalities that I don’t control, but maybe can influence.
By being there, and in this industry within rounding error of everyone has the choice to go find another job--you've already committed, personally, to responsibilities for some externalities. At Google, they may be considerable, and they may have large echoes.
Personally, I would feel obligated to make right something I did that I thought wasn't good for the world at large.
Relatedly, this is why I pick my employers (and, when consulting, my clients) very carefully.
Thanks. I think I feel similarly. I don’t have direct control over externalities so I try to pick employers with as much consideration as I can.
So I don’t think I am responsible, but do feel guilt or pride based on organization actions. For a historical example, even if I’m not building the slave ships, I wouldn’t want to work on building them. Depending on the particulars I would either try to change the firm to stop this practice, or leave the firm for another job and then use other legal actions to stop this practice.
I am a former film industry worker and former member of Local 600 Cinematographers Guild.
You have two incorrect assumptions here:
1. Non-union filmmaking is absolutely a common thing. Most crew members start their careers on nonunion shoots. Further, not all filmmaking related unions prevent their members from participating in non-union shoots (though some do and others will encourage you to call the shoot in if the budget is high enough to justify union participation).
2. Most crew on a film are not working for a specific employer on an ongoing basis. Generally, crew are hired on a contract basis for individual projects.
You list teachers, who in my opinion are the poster children of how problematic unions are.
And there are some phenomenal teachers out there. There are teachers that change lives profoundly. But they don't need the unions, and the terrible teachers who should be fired /are/ protected. It's really messed up, most people have first-hand experience with it, and they are a corrosive factor in the end.
This is complicated, because public schools (and police departments, mentioned by another replier) are not for-profit entities. I don't think we can treat public employee unions and private employee unions the same.
Public schools, police departments, etc., are usually "political" entities, run by elected officials such as school boards and city councils. I would say there's no guarantee whatsoever in these cases that the leadership of those entities are even interested in compensating/promoting the "top performers" among teachers, or police. There's no direct financial incentive. The "outcomes" of a school — student education — don't provide much of a feedback mechanism to the financial performance or governance of the school. Likewise with police departments, etc. If anything, poor performance by these public entities may lead to calls for increased funding, standing the incentives on their heads.
Part of the reason for public employee unions is to protect the members specifically from political interference. The alternative is not necessarily "merit" based compensation but rather political favoritism and retribution.
>Part of the reason for public employee unions is to protect the members specifically from political interference. The alternative is not necessarily "merit" based compensation but rather political favoritism and retribution.
And yet all forms of public sector employment, regardless of union status, are treated as staffing agencies who's hiring can be manipulated by those who traditionally hold the power of political interference. The best way to step up your career as a teacher, cop or other bureaucrat is to know a guy who knows a guy who's owed a favor by a politician who can write a recommendation on your behalf to an open position that you want to step up to. This is how people move from line level positions to administrative positions. (And before anyone says "but the police", they are somewhat insulated because they have strict traditions in their industry that have sway over career advancement.)
If the purpose of unions is to insulate the labor pool from political meddling then they have done an incredibly poor job at it.
I'm much more inclined to believe that the purpose of unions is to extract maximum concessions from the employer(s) for the benefit of the people they control while ignoring any externalities. In settings where labor is interchangeable and employed privately the benefits are clear and the downsides are very limited. But when you start talking about the police and teachers unions circling the wagons to protect people who behave badly while simultaneously attempting to extract maximum money from society it becomes much less clear whether the unions in question are an overall good thing. It's one thing for the union to try and extract more concessions from a corporation that would otherwise pocket the money and supposedly has competition to keep them from just passing on the cost without pressure to reduce margins. It's a whole different ethical ballgame when society will be footing the bill and there is no competition to keep downward pressure on costs.
> I'm much more inclined to believe that the purpose of unions is to extract maximum concessions from the employer(s) for the benefit of the people they control while ignoring any externalities.
I agree that this is one purpose of unions. I just disagree that it's the only purpose. Unions have multiple purposes, and it's a common misconception that there's only one specific type of benefit to them. This is why I intentionally phrased my comment with "Part of the reason for public employee unions is..."
With regard to police officers, I would say that it's not just the police unions that circle the wagons and protect them. The courts have been extremely reluctant to charge or convict police officers with crimes for acts in the line of duty. Also, there's widespread support for the police in the general public, "blue lives matter", etc. I would suggest that police unions have only been allowed to wield they power they do because there's outside support in the general public for protecting police officers. Even the politicians who are anti-union tend to exempt police unions from their wrath, because those politicians tend to also be "law and order" types.
So politicians cave to large organized groups who can cause them problems and effect their ability to be elected?
How is that a surprise, of course politicians give public sector unions what they want -- they hold the cards, a huge voting block and cause problems. Most of the tradeoffs are passed down the line so the politician doesn't care either.
> So politicians cave to large organized groups who can cause them problems and effect their ability to be elected?
That's not what I said? I said the general public (who are unorganized) have a great deal of deference for police officers, and the power of police unions is merely a consequence of the public's deference to police.
> How is that a surprise, of course politicians give public sector unions what they want -- they hold the cards, a huge voting block and cause problems.
It's not a huge voting block. Union membership is much lower now than it was, say, 50 years ago. Moreover, politicians don't give public sector unions what they want. Here in Wisconsin, the state legislature stripped public employee unions of collective bargaining rights. There were massive protests at the state capitol about this, but in the end it didn't matter. Afterward there was recall campaign and election against the Governor, but the Governor won the recall election.
It feels to me like many people still have a 1960s conception of labor unions and their power, but empirically speaking, labor unions have been on the decline for decades, perhaps starting with the Reagan years. Now is not the Jimmy Hoffa era anymore.
> Part of the reason for public employee unions is to protect the members specifically from political interference.
That’s one side of the coin. The other side is to be a large enough entity to influence elections and then “negotiate” with those you helped get elected. Is it any wonder that states with large public service unions are in debt (even with high taxes) and have unsustainable pension obligations?
I’m not blaming a party here either. Democrats and Republicans tend to align with teachers and police respectively here and it creates the same problem.
It’s why public employees should never be allowed to unionize. FDR himself expressed this of all people. It’s an inevitable path to corruption. We can’t expect a reasonable “collective bargaining” when both sides of the negotiations are in bed.
> The other side is to be a large enough entity to influence elections and then “negotiate” with those you helped get elected.
That's the nature of politics. Businesses and business leaders lobby politicians and donate to their political campaigns too. It's strange to single out unions when there are so many different kinds of political interest groups, often with much more money than unions.
Public employee unions are bad, but the Tavern League, for example (I'm from Wisconsin), is ok? The National Rifle Association is ok? The National Landlord Association? Businesses and interest groups of every kind are donating money to the politicians who will directly regulate them. Why specifically exclude public employees from that?
Corruption comes in many forms, yes. But a private sector union that can elect gives the people they elect incentive to grow the union membership and therefore consolidate power. You can’t elect the person you’re going to negotiate with. It’s pure corruption and a major conflict of interest.
Private money has major issues too but it doesn’t have a direct influence on votes. A company can lobby all day and give money and that might get you more ads. But aligning with a union gets you votes and will continue to.
Police unions do this with Republicans as Teachers do with Democrats.
Public unions are a bad idea in general. The citizens collectively employ the government, and that government shouldn’t have a right to organize against the people whom it serves.
So in my opinion, these two examples of toxic public unions shouldn’t be applied to private unions.
I agree. I’m indifferent to private sector unions. None of my business if it isn’t my workplace. But public sector unions are a path to corruption. Both major parties exploit these so I can’t blame a single party here either.
What better way to consolidate power than by aligning with a public service union and “bargain” with them while being incentivized to grow membership in that union to further consolidate power.
If anything I’d support public sector unions if members were not allowed to vote for offices that represent their “management” or control their budgets.
Could you imagine a private sector union appointing the management of the company they negotiate with?
>Both major parties exploit these so I can’t blame a single party here either.
Republicans in Wisconsin abolished public unions back in 2011 (though admittedly they had exemptions for police and firefighters) and there was nationwide outrage from the left about it. There have been recent calls from the left to abolish police unions but those seem almost exclusively about police unions' ability to protect corrupt/brutal/racist cops and not about their ability to bilk taxpayers.
So while it's not completely clearcut, the right has a much better record for opposing public unions than the left.
Republicans have only opposed the unions that don’t support them. Police unions, like the ones in Wisconsin, supported Gov. Walker so he conveniently didn’t break them. That’s corrupt in my opinion and unprincipled.
You have begun to see labor movements distance themselves from police unions. I’d expect at some point it will be politically acceptable for Democrats in places like Wisconsin to strike back at them, which I’d support. So long as the other unions in the public sector are broken too.
No public sector should be able to unionize. If these groups want to lobby then fine. Lobbying, although corrupt in many ways, does not beholden tax payers to corrupt contracts.
I think it's pretty hard to claim that the reason there are bad teachers is because it's hard to fire them because they're unionized.
There are a lot of potential reasons:
- The pay is crap
- The "prestige" is crap
- The barrier to entry is low
In Finland, for example, there are excellent teachers because the profession is treated as on par with doctors. I don't think it's fair to blame unions for this difference in culture.
Your first two reasons are not valid reasons for being a bad employee. Both are knowable before taking the job. If you take a job knowing the pay is bad and you justify being a bad employee because the pay is bad, you’re a shitty person.
The third reason I don’t think is true. Teaching is in the class of occupations that require government certification.
It isn't about the employee choosing to do a shitty job because the pay is low. It is about the super talented, smart, ambitious person never going into the field in the first place because the pay is shitty.
I'd say that super talented, smart, and ambitious describe a finer gradation of employee than the simple good/bad in the earlier comments. It's just my opinion, but, as in most occupations, you don't have to be the cream of the crop to be a good employee.
Look for data on this and you’ll learn the opposite. Teaching requires a master’s degree in most cases but in many states that’s only getting you pay in the $40-50k range (yes, housing is cheaper in the boonies. No, cars, consumer goods, food, medications, etc. are not.)
A popular propaganda claim is that teachers work fewer hours based on the hope that reader doesn’t know teaching includes more than direct instructional time. Summer breaks are shorter now and have things like mandatory training for required professional development, and the few weeks most teachers have off are not enough to make up for the long hours during the school year and inability to take time off when school is in session.
This is anecdotal evidence, but my mom was a teacher and she was getting paid 85k, had no masters, didn't work at all during the summer, and didn't work at home at all (<8 hour work day).
This isn't your mom's educational labor market. The stats are there to support most assertions in the above reply. They're just inconveniently scattered across the states and not all electronically accessible. I wonder whose interests that serves? When I taught in inner city Paterson back in the mid-90s most teachers worked at least two jobs but still spent many extra hours a week outside normal school time on phone conferences with parents, curriculum development and grading tests/papers, because they all had a full load of classes with 35+ students each. Things weren't much easier down here in NC two decades later where my own kids were in school (our district has a year-round calendar -- so no summers off for teachers). The master's requirement exists in NY, but practically discouraged in other places because school districts didn't want to pay the differential. Sure, none of this approaches the often 24x7x365 experience of many sysadmins and devs (my own tech experience for over 20 years), but it's also far from the bankers' hours myth that's been pushed since at least the 80s.
More power to her — that sounds a lot better than any of the teachers I know.
For me, the biggest push here is that we've had a generation or so of our society collectively telling everyone that the future for good jobs is STEM, STEM, STEM or maybe STEM. If we actually believe that, we should be paying and treating teachers well because we are targeting education-intensive subjects and because we need to hire teachers who have an understanding of subjects which pay well. Teaching shop was a great job option for a contractor who was getting older and needed the benefits but that dynamic doesn't apply to someone who can teach most STEM subjects can often get comparable benefits and likely better pay, and enjoying teaching only goes so far to compensate the various drawbacks.
Generally, states requiring masters degrees pay more than $40-50k a year. Teaching is a rewarding profession, so naturally there will be a lot of teachers willing to work, which depresses wages. Regardless, teachers get paid well above medium incomes regardless of where they live.
I agree that teachers should be paid more, particularly newer ones, but I blame the unions for this. So much money gets funneled into pensions, which only a small fraction of teachers ever get.
Three months off is not a “few weeks”. Good lord. What school district are you referencing where teachers are forced to work every day during the summer?
Yes, they don’t get paid for not working, but can usually have their employer stretch the 9 month salary to cover all 12.
There are a lot of reasons I wouldn’t want to be a modern American teacher, but the time-off schedule is not one of them.
Note that I never claimed teachers were forced to work every day of the summer. I said “a few weeks” because for the teachers I know scheduling a vacation ends up being a couple of weeks where they have a contiguous free stretch between the end of school in June (usually a week after students), staff meetings and trainings, professional development, and planning for the school year which begins in August. No, they aren’t working every day of that period but it’s nowhere near as generous as people tend to describe it sounding like June 1st to September 1st.
> Look for data on this and you’ll learn the opposite.
I looked at the data and stand by my assessment.
> Teaching requires a master’s degree in most cases
It does not. Most teachers get masters degree because pay schedule pays extra for master degree holders. Master degrees are less prevalent in private schools, because private schools are not typically so dumb to have rigid pay schedules that pay extra for degrees, regardless of whether these degrees are actually useful.
> that’s only getting you pay in the $40-50k range
That’s already above median wage. It’s slightly below median wage of all workers with a university degree, but once you take into account hours actually worked and non-wage benefits, this is actually significantly above average pay of workers with university degrees.
> A popular propaganda claim is that teachers work fewer hours based on the hope that reader doesn’t know teaching includes more than direct instructional time.
A popular propaganda claim is also that non-instructional time is a lot. It might be for some teachers, especially younger ones fresh into their careers who need more time to prepare for their classes. The non-instructional work sometimes is also pretty concentrated, making some weeks very busy and requiring hard work in those. However, most weeks are not busy, and most teachers do not spend more than a handful of hours each week on non-teaching work.
The rubber room story that is trotted out all the time is the exception, not the rule.
The very existence of teachers unions has probably kept tens or even hundreds of thousands of people from being out of work without healthcare during a global pandemic.
In my experience, having a teacher as a spouse, discipline of even union employees is not rare when warranted.
>>engineers can "collectively bargain" with Google by simply leaving and working somewhere "better".
This "if you don't like it here, go work somewhere else" kind of reasoning disproportionately balances the power towards the employer. Instead of fixing problems, it leads to removing those that are affected. This is exactly what unions are for.
At that, what is basically a startup, level it is possible but for a company the size of Google it would not put a dent into the system. Totally different power dynamics.
> engineers can "collectively bargain" with Google by simply leaving and working somewhere "better"
While I generally agree with the sentiment of your comment, I would like to point out that the above is only true for green card holders. There are a lot of H1B/L1B workers stuck at bad teams with high amounts of pressure/stress and incompetent or downright abusive managers.
For them, leaving the company isn't an option because it means leaving the country and leaving a life-changing amount of money on the table and denying their children the advantage of growing up in the US.
You might argue they can switch teams, which is technically true, but this can complicate and delay the green card process, and vindictive managers often smear engineers with HR because people bailing on them makes them look bad. At Amazon for example, particularly bad managers will PIP an engineer to block them from transferring teams.
So while in general engineers are treated well and can choose where they want to work, I think we should also show some solidarity with our friends who don't have the same options that we do.
> engineers can "collectively bargain" with Google by simply leaving and working somewhere "better".
I.e. not collectively bargaining, instead hoping that enough other people will individually decide put their livelihood on the line to give employers the impression that things should change up, after which they will not be able to enjoy the changes because they switched job (which can be a pain in the ass regardless of opportunities).
> The reality is that Google is an easy place to work relative to how much people get paid. People don't want to leave a cushy job for one where they would have to work harder for their money, so instead, they are trying other means to have their cake and eat it too.
The relationship between an employer and employee is naturally adversarial in that there's a fundamental conflict between their interests. As an employee, I want to be paid as much as possible for my work (indeed as little work as possible), and I want it to be as pleasant as possible. The employer on the other hand will want me to do as much work as possible at as little cost as possible. Of course I want to provide value to my employer, and my employer wants to provide value to me, but that's because we both have my employment as a bargaining chip. That's my only chip, but it's only one of Google's ~100000.
In those terms, if you can approach having the cake and eating it, why not? Why should only my employer organize and use their massive resources to achieve their goals to the greatest extent possible, while workers should willfully stay disorganized and never utilize their collective influence like a corporation will? Because having two cakes is bad? There's certainly more than enough cake to go around in FAANG.
All unions end up being political. The elected union leaders are voted and the democratic process compels the leaders take decision that helps them stay in power. This is what causes the problem where you have elected union leader whose values don't align with helping companies bottom line. This will be the slow death of Google as the company we know. Can't wait to see right wing and left wing groups forming within Google.
You say this like it's a bad thing. Instead, we've just been conditioned as "professional" employees to not talk politics in the one place where we have a modicum of control over how resources are allocated in society.
The organization of people around common goals and trying to define those goals is inherently political. Organizations without politics are like unicorns without horns, whether they're nation states, corporations or trade unions. Unions come with all that's good and bad about that.
I don't believe that you can argue in good faith that unions will somehow be the first to introduce political schisms within Google.
I have to say, this is a really American view of unions. Here in Europe, I know a lot of people who love their company and are still part of an union.
First of, yeah, you could "just go" if you don't like what the company is offering. But it is not a reality for a lot of people, even in the tech industry. Leaving your job is not that easy.
And it encourage a race to the bottom. With no union to negotiate, the negotiation will always be unbalanced in the favour of the employee since you are negotiating as an individual vs. a organization. Its way, way easier for company to scare you and keep wage low when their is no union to back you up.
Also, union can help you when you have a manager or any higher-up that makes your work life hard. I know a lot of company who try to sweep complain under the rug for one reason or another. But when the union get involved, they just can't, they have to deal with it.
Finally, employee are stake holder in a company. A lot feel involved and responsible in the company direction and future. You can't just excluded them because they are not shareholder. I mean, you can, but that will lead to a strong feeling of alienation. Union help with that, and I know some people who are part of a union just for this: They love their job and the company they work for, so they want to have a say in where the company is going.
I have friends who are in the animation industry (which has been heavily unionized since the 50s) and they tell me the Union is constantly fighting with the studios over the studios trying to get more work out of them for less money.
I have friends in the visual effects industry (which has never been unionized) and their lives are full of stuff like effects houses that did work on award-winning films with huge budgets closing up without paying people because the studio skipped out on payments.
These are very similar fields in terms of skills. Both are mostly based in the same place. Both involve a lot of long hours working on stuff that flashes by in seconds. One has a union, one doesn’t. One is better off than the other.
Minor nitpick...the animation industry is only really unionized in LA. Outside of LA, the animation union dwindles dramatically and is close to non existent.
For example, Titmouse was the first studio in Canada to unionize and that was just in mid 2020.
The Bay area studios like Pixar aren't unionized either, even though their sister studio WDAS in LA is unionized.
"engineers can "collectively bargain" with Google by simply leaving and working somewhere "better"."
That's only collective bargaining if a lot of them leave en masse (ie. collectively), and for the same issue(s). To do that effectively they'd need to organize, coordinate their efforts, and speak as one voice: in other words, they'd need to unionize.
Leaving one at a time, for different issues is not collective bargaining, it's individual bargaining, so not at all comparable to a union.
Exactly - people don't want to sacrifice their paycheck for their principles, so instead they are forming a union so they can try and change the company and have it both ways.
I work at Google, and when I started, I thought the idea of unionizing there is ridiculous.
They already have a very well defined leveling system. The promotion and hiring system - people hate - but it is as un-nepotistic as possible and (I think) fairer than pretty much anywhere else.
The compensation is already higher than basically everywhere - as you mentioned - ESPECIALLY considering expectations for your work.
And, sure, I think no one in America gets enough time off. We could maybe squeeze out 5 weeks of PTO for all employees.
Originally, I thought, is that worth unionizing for? I didn't think so.
HOWEVER, Googlers have since convinced me that this is more about employees having a voice in corporate decisions than compensation. For example (and I don't really agree with this) - most Googlers are VERY much against Google working with the DoD. They want to be able to use unions to block that. Others want to use unions to force Google to be more transparent about what it's doing with data and so on. Others want a better way for employees to speak up when we do things that seem illegal (breaking GDPR rules) or extremely unethical (hypnotizing babies on YouTube for ad-money). Currently, as with most companies, Google is a company that really cares only about maximizing shareholder value. Most Googlers were hired when the Google slogan was "Do no evil" and they really took that to heart. And for a long time, that WAS true. Now, a lot of them (and current employees) feel differently. And they think unions can bring "Do no evil" back to our main corporate guideline.
I'm not sure I'm convinced this is worth it or possible, but (to me) it's DEFINITELY more convincing than the compensation / working conditions argument.
If we unionizing and employees get a stronger corporate voice AND 5+ weeks PTO, I'll be very happy. But it seems like a pipe dream to me.
Yes, exactly. There is no "workers rights" argument for a union at Google.
It is purely a hard-left power grab, just like at Kickstarter when they unionised for the pure, noble purpose of forcing their employer to allow fundraisers that were threatening violence against conservatives (and thus had been taken down as a ToS violation).
As a former Googler myself (not for quite some years), I see this as the inevitable end result of always kowtowing and giving in to ever more radical left extremism. It started with nice but trivial sounding language about how there should be more women in tech, and it ends with hiring endless full time activists like Timnit Gebru.
If Google is ever to regain its former glory, it needs a serious purge. There won't be one: instead I suspect it will become a cautionary tale spoken about quietly throughout the world, for many decades to come. The lesson drawn will be: don't hire SJWs or else you might end up like Google did, with managers being deposed by a unionised mob demanding endless and ever-spiralling purity warns.
> "employees having a voice in corporate decisions than compensation"
Should your waiter, your dentist, your auto mechanic, your daycare worker, your landscaper, etc. have a say in your decisions? They're your employees, albeit temporarily, so why not?
The shareholders are the owners of the company, not employees. The right to set the direction of the company belongs to its owners. The profits belong its owners, just as your paycheck and what to do with it belongs solely to you.
(As an aside on shareholders and compensation, considering how many FAANG people have huge chunks of their compensation in stock, people are well aware unionizing at a FAANG is basically people attempting to pick their own pockets since increasing employee compensation (themselves) is taken from shareholders (themselves).)
>Unions are intended for industries where a worker doesn't have a marketplace of options... engineers can "collectively bargain" with Google by simply leaving and working somewhere "better".
I don’t know that you’ve put forth a convincing argument here. There is no defining union industry in principle, only in past embodiment. The intent of a union is to balance the leverage of workers compared to management via collective bargaining. So a union is valid anywhere there is a real or perceived imbalance of leverage.
Claiming one can go get a job anywhere else only balances the leverage when certain assumptions are met (e.g., symmetry of information, no conspiracies to suppress wages or prevent hiring etc.) Considering the tech industry hasn’t always met these assumptions, I don’t know that your claim proves true
Wow, you are excluding a LOT of workers in your statements here. Most people who work at Google, even the tech-focused ones, are not the type of full-time high-demand engineers who can get a new job at the drop of a hat.
But I'm not sure what that has to do with the question anyway. Unions aren't "intended" only for certain industries or market conditions. They are a means of balancing the power difference between workers and employers. And we see evidence every day that Google and most other large tech employers in the area are abusing the power they have over their workers on a regular basis. "Just get a new job" is not a solution for the vast majority of people who work at Google et al.
Also, unions are about balance of power. Giving more bargaining power (collectively) to people that otherwise don't have much bargaining power.
Most people in tech, and especially so at places like google don't feel like they have low bargaining power. So I think the perception is, not only is there not much to be gained by unionizing, there is potentially more to lose by giving up individual bargaining power to the union. So basically losing autonomy and control for some unknown and fuzzy benefit.
> Unions are intended for industries where a worker doesn't have a marketplace of options as there is a single or just a few employers (e.g. Hollywood, teachers, coal mining towns, hospital staff, etc.)
Unions serve a purpose of being able to collectively bargain, regardles off how many "options" there are.
Employers and corporations always have bargaining power and are basically collective establishments themselves. Individuals rarely have any negotiating power for better conditions, wages, treatment, etc...
> as there are thousands of tech companies hiring engineers in the valley -- engineers can "collectively bargain" with Google by simply leaving and working somewhere "better".
And we have court cases documenting that Google, Apple, etc. will do their worst to collectively reduce job mobility and artificially reduce wages. You can't use a better paying position at Apple to bargain for better wages at Google because they (and dozens others) agreed not to hire each others workers.
>Unions are intended for industries where a worker doesn't have a marketplace of options as there is a single or just a few employers (e.g. Hollywood, teachers, coal mining towns, hospital staff, etc.). Unionizing at Google makes no sense, as there are thousands of tech companies hiring engineers in the valley -- engineers can "collectively bargain" with Google by simply leaving and working somewhere "better".
I feel like this is only half of the truth. They also help employees increase negotiating power as a counter to employers working together to increase their negotiating power (colluding on wages).
>The reality is that Google is an easy place to work relative to how much people get paid. People don't want to leave a cushy job for one where they would have to work harder for their money, so instead, they are trying other means to have their cake and eat it too.
If by taking some action they get a bigger slice of cake, why shouldn't they take that action? Our economy is built off the idea of rational actors acting in their own self interest, so doing something to get you a bigger slice of cake at a lower (or equal) price fits the expected behavior of actors in such a system.
> Unionizing at Google makes no sense, as there are thousands of tech companies hiring engineers in the valley -- engineers can "collectively bargain" with Google by simply leaving and working somewhere "better".
Wouldn’t Google workers collectively bargaining with Google using the threat of leaving to work at another tech company be, like, a union?
> Unionizing at Google makes no sense, as there are thousands of tech companies hiring engineers in the valley
> they are trying other means to have their cake and eat it too.
I think you're basically correct but are making multiple slightly incorrect assumptions:
- That working at Google is comparable to any other tech company in terms of benefits and stability. In reality, only a few companies could compare. (Not everyone can work at a startup, etc.)
- That tech companies are wildly different in terms of culture and philosophy. In my experience, tech industry culture is hyper normalized and you see the same problems everywhere.
So it's not like a selfish "have their cake and eat it too", but more like they actually can't gain what they want by moving, so the remaining path is change from the inside.
> Don't think we've ever seen Hollywood in the modern era without unions, so not sure how you can claim it's "undeniable" the industry is better off. We basically have no clue if it's better off or not.
> Unions are intended for industries where a worker doesn't have a marketplace of options as there is a single or just a few employers (e.g. Hollywood, teachers, coal mining towns, hospital staff, etc.).
Unions are for all workers in all industries and sectors. Unions protect workers rights through collective action and ensure the work force isn't marginalized, mismanaged or abused.
A worker has a right to a voice. Unions are the body of that voice.
> engineers can "collectively bargain" with Google by simply leaving and working somewhere "better".
That is literally the opposite of what "collective" means. You seem to be trying to argue against unionization by circular logic, by claiming that it doesn't work because market forces do the same thing because unionization isn't necessary.
I mean, it's easy to do that in the case of FAANG employers who already pay very high salaries. But they make outrageous profits too. What's the argument that the already-highly-paid engineers shouldn't get a bigger share?
a Union is about rights, they _should_ provide an extra safety net should your employer put you in a bad position. It means that its much harder to divide and conquer employees
A moderately well run union is useful for the employer as a way to consult, defuse and get sentiment for changes.
Unions have nothing to do with employability, its about making the conditions better for the workers, and not because that's what other companies do.
Employees leaving doesn't mean the place changes, especially if there is a limitless supply of keen, naive and cheap labour out there. The VFX industry is a prime example of this.
> Unions are intended for industries where a worker doesn't have a marketplace of options...
I'm not sure the cause and effect work that way, at least not entirely.
Unions do restrain roles of workers and structure compensation to particular patterns. It seems plausible to me that those sorts of restrictions are in some ways detrimental to companies that wish to (or need to) disrupt incumbents. It's plausible that they function as a sort of regulatory capture. In some cases, as with unions of government workers, literal regulator capture enters the picture too.
I'd just say that there are more reasons to unionize than just local monopolies. You unionize whenever there's a major disparity between cooperate profits and worker benefits. You unionize when work conditions are bad and management doesn't care. You unionize when you feel you are being treated unfairly.
For example, construction companies are often places where there's both lots of work available and union outfits doing a lot of good.
> engineers can "collectively bargain" with Google by simply leaving and working somewhere "better".
To do this as a group you will still benefit from an organization to manage it. Its a lot more effective to say, "Stop doing this or we 1500 engineers are all leaving on Feb 1" versus a bunch of engineers seemingly random quitting (although for similar reasons).
We've seen lots of exodus from Hollywood to states that are less union friendly, or at least that don't yet have a strong related union presence (yet).
While there maybe isn't yet a definitive "Hollywood East" or "Hollywood South" etc yet, the desire to find/build an alternative to Hollywood proper seems clear.
> Don't think we've ever seen Hollywood in the modern era without unions, so not sure how you can claim it's "undeniable" the industry is better off. We basically have no clue if it's better off or not.
Um it's called looking at the past? Making reasonable inferences?
Unionizing doesn’t make sense is a great sentence for an HR person to speak. In truth, it’s about as real as ‘HR doesn’t make sense’. Unions are supposed to be a counterweight for HR in that they should care about employees in the same way HR cares about the company.
They did a strike to get paid for streaming back when most people thought it wouldn't go anywhere. I think the industry is better off with them getting paid for what is becoming the default way to watch stuff.
Large swaths of film production work is non union btw. Union is the default for on set and pre production but it's not exclusively so. Post production is majority non union
It seems incredibly significant that only 230 people are officially involved with these plans to unionize. As of 2019, Google had nearly 120,000 employees.[0] That seems quite small, relatively speaking.
Legally (I think, just learning about this now), to form a union, a majority of workers must show their willingness to form a union. Alternatively, to choose an existing union to join, an election with 30% of the workers support is required.[1]
So with that said, am I reading this right? Does this group of 230 people need to find at least ~40,000 more people for this to be a valid effort to form/join a legal union?
They are not trying to form a traditional majority union.
> unlike a traditional union, which demands that an employer come to the bargaining table to agree on a contract, the Alphabet Workers Union is a so-called minority union that represents a fraction of the company’s more than 260,000 full-time employees and contractors. Workers said it was primarily an effort to give structure and longevity to activism at Google, rather than to negotiate for a contract.
This is a very important comment, not sure why it's not higher. This isn't really a union in the traditional sense - it's just a group of hyper liberal Google activist employees who are banding together to try to get institutional change.
In societies that are not America, unions are traditionally left of center but most definitely still more or less in the center.
It seems that political discussions relating to the US don't have the appropriate vocabulary to discuss political opinions that are positioned to the left of the corporate wing of the Democratic party.
no its not. these activists are leftists, not liberals, which is what the parent was trying to point out.
liberalism is not a far left ideology, it is actually pretty centrist. "Hyper-liberal" is more synonymous to libertarian than it is to what these google activists are.
America has a stunted perception of political ideology. This is pretty apparent when you observe far right pundits and politicians refer to democrats as "far left" when the majority are actually right of center and would be considered conservative in most european countries or even by the democratic party of 20 years ago.
Even among unions, the tone and political messaging from the AWU is particularly left. It's obvious if you contrast the AWU's stated principles and values with a more traditional union.
Due to all kinds of reasons people tend to not wanting to be officially associated with an budding union until it becomes reality.
I mean you can guess which 230 people are more likely to lose their job, then they had been before (if the union fails).
(I don't mean Google will target them, but that if Google considers letting them go for whatever other reason it's now more likely that they will let them go.)
imagine using tools explicitly created to facilitate communication and organization between employees but suddenly its abuse when used for organize something other than a potluck
A person on the security team tasked with notifying employees browsing the Web of company guidelines and policies decided to author a policy notification entirely of her own.
That's like the guy hanging up memos from the top floor in the company lunch room one day deciding to slip in a political message, printed on official company stationary to disguise it as an official memo.
It's not about using general-purpose internal communication tools to remind co-workers of their rights, it's abuse of a privileged position involving the power to broadcast official messages.
Whether someone thinks it's justified by the cause is a separate argument.
Defining a 'break room' and legally protected workplace communications wasn't really ready for the internet age when this happened (this is the context behind the above two posts for those out of the loop[0]). Thankfully NLRB weighed in and suggested that this was protected communication [1], or they at least are suing to argue that case[2] (still an open case).
Google is already being ruined by this tiny minority of sanctimonious blowhards. This is just a move to give more power to themselves to push their own political agenda in Google. Personally I want nothing to do with them, and I'd prefer that they just leave the company if they're unhappy. There's still lots of companies that want to hire software engineers, though of course they may find that nobody else puts up with their nonsense either.
These are the people behind the Google Graveyard, the company's awful track record on UX and product design, and its core business strategy of making you, the user, the product through data monetization?
I'm saying that those are major customer-facing reasons for why Google is seen as not good these days, not inside baseball culture wars that could be attributable to a "tiny minority of sanctimonious blowhards".
It’s less of a reach than you think. These people may not be directly responsible for those decisions, but their distractions have allowed a lot of the people responsible for those decisions to bully them through. They’ve also created a climate where the people who push back against those bad decisions are uncomfortable or outright persecuted.
> They’ve also created a climate where the people who push back against those bad decisions are uncomfortable or outright persecuted.
I can guarantee you that there are AWU members who have tried to push back against product decisions by Google that you aren't a fan of, and been unsuccessful in doing so. Perhaps with more political force, they'll be better able to keep bad product decisions in check ;)
Years ago, my friend was part of a small movement to unionize a certain universally hated company that rhymes with Omfast.
They thought it would be a home run given all of the nonsense that goes on there. As it turns out, selling people on the idea of unionizing is much harder than it sounds. People weren’t even necessarily afraid of the company, they just didn’t want to be in a union.
They, too, gathered a small number of people at first, but the effort fizzled out when the initial enthusiasm didn’t spread beyond those few idealistic people.
In a company the size of Google, it wouldn’t be hard to find 230 people who would claim to be unionizing, but it doesn’t mean much when you’re talking about a tiny fraction of employees.
It's also the case that the leadership of said company communicates (or did 12 years ago) anti-union rhetoric to their employees on a regular basis (starting from orientation) and requests employees to report any unionizing talk from other employees. Always with the same language about how unions are bad for employees, etc.
It's rather unfortunate that any rational counter-argument to unionization is automatically termed rhetoric or propaganda with the implication that it has no validity.
Reading the article, it sounds like they do need to find ~40,000 votes. The article mentions that now they've announced the unionisation attempt, they're gonna starting doing lots of public campaigning to collect the votes they need.
Yeah, they definitely need to gather support of some sort, I'm just curious about the scale. 40,000 people from within the 120,000+ organization seems huge. If that's really the case, the coverage so far would seem fairly sensationalist - 0.25% of employees signing on to unionize is a drop in the bucket next to a required minimum 30% of the workforce signed on.
I think the article is pretty accurate, the title looks pretty spot on
> Google workers announce plans to unionize
I agree that the number involved is quite small at the moment, but given how hostile Google has been to any unisation effort, the fact the 230 people have organised anyway, and now put their jobs on the line, is quite a big thing.
I suspect that there are many at Google that would happily join a union, just look at how high the attendance of Google's walk outs have been. This announcement clearly indicates that union organisers believe they have enough support to come out of the woodwork, and start some serious campaigning.
> I suspect that there are many at Google that would happily join a union, just look at how high the attendance of Google's walk outs have been.
You're assuming a lot here. The Google Walkout had a huge attendance because it had zero teeth and zero commitment. People took their lunch break outside to say "I don't like sexual harassment". Then they went back to their desks and back to work. Google refused all but one of their demands, fired or drove out all of the organizers, and went on with it's day.
Essentially, very few people who walked out would put their cushy Google job on the line for what they believe in. The organizers did, they're gone. A handful of other people since then have also put their jobs on the line for their principals, they've also now been fired. Every time Google has fired organizers, it has made it much harder for the remaining workers to organize, both because the people who would organize are gone, and those left have a cautionary tale of what happens if they do.
Everyone at Google today is someone who had a chance to stand up for what's right in a manner that risks their employment, and has chosen not to do so.
The title is technically accurate, but I think the omission of scale and any sense of how far along these plans are leaves quite a sensationalist tidbit. "Google workers announce plans to unionize" translated to "the necessary amount of employees at Google to form a union are unionizing" on my first pass. I clicked immediately because that seemed significant. I'm sure this was the intention, though I can only speculate. A clear and less sensationalist (though less click-worthy) title could have been as simple as: "230 Google workers announce plans to unionize"
That being said, I'm not contesting the validity of the movement - it's certainly possible that thousands of Googlers will sign on in support now that the movement is public, and more power to them!
It just seems like the reporting on this should be making it more clear where this effort stands and just how much needs to happen before it's legally viable. Arguably, more honest reporting in that regard would help make clear to potential allies that their support is needed, and this is not a sure thing.
Without defending Google management at all, I'll say that everyone who got fired was not at all careful in their activity. Organizing a union is different from doing intentionally disruptive protest activity, and while one can argue that both are morally correct, one is a lot more job-threatening than the other.
The people who are organization the union and signing petitions, but not hacking employer systems or calling their coworkers "Nazis" are still employed and organizing but also less visible to the public.
Much like cyclists facing cars have to learn that it's better to be alive than claim the right of way and be dead, activists need to be smart about taking calculated risks. (And if people are calculating that getting fired is good for their political cause or future career at a like-minded organization, then good for them!)
> I suspect that there are many at Google that would happily join a union, just look at how high the attendance of Google's walk outs have been.
I'm hopeful that you're right, but I also suspect that a lot of engineers will look at the fees and decide "hey, 1% of my total compensation is actually a hefty amount." The walkouts were free.
> 1% of 100K people making over $100K/yr is an insanely huge amount of money for a union.
Well, think about it this way. 1% of 200k people making >$50k is the same amount.
There are 775k members of the IBEW, for reference, which charges 2% of base wages in additional to fixed overheads. The SAG charges dues of 1.575% on the first $500k. Writer's Guild charges 1.5% with no cap. So 1% is actually low.
> (But that 1% is perhaps/likely only salary not equity.)
The article stated "compensation", which I suppose could go either way, but I lean toward "total compensation" in my reading. But either way, I'm sure the majority of Google employees do make over $100k in base salary (between those in the Bay Area, New York, Seattle, Boston, London, and more).
> A big question to ask is whether Googlers need to pay for union or if they should donate to politicians who would regulate Google.
How many of those regulations would impact the profitability of Google (e.g. through antitrust enforcement) versus encourage better working conditions?
I mean, I think it is always the case that organizing efforts start with a small number of very activist employees and escalate from there. That has at least been my understanding of organizing MO, so sort of an odd standard to hold.
Huge difference between signing on and voting in a secret ballot - esp. in the context of in a company.
It's significant in the sense that it shows google's sucesses in been fighting attempts to unionise. In addition for straight up prohibiting employees to gather in larger groups (no more than 100 per event or 10 rooms at once) they've been reading employee communications and firing people: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/02/google-spied-on-employees-il...
Keeping something secret amongst 230 people is not an easy task. At some point the campaign has to become public, and it's better to do that in a planned, coordinated manner, than have it get leaked to the press.
Note that despite their public claims, it seems that non-North American (that is, European, Australian, Asian, African and South American) Google employees aren't allowed to join this union.
Traditional unions target specific job role at specific locations, where you only need people in that job at that location to vote for unionization. It seems like a lofty goal to try to unionize the whole company in one go, when you don't have a track record of successes at a small scale you can point to as reasons that this union is a good idea on a large scale.
They formed a Members-only union which can exist absent a majority of employees joining. The terminology is confusing since all unions are member-only.
These minority unions do not have collective bargaining rights unless the employer agrees.
I don’t think this is correct. Maybe that’s for some place where there’s forced union membership?
I’ve worked at places where certain departments were unionized (for example hospitality) but others were not. Far below any such 30% threshold for total employment. Also unions form at individual worksites all the time, so I sincerely doubt there’s any company-wide membership requirements.
Edit: I'm correct. There's this concept of a bargaining unit, so it would only have to be workers doing a certain type of work in a certain place, generally, though it can be just those doing a certain type of work:
The 100k+ figure is globally though, correct? I'm assuming there are other countries where white collar workers, Including Google employees, are already commonly unionized.
On this group's homepage [1]:
"We are BIPOC workers who fight against totalitarianism."
I am not sure what this has to do with unionizing Google workers. Using obscure acronyms to arbitrarily focus on race and ethnicity (something frowned upon here in Europe at least) + the hyperbole of "fighting totalitarianism" doesn't give me great confidence that this is representing workers, as much as it is pushing the ideology of a vocal minority.
If they truly believe they represent the majority of Google employees, then they are free to widely share this call internally and see how many people actually agree with them and want to join their group. So far, it's ~0.2K out of ~260K employees.
This is a common criticism of teacher unions in the USA [0]. They donate dues money to left-leaning political causes against the wishes of many of their members. In a union shop, dues-paying employees have no choice in the matter. It is compelled political speech.
I expect this will be a big issue in tech unions also.
To be clear, the "BIPOC workers" and "fight against totalitarianism" are elements of picklists, with other options like "We are technologists who want pay equity". The overall message of the picklist is that the union is an inclusive group which stands together for a variety of reasons.
And, the union doesn't claim to speak for all workers. It only claims to speak for its members, and to fight to protect all workers.
Thanks, I tried to clarify this in my original comment, but it can no longer be edited.
I'm not sure that changes much. To me, "BIPOC" is anything but inclusive. It's an acronym that apparently was used for about a month, by people of a very specific political ideology, and seems to be criticized by the very people this term is supposed to represent. [1]
And what does totalitarianism have to do with anything? I am all for putting a bit more power in employees' hands (esp. for issues where HR will throw an employee under the bus), but can we please keep the divisive political rhetoric out of it? Not shoehorn "BIPOC" and politically-charged language everywhere?
I am a "BIPOC", but I feel this rhetoric will be more effective with (mostly white) progressives/liberals, not the people it purports to represent.
"Google employs more than 130,000 contractors and temp workers, a shadow work force that outnumbers its 123,000 full-time" [1]
130K+123K = 253K
(article from May, likely closer to 260K now)
One of the main points this group is making is that they want to equally represent fulltime employees and contractors.
"All Alphabet workers deserve a voice: full-time employees, temporary employees, contractors, and vendors. We care for and support each other by striving for open and continuous dialogue among union members." [2]
That's a noble goal, but one of the reasons companies hire contractors is to give themselves flexibility. Often they aren't even the company on the pay check the contractor receives. I fully support contractors and employees being treated fairly in the workplace, but it's not reasonable to expect them to be treated with full equality.
Good for them. I work for a large company and am a member of the union. While they're not perfect they're very constructive and provide a lot of benefits to all employees, and also to the company itself.
Compensation has become very complex over the years. While most people understand their pay the rest is usually where employers cheap out, things like insurance, sick pay, long-term provider care, pension contribution, tend to be worse for my friends who also work in IT but in non-unionized workforce.
I understand that in the US unions are often seen as a burden, rather than a constructive partner, so I hope this one will help to improve the image of all unions as well as improve live of Googlers.
> I understand that in the US unions are often seen as a burden
Some are, some the opposite. Often people discuss unions like something very homogenous. They're like companies - there will be both loan sharks and non-profit activists (and lots in between).
Unions have also been centers of corruption and organized crime. This is what gave them such a bad name in the 1980s and is why it's so easy to "tie" anyone in construction to the mob, such as one famous person in charge these days.
His company is renovating buildings or building new ones, less frequently now.
There are recordings of one of the mob bosses discussing Trump buildings and their concrete. The likelihood that Trump never spoke to a mob boss is just about 0%, either willfully or accidently. But judging from his behavior the last 4 years, there is a decent chance Trump knew and liked it.
Pensions are horrifically anti-worker. You're basically withholding X% of someone's pay for 40 years, and also confiscating that pay if they don't stay at the same company until the pension vests (so people cannot leave without incurring a huge financial penalty even if they hate their job and can find better options elsewhere).
> Pensions are horrifically anti-worker. You're basically withholding X% of someone's pay for 40 years, and also confiscating that pay if they don't stay at the same company until the pension vests (so people cannot leave without incurring a huge financial penalty even if they hate their job and can find better options elsewhere).
It depends. I have a defined-benefit pension that vested after a short time (5 years? it was a long time ago, but it was about the same as the 401k match). I've never felt tied down by it, and it's a nice thing to have to diversify my retirement assets, since it was one where I wasn't taking the risk.
See, this is why people need unions. In my country pensions are handled by the employer AND the union. All the issues you mention are not present here, since unions would not agree to let employers hold a pension over someone like this.
One difficulty I see with the mission statement (https://alphabetworkersunion.org/principles/mission-statemen...) is that it is very broad, and contains a lot of progressive values that are likely not as widely shared as the authors might expect. One might or might not agree with these values, but it is going to be significantly harder to start steering the company's product direction and social responsibility efforts than 'just' representing the employees during e.g. benefits and compensation negotiations.
Seems to me that the organizers are using a union to push their own personal agendas (which they otherwise don't have the power to push) which seems like the perfect way to form a corrupt union that harms workers.
All in all, seems to be good values to want to have in a workplace, especially such a global and pervasive one as Google. If all of these things were pushed for and implemented in Google, you think that would harm the workers?
The primary goal of a union is to ensure safe and secure working conditions, the best compensation and benefits, etc.;
> negotiating the best wages, working conditions, and health and pension benefits; preserving and expanding members’ work opportunities; vigorously enforcing our contracts; and protecting members against unauthorized use of their work.
The purpose of a labor union is traditionally not to set corporate direction / input into the creative process, to ensure “right-think” in the workplace, or for social justice campaigns.
I agree somewhat, the values are a bit wishy-washy, like Google's original "Don't be evil". But I think the dramatically different circumstances of our time are playing a huge role in the distinction you're drawing.
USW were fighting for the abolition of child labor -- this is not a direct concern for Alphabet employees, thankfully. Actor's Equity Association were fighting against McCarthyism and blacklisting (which SAG participated in, and apologized for in 1997).
In particular, for the Alphabet union effort, I think their press release[0] is more concrete. I think the goals of increased workplace democracy, pressuring management to prevent pushing externalities, and preventing suppression and retaliation in the workplace are pretty relevant, and would be high on my list for a prospective union for tech workers.
Ironically, I think they would draw much more ire if they merely focused on analogous workplace/worklife comfort improvements, for Software Engineers at least, given their famed perks. Hopefully the union targets the Alphabet employees who really do need workplace/worklife improvements, mostly found in the non-full-time ranks.
Unions actually legally are very similar to PACs whenever politics are concerned, for a good reason. The United Steelworkers is one example amongst many, I know of a lot of major unions in my city that have similar policy positions.
Definitions mean something. IANAL, but as I understand it, trade unions are a legally protected entity, not an abstract concept which relates to any organization of people who happen to be employed in the same line of work.
> trade union: An organization of workers in the same skilled occupation or related skilled occupations who act together to secure for all members favorable wages, hours, and other working conditions.
There is apparently a concept in trade unions called the "golden formulae";
> golden formulae a non-technical but convenient expression to describe the conditions required for a trade union to benefit from the limited immunities available to it under legislation. There must first be a trade dispute that relates wholly or mainly to matters such as terms and conditions of employment, sacking or suspension of workers, allocation of work, discipline, membership of a union, facilities for union officials or negotiating regime. The acts in question must be in contemplation of furtherance of the dispute.
So, for example, the legal benefits of a union may not confer to any possible activity a group of employees may conduct, but rather must pertain to specific aspects of their employment and relations to their employer.
US Federal labor law defines a trade union as;
> any organization of any kind, or any agency or employee representation committee or plan, in which employees participate and which exists for the purpose, in whole or in part, of dealing with employers concerning grievances, labor disputes, wages, rates of pay, hours of employment, or conditions of work.
I'm not saying that it's impossible for a collective of employees to organize around political rallying points, just that these actions are not generally recognized as the purpose of a trade union, and perhaps would not be legally protected in the same way.
For example, there are carve-outs to requiring employees to pay union dues which are not used for specific purposes;
> In 1988, the Supreme Court ruled (5–3) in Communications Workers v. Beck that private-sector workers who are not full union members cannot be forced to pay for the “social, charitable, and political” activities of unions. They can only be forced to pay the portion of dues used for “collective bargaining, contract administration, and grievance adjustment.” Per the ruling, the federal law that requires compulsory unionism in certain situations does not provide the unions with a means for forcing employees, over their objection, to support political causes which they oppose.
To the extent that this "union" is more of a PAC than a collective bargaining agreement over labor contracts, the specific protections (like required payment of dues) melt away.
Pretty much every politician ever has used manipulative language to try to make themselves sound better than they are. It's why abortion activists call themselves pro-life/pro-choice. To take their words at face value is incredibly naive. For example, the line about "economic justice" almost certainly means the authors believe the company should be used as a propaganda vehicle for socialism/communism. And the line about a "welcoming environment" is an outright lie as shown by these same employees' bullying and harassment of numerous wrong-thinking employees (James Damore and Miles Taylor come to mind as a few examples).
These activists forced Google to oust a black women out of AI ethics (Kay Cole James), and are now complaining that Google doesn't care about black women in AI ethics when someone woke gets let go. It's so transparent that they only care about their political goals.
You don't think it has anything to do with one of these people having a PhD in the field, and the other having the position solely to appeal to conservative politicians?
> For example, the line about "economic justice" almost certainly means the authors believe the company should be used as a propaganda vehicle for socialism/communism
These days it's for race+gender-orientated demands.
> To take their words at face value is incredibly naive
I agree, but that's what we have to go on, as this effort just started. The opposite is naive as well, where you assume everyone always have hidden agendas. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle.
> For example, the line about "economic justice" almost certainly means the authors believe the company should be used as a propaganda vehicle for socialism/communism.
Well, yes and no. Yes, you can describe their economic justice value as socialistic, I don't think they are trying to hide that. Here's the full value:
> Social and economic justice are paramount to achieving just outcomes. We will prioritize the needs of the worst off. Neutrality never helps the victim.
Yes, sounds like socialism. Exactly what they are aiming to implement in the Google/Alphabet workplace. The people who sign up with the union, are people who agree they want to focus on fixing that particular problem. That's a strong point of unions in general, to align about common values.
Not sure how you get it to be a "Google should be used as a propaganda vehicle". The employees there want to improve their own workplace by implementing their ideas. Now they are calling for others (who agree) to join them. I don't have any skin in the game, so I'm fine either way. But I find the process of even trying this to be refreshing, no matter what their values and ultimately their impact will be.
The 'personal agenda' refers to the fact that it is unclear whether these values represent the opinion of an overwhelming majority at Google.
Some of these statements are _actually_ controversial. (Without saying whether I personally agree with them or not -- I am saying that they are far from being universally accepted.)
Examples:
> All aspects of our work should be transparent, including the freedom to decline to work on projects that don’t align with our values.
Not sure how the company should approach this exactly. I'll bring up some extreme (and maybe stupid) examples. Let's say Google wants to monetize the Google search page even more, while employees working in the UX team disagree with this direction. Should Google be able to let them go (in case there's no other UX role in the company) or not?
> Our decisions are made democratically, not just by electing our leaders who set the agenda, but by actively and continuously listening to what workers believe is important.
This approach of corporate decision making practically doesn't exist anywhere, and there's not much proof that it'd work, so I consider this controversial.
> Social and economic justice are paramount to achieving just outcomes. We will prioritize the needs of the worst off. Neutrality never helps the victim.
Google had a massive impact on the world by creating the search engine and broadening access to information to people around the world. Should it have other social missions as well? What should those be? What happens if the company's core mission (organizing the world's information) becomes at odds with other social mission(s)?
Normally the leaders of the company are responsible for making decisions here.
> Everyone deserves a welcoming environment
I think this is something most people would agree with, if there weren't many examples of people abusing these policies.
> We prioritize society and the environment instead of maximizing profits at all costs. We can make money without doing evil.
Sure, no reason to not agree with this sentence. Question is: how is this actionable? Who is going to decide what's evil, what's worth it? By default the executives do, that's their job.
> Democratic Decision Making
I'd question whether it's wanting "democratic" decision making or if the group wants a great role in decision making, perhaps beyond that which it's numbers justify. I say this as I work at a place where topics for all-hands could be submitted and voted on. This seemed to work well until a topic was submitted and the downvote to upvote ratio was "disappointing" to the person/group that submitted. After this meeting, only upvotes were allowed on submissions.
If I were a Google employee with an active social media account that promoted conservative politics, this would be pretty alarming to me. It's similar to the CoC debates - the visionary goals foreshadow the darker enforcement strategies.
I've seen harassment campaigns (which ended in a lawsuit against the chief harasser) over association with someone who associates with a certain group. So even if you're a liberal you can get in trouble for associating with the wrong people or speaking at the wrong conference or promoting the wrong project.
Yeah, the argument that this will primarily target conservatives is probably incorrect; the baseline population of conservatives at Google is probably dwarfed by the population of mainstream progressives who would fail in some way, shape, or form to abide by proper woke etiquette and thus create an unsafe environment.
If you're remotely alarmed by what happened to James Damore, then you should be alarmed by a union that organizes itself around these sorts of values.
There's a certain kind of personality who needs to be a hero fighting against the enemy. It exists on both sides of the political spectrum. Both liberals and conservatives hate it when they see it on the opposite side but support it on their own side. When this sort of person lacks a clear enemy they will make one up. Some 10% of the group will always and must always be the enemy. Hope you don't end up unlucky enough to fall into that group.
The language of these organizers triggers too many warnings in my head around being that kind of personality. No matter which side of the political spectrum they are on I try to not support these personalities.
Now I'm not super into US politics, partly because it's so polarized today, but which one of these values are against conservative ideals? Seems to be pretty basic human decency, like everyone deserves a voice, welcoming environment, decisions are made democratically and more. Are those really against conservative ideas?
Edit: My comment seems to have spawned replies to unrelated subjects so I'll repeat the question hopefully a bit more clear: What of the values proposed so far in the "Google Union", goes against modern conservative values in the US today?
In practice, as we've seen numerous times with CoC squabbles, being known to harbor certain political attitudes that are well within the American Overton window will create allegations that you're make people feel unsafe.
For example, if one posts "All Lives Matter" on social media they could easily fall afoul of a "welcoming environment" provision.
> Social and economic justice are paramount to achieving just outcomes. We will prioritize the needs of the worst off. Neutrality never helps the victim.
Social justice is a progressive view normally running counter to the individual responsibly outlook favored by conservatives. Prioritizing the needs of the worst off could be supported by conservatism but they will probably define "worst" in a way conservatives find objectionable. As for "Neutrality never helps the victim" that runs counter to a lot of American conservative thought that rule of law and applying rules neutrally is a massive progress over previously biased systems. The implication of the statement is that they want to remove neutrality in certain circumstances for certain people which goes against the conservative view that all people should be treated equally.
Often "welcoming environments", especially when paired with progressive dogwhistles, really mean an environment that is hostile for those that are not on one end of the political spectrum. The threshold isn't just conservative, even moderate liberals fall afoul of this. For instance, not supporting the defunding of police would get you eviscerated at my company despite the fact that it's a view 75% of Americans share: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2020/07/09/majority-of-...
I really love the whole kerfuffle about the police because it's doing a great job putting on display that you have "law and order" type jackbooted authoritarians on both sides of the isle.
Democracy in the US is seen by some people as the rule of the majority, therefore infringes personal rights and freedom.
Prioritizing the environment? Straight from the radical liberal left playbook. It means allowing my children die of hunger because I can’t find a job so a dolphin survives.
> Prioritizing the environment? Straight from the radical liberal left playbook. It means allowing my children die of hunger because I can’t find a job so a dolphin survives.
So if I understand what you're saying as a reply to my question, you mean that having "We prioritize society and the environment instead of maximizing profits at all costs" as a explicit value for the Google workplace, means that you'll end up without food for your child?
Not sure when/how dolphins became Google's business, but I might have missed something recently as I don't follow their every move.
Heh, sorry. Being sarcastic. You’re going into the right direction. A lot of people believe to save the environment (or fight global warming) the economy has to suffer, therefore I will lose my job, won’t be able to put food on the table, and all of that so cute animals can survive.
I was super sarcastic because it’s not a view I share, but pretty common in the US. Heck, it’s similar to the coronavirus situation right now, we can’t stop the economy just to save people who are about to die anyway.
I think in general, there have been some examples where the the environment has been prioritized of over people in a way that is hard to unsee. This can make some people very suspicious of such taglines and seeding the interpretation of the balance to others.
An eye opener for me is how water policy is impacting small farmers in the eastern part of California. Imagine spending 40 years building a business, and then being told that starting in 2021 you will have to pay 1M$ in fees to continue pumping water that you have legal rights to using your own infrastructure. It is literally taking peoples livelihoods without any compensation and eminent domain.
I suspect many of those values are not shared by a large proportion of the US population and likely by a non trivial percentage of Google workers. They are liberal values and not universal values. You, and me, seem to share those values which is fine but please don't claim they are universally shared. As such they are the personal values of the organizers which they are trying to make company values applicable to all workers.
> I suspect many of those values are not shared by a large proportion of the US population
That's not really relevant, the union will focus on Google and it's workplace, not the US as a whole. Maybe in the future they'll have impact in US politics, but that's not how unions start out.
> likely by a non trivial percentage of Google workers
I guess that's why they announced this, to see how many agree with it. We already know by fact that Google try to prevent internal discussions about unions, hence the people wanting to unionize, have to communicate in other ways (press releases to reach more people).
> As such they are the personal values of the organizers
They might also be the personal value of the organizers, but the explicit goal of setting up a organization (or more specifically a union) is to setup an organization that reflects those views. Once the organization is setup, it's the organizations values, not their personal values.
Ok, let's hear your definitions of what social justice is, and what justice is?
In a traditional sense, social justice is referring to the balance between the individual and society at large. Distribution of wealth, public services/schools, taxation, regulations of markets and more are part of what social justice is, at least in this part of the world.
That does sound like justice to me. It's not criminal justice, which you might be referring to, but more justice in the sense of "just behavior or treatment".
"Social justice" is an awkward term for an immensely important project, perhaps the most important project, which is to make the world a more equitable, fair, and compassionate place.
But the project for social justice has been captured by an elite strata of post-collegiate, digitally-enabled children of privilege, who do not pursue that project as an end, but rather use it as a means with which to compete, socially and professionally, with each other.
In that use, they value not speech or actions that actually result in a better world, but rather those that result in greater social reward, which in the digital world is obvious and explicit. That means that they prefer engagement that creates a) outrage and b) jokes, rather than engagement that leads to positive change.
In this disregard for actual political success, they reveal their own privilege, as it’s only the privileged who could ever have so little regard for actual, material progress. As long as they are allowed to co-opt the movement for social justice for their own personal aggrandizement, the world will not improve, not for women, people of color, gay and transgender people, or the poor.
Right, and forcing balanced outcomes when there's very unbalanced inputs is not justice in the eyes of many people. Consider the fact that Asian students in the US spend on average 110 minutes a day studying as compared to Whites' ~55 and Black student's ~35 [1]. Forcing a balanced outcome with disparate inputs is not what many consider just behavior. I have not only witnessed, but carried out, similar policy in tech. E.g. companies setting diversity targets that are substantially higher (often over 2x higher) than the said groups' representation in the field. I have also worked at companies that let women and URM candidates take two attempts at passing the pre-onsite technical phone interview while white and Asian men get one chance.
Maybe this isn't the kind of "social justice" Google union activists are arriving for. But if that's the case the union activists should lay out specific goals, like establishing name-blind resume reviews, eliminating gender and racial quotas, or something else. Otherwise, my instinct is to lump their views into the same trend as the social justice activists I have encountered during my time working in tech which tends to be hostile to meritocracy and desires picking outcomes a priori.
To be clear, it's fine to be in favor of affirmation action as an individual and I often support it myself, but I definitely wouldn't want a union enforcing it and I could see why many people would be alienated by a union movement espousing it.
Justice is coming up with a fair outcome based on an objective examination of the input factors. For example, deciding on guilt based on an objective examination of evidence.
Social justice is an arbitrary judgment based on subjective examination of inputs. It's collectivism. Disregard for individuals.
This is a clear misunderstanding. We're talking about two different social justice's here. The social justice you're talking about is the current moral panic many feel in the US today. The social justice I'm (and hopefully the future union) talking about, is balancing society at large and the individuals. Not disregarding, balancing. That means that sometimes the individual has to have less of something and society more, and sometimes the other way around.
But maybe the word "social justice" in the US has been completely co-opted by TV politics, so us in the rest of the world now talk a different language...
Yes, the phrase "social justice" has been co-opted. So if you or anyone else wants to refer to what that phrase meant 20 years ago, then you should stop using the phrase "social justice".
As an outside observer, I'd expect a "union" to push an agenda of fair compensation for it's workers and an end to abusive practices from management. This "personal agenda", as you correctly term it, feels more like a political party than a workers' union.
I think these Google workers see their demands falling into this category..not saying I agree with every bullet, but it really doesn't seem that different to me.
The agenda of the workers (benefits, pay, working conditions, etc.) rather than the agenda of the organizers/leaders. If the workers want social issues as their agenda then that's fine but there should be a broad voting process for that rather than a dictatorial preemptive agenda. This just seems like a few dozen people trying to tell 100k what they should care about.
edit: I don't think I've ever seen environmentalism come up as a desirable goal from proponents when people discussed tech unions. Pay, benefits, working conditions, abusive management and so on but environmentalism????
> it is going to be significantly harder to start steering the company's product direction and social responsibility efforts than 'just' representing the employees during e.g. benefits and compensation negotiations.
Unions with a very limited focus on their member's compensation negotiations tend to be either short-lived or so weak it is like they don't exist. Just for survival, unions want wider unionization in their own industry and then other industries and then internationally.
Actually FAANG was already organized against employee compensation in the secret pact between Steve Jobs, Eric Schmidt etc. which courts found illegal.
Are corporations and their majority controlling shareholders just representing the employers "during e.g. benefits and compensation negotiations". No. In 1938, the American Enterprise Association (now called AEI) was formed by Chrysler, General Mills, Paine Webber to push corporate hegemony. Their website is one screed after another attacking progressive values. If these companies think it important to spend money attacking, as you call them, progressive values, why should unions limit themselves in not defending them? It makes little sense to start things out with one hand tied behind the back. AEI is just one front of corporate America's many fronts.
This is exactly why I would never join a tech union. Just read their mission statement: this is about enforcing political goals via any power source they can get their hands on. Much like a lot of recent codes of conduct in open source projects.
I think you might misunderstand the goal of a union. It's inherently political, that's the whole point of it. And the values from the mission statement does sound like something every company should aim for, but sometimes they forget we're all humans here, so we need something to keep companies in check.
I'm not sure comparing unions to code of conducts are suitable. Unions are a historically old and proven way for workers to enact change in workplaces, industries and even entire countries. Code of conducts in open source is a fairly new invention (officially, written down ones at least) with no such track record.
> I think you might misunderstand the goal of a union. It's inherently political, that's the whole point of it.
I think this is disingenuous. It's inherently political, yes, but historically it is the politics of the workplace that a union focuses on. Specifically workplace safety, compensation, and benefits. This mission statement is explicitly dragging larger social activism into the workplace.
> Unions are a historically old and proven way for workers to enact change in workplaces, industries and even entire countries. Code of conducts in open source is a fairly new invention (officially, written down ones at least) with no such track record.
It is the same pattern of dragging social activism into a domain where it is not inherently relevant, and using bureaucracy to force it onto members. One mechanism of doing so being old or new isn't the point.
> historically it is the politics of the workplace that a union focuses on
Might be so in the US, but certainly not everywhere. Nor just because it's been so in the US before, doesn't mean it has to be like that. In Spain for example, unions are one of the most active and most likely to actually achieve political change in the country, at least judging by how it's been so far.
Which ones of the announced values you feel is trying to be applied to society at large? The way I'm reading it, all the values are geared towards Google and it's workplace, not going further than that.
> And the values from the mission statement does sound like something every company should aim for
For the record here is the second listed value
> Social and economic justice are paramount to achieving just outcomes. We will prioritize the needs of the worst off. Neutrality never helps the victim.
Let me speak plainly. This type of phrasing is extremely common for progressives. A Trump voter would read this as politically charged and outside the scope of most unions. If you cannot see why someone would oppose this you need to widen the scope of people you talk to.
Yes they should stick to actual "Trade union union issues" to start with - and remember that large number of Google employees would be ok working on defence and probably voted republican.
Selling tech to oppressive nation states who are not the USA's friends is a separate issue
> large number of Google employees would be ok working on defence
> probably voted republican
I'm not saying you're wrong, but do you have any surveys or data points to support those two points?
Seems you and a few others here on HN would do good by reading up on trade unions look around the world. As far as I'm reading their values, all of them are within "Trade union issues" and doesn't consider having a country-wide political impact. The people working on this are trying to adjust their own workplace.
Caveats galore of course: Not every Santa Clara resident works at Google, not every worker at that office lives in Santa Clara county, Google has many other offices in other areas, voting for Trump doesn't mean someone is republican, etc. etc.
But, it would be pretty surprising to me if there wasn't a sizable minority -- say at least 10% -- of workers at Google that voted republican/trump.
Here's another data point, re: donations to political parties by Google employees, with probably an even longer list of caveats than the above analysis:
What unions have you seen/participated in? What countries are those located in? Could you imagine a union that does something that is not shared with those unions you've seen?
Being unlike other unions doesn't have to bad, could be great thing. Why not improve on top of the idea of unions and try to come up with something even better? Seems like an excellent idea, especially in these times of "disruption" of industries left and right.
You might get a Google indeed; some new vehicle that helps move society forward. But I suspect a very dangerous Theranos; except the union members will be left holdng the mess after it blows up .
From the definition of unions there isn't much overlap. Yes they want to protect Google Workers from harassment which is valuable but doesn't sound like they're fighting for improving wages, benefits, or working conditions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_unions_in_the_United_Sta...
I think you should point out what specifically is too broad? They are pretty banal points about fairness, ethics, environment, we know that Google employees are likely to push for a blue-ish agenda, and it's really not controversial imo.
Chicken, egg issue I think. The people most likely to seed the movement are gonna be activist type people whereas the actual majority of workers might just be left/libertarian leaning but mostly non-political people. Once the majority of workers are part of the union, and if it's really democratic, then the union should reflect what the members want it to reflect (even if it ends up being the same as the activists').
Googler here, these articles are literally the first I've heard of it. No internal emails, rabblerousing, or any kind of comms about it, and it seems as though the union discussed doesn't actually exist yet. Seems a bit odd (and bad reporting), but we'll see where it goes.
After watching how a mechanics union did absolutely nothing while CEOs ripped apart my Dad's pension and put him through hell, I have a bit of a dim view on this sort of thing to begin with.
Aha! Wasn't aware of this rule change. Wonder how they'll garner the votes they need to fully form the union without internal rabblerousing digitally, and with offices being closed.
Is it legal for a union to use employee info directories to contact employees outside of corp comms?
I've rarely found an employee directory that would contain people's personal email addresses. They might be stuck with calling people on the phone or something.
Which might be for the best: Google controls probably nearly every employee's personal email address too!
A good chunk of Google employees don't have a 'personal' phone. They use test android devices, or work-provided phones and plans. Google even has an internal program to migrate your personal phone number onto a corporate device.
Calls between employees will be video conferences over google servers anyway - nobody goes typing old fashioned phone numbers anymore...
And with the lack of this union's formal status, Google probably could get away with behaviors which interfere with the use of Gmail, Fi, Voice, and Meet services used to organize this union without significant penalty.
> After watching how a mechanics union did absolutely nothing while CEOs ripped apart my Dad's pension and put him through hell, I have a bit of a dim view on this sort of thing to begin with.
I would say that unions aren't magical entities. They're a necessary but not a sufficient condition for protecting the interests of workers. A union is only as good as its membership. If union members think they can just pay their union dues and expect the benefits to magically accrue, that's not going to happen. Union members have to take a very active part in governance of their union, and immediately remove any union leaders who start to show signs of corruption. Complacency is the enemy. As soon as unions become "hierarchical", it's game over, and the union is no better than the management it was designed to fight against.
Necessary in some cases. Workers who are happy with the general conditions of their company won't unionize.
>As soon as unions become "hierarchical",
Which is a probability that approaches 1 over time. All human endeavors tend toward hierarchies, it's just a matter of how formalized the hierarchy is and how many levels it has - but one always exists.
Also Googler. When I previously worked at a unionized company the union actually helped a lot when our corporate overlords cut retirement benefits. For that sort of collective bargaining I think unions can be useful. It looks like this isn't that type of union however. This one seems much more like a political advocacy group (I realize all unions are political, but the idealized union is political as a side effect of improving the welfare of their constituency, not as their primary purpose).
Not to put too fine a point on it, but usually the people who know about the union before it's announced are those who are understood to support the idea & are unlikely to go to management about it :)
This is the first I've ever suggested an opinion on it publicly, and I'm a line engineer, not management. Internally, I don't usually talk about things like this, either.
Not sure where you read that from my comment. Corps are filled with non-management workers who will tell management about unionization efforts, either naively or intentionally.
Ah, then it's likely that by chance someone just never got around to talking to you about it. It's a big company! Hopefully you'll soon get to talk to an organizer about your specific doubts.
It might also be that the organizers where only talking to people that they expected to be pro-union (as opposed to selecting people who only had not expressed negative views of unions). This is the safer approach at union-hostile companies like Google.
That pension thing probably isn't the union's fault. Pretty much anyone that had a non-government backed pension lost it or had it severely reduced. They simply were not financially sustainable. But I do agree they sometimes the union can be their own worst enemy. For example, I knew a sterl plant manager and he was telling me that they had a hard time competing with imported steel and that the union was constantly asking for more and more money and time off. Eventually management was forced to give them everything they wanted dispite explaining that it would bankrupt the company.
Overall, I think unions can be good. I would like an actual contract and no forced arbitration.
Does the Google Walkout count as rabblerousing? It's all been word-of-mouth until now, which is kinda slow since everyone left the office and went online.
The recurring theme in the comments against unions can be captured by a simple truth: Unions don't protect your interests; they protect their interests.
Which is fundamentally true, and cannot be changed.
So if your employment situation is so bad that you need a second, massively powerful, self-interested entity to negotiate with the massively powerful, self-interested entity in the hopes that your interests may happen to align then a union is the right choice.
But if not, you are adding an order of magnitude of complexity to your political work environment (yuck) and will come to regret it.
And if it comes to pass, it is absolutely critical to structure the union in such a way that the interests are aligned with the employee members.
No, that's just normal anti-union-FUD. A union doesn't have to imply that it controls everything, or that everyone has to be part of the union to work somewhere.
A union could also just be a large entity that collectively bargain on behalf of the workers, and can do so better than they could separately. Often that involves stuff like better safety, pay, getting rid of bad stuff like non-competes etc. And where I'm from those new things are enforced company wide, not just for the union. So every worker profits from the union, even non-union members.
If anything, the non-union members are the deadweight where I live. They get the benefits, without paying any membership fee.
As there's no set definition that would capture every union/guild to have ever existed...a "union" doesn't imply a thing other than some collective decision making apparatus.
However, turning from Plato to my good friend Aristotle, history shows that unions tend to not notice non-members or - even worse - actively work against them. It's not FUD; it's a pattern.
The difference is the union at some level ultimately has to answer to the workers who comprise the union, whereas the corporation is ultimately responsible to the majority stockholders who are expropriating surplus labor time from those working at corporations.
> the union at some level ultimately has to answer to the workers who comprise the union
yes, and a democratic government has to "answer" to its people ostensibly. ask russians how it's going for them.
unions are just another power structure adding on to the infinite pile of things that are constantly trying to fuck me over as an individual human being. no thanks.
The difference is labor time compensated for is compensated for, labor time expropriated is not.
Labor time compensated for by Google excessively well is also labor time where workers are producing wealth excessively well. Ken Thompson had a hand in creating an enormous amount of wealth before he stepped foot in Google. Where does all this created wealth come from? The work done by those who work and create wealth at Google (and the uncompensated primitive accumulation of web content - and the taxpayer funded grants to Stanford and for ARPAnet development etc.)
One obvious way this manifests is in seniority-based provisions whereby union members demonstrate a preference for their own interests over the interests of future new hires.
However, while that article says they will not be able to be a collective bargaining unit under US law with that structure, the announcement oped in the NY Times (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/04/opinion/google-union.html) implies they will be pursuing becoming one, so not sure if that nontraditional structure is temporary or if the Post got some details wrong.
There is a great line of research that part of labor's downfall in the postwar era was due to becoming to legalized/instituionalized, creating a hysteresis trap were the unions official power (laws and norms) lagged behind the underlying conditions that give it real power (labor scarcity + worker radicalization). Workers got complacent and depoliticized starting with the red scare, and edges along by shitty union leadership, and the whole Regan era turnabout was less a right-wing conspiracy and more the hysteresis delay coming to an an end.
Members-only unions and whatnot that forgo the NRLB are "riskier" in some sense, but that vary precarity / forgoing of intertia can avoid the lag and help keep the union vigilant.
After reading the NYT article and browsing their website - they seem to be mainly concerned with getting the company to bend to various social justice causes and getting the company to adopt politically motivated strategy changes. So I'm a bit confused. This doesn't seem like the purpose of a labor union in the traditional sense. What am I missing here?
On a corp-cultural level it's interesting this is originating at Google, as opposed to say Amazon which is generally considered a more burnout-causing/crushing place to work on the engineering side in some teams. The Google employees I've talked to all seemed remarkably uncynical about their jobs, and still took a certain amount of pride in working at their company. I can contrast this with Amazon, Microsoft, and (to a lesser degree) Facebook employees who sort of hold their jobs at arm's length from themselves; not much of their identity is wrapped up in it. For union organization at higher payscales, maybe peoples' desire to better their workplace will only be effective if they care about their workplace to begin with.
Essentially the different is that Google is so incredibly culty that people refuse to leave even when they're grossly mistreated and the company does incredibly unethical things. Everyone in big tech has job mobility, so for someone to care to unionize, they have to not want to leave.
So where in other tech companies, unhappy employees leave, at Google they try to "fix" it, which has led to these unionization type efforts, with wider goals around making the company behave.
I absolutely think that the fact that many Googlers' primary social identity is that they're a Googler is why this is starting there and not another FAANG.
That being said, without the employees who could leave, but choose not to, Google would not survive. Hiring underpaid immigrants can only get you so far.
If the employees who could leave organize for the benefit of employees who can’t, isn’t that precisely unionizing? That’s my jab here. I don’t really know/care about how great certain employees have it, I care that several other employees are systematically abused and there’s no check on their power.
Perhaps App store publishers can unionize too. For example, instead of having small companies publishing apps themselves, they can have an organization do it for them, so it's big organization versus BigCorp, instead of little guy versus BigCorp. Also, it could provide some more transparency of the App Store sales.
Is there precedent for a group of unrelated individuals who happen to be in the same industry ‘unionizing’ ?
Edit: answer of course is guilds, thanks commenters :) The word union threw me off. One could totally imagine an ‘app developers guild’ to help defend against the big guys. Go start one!
In Germany, there are "Genossenschaften"[1], which are cooperatives organized by small members to further a common commercial interest. For example, winemakers, which are often family businesses (at least in the area I'm from), often form them to sell wine, to have better leverage against the buyers, which are usually big companies like Aldi.
In the Netherlands dairy farmers formed their own cooperative so sell dairy products to prevent 3rd party 'big dairy' corporations from playing them against each other on price and quality.
As other have noted, guilds, especially around movie and television production. The WGA, SAG-AFTRA, DGA, PGA, are some examples. There are some newspaper specific guilds, though some of them are part of the CWA or other affiliate unions.
And of course, some of those guilds have a choice in contract types, staff or freelance. The WGAE, where I was a member and part of the negotiating committee for my then-employer, had its own CBA for our “shop” — but the WGA and WGAE also have MBAs (minimum bargaining agreements) for freelancers, which is the more traditional model for entertainment guilds (though WGAE in particular has shifted a lot of its attentions to staff contracts).
Yes. Cooperatives. Farmer cooperatives are quite common for example. Basically, freelancers who have to negotiate with the same small number of other entities can form a cooperative to both handle the admin and also allow them to negotiate as one.
It's that pretty normal? That's what unions generally are, or am I misunderstanding your question. Denmark have/had unions for "office workers", engineers in general, steel workers and more. They are in the same industry, mostly, but they don't work for the same company.
The members of these unions are generally unrelated, they just have jobs in the same sector of industry or very similar education.
I think the weird part is when a union just represent the people working for one particular company.
"Guild" might not go down to well in the USA as it sadly implies restrictive practices (descrimation against black workers) - read up on the early labour history in the USA.
Sending my heartfelt and sincere congratulations to the workers at Google who have unionized. There's power in a union and I'm extremely heartened to see them get together and organize.
Downvote me if you want, but as a SWE I find my job very highly rewarded both economically and technically. I'm happy where I am and in my team. I'm a minority and I have study all my life to be competitive, I have been treated fairly because of my skills. Free food, gym, coffee, stocks, high salaries, mobility, not sure I can ask for more
If you want to have all of that in the future, as SWE jobs grow in ubiquity and quantity, you should want a union. The reason we have those things now is because we had the leverage in scarcity. In the next decade that scarcity will be gone and you'll be replaceable.
>that scarcity will be gone and you'll be replaceable
That's a wild prediction not based in fact. There's an insurmountable skills shortage in tech and always will be. Appetite for automation, efficiency and software solutions is practically unbounded.
Fact is, software salaries are sky high because there's no union.
No high performer would ever willingly join a union so his salary can be halved or worse with the difference given to someone who is far less good at their job and is essentially unfireable.
Teachers unions ruined education, and a software union would similarly ruin software by protecting the worse engineers and dragging salaries down of high performers.
The best teacher in the US is paid identically to the worst teacher. No wonder education is a disaster.
Correct, it's a prediction based on the job market numbers, I wouldn't call it "wild" though.
> There's an insurmountable skills shortage in tech and always will be.
This is incredibly optimistic and in my opinion very naive view of tech. I've already started seeing wages for junior and mid level engineers decreasing because of the flood of new bootcamp graduates.
> Appetite for automation, efficiency and software solutions is practically unbounded.
Sure, doesn't mean that 10x increase in the labor pool won't effect wages.
> software salaries are sky high because there's no union
Source needed.
> so his salary can be halved
You can't say mine is not based in fact and that pull numbers out of your ass, too, ya dingus.
> Teachers unions ruined education
Source needed.
> dragging salaries down of high performers.
Do you consider yourself a "high performer"? A 10xer? It's hard to judge ourselves accurately, isn't it?
> The best teacher in the US is paid identically to the worst teacher. No wonder education is a disaster.
I would think to blame a great many things for this before I'd put the blame at unions, which have been losing power in the states since at least the 90s, probably earlier. Republicans have been gutting education spending the entire time, too. But sure, it was the big bad unions that did it.
All I'm saying is that tech wages are good right now, but they won't be this good forever, and we should use our current leverage to at least try to situate ourselves into a more solid standing. If you don't think unions are the way to do that, that's fine, but you can't disagree with the numbers. There's an huge flux of new SWE's entering the workforce right now, in 5-10 years it's going to start being a significant factor in wages all the way up to the top skill levels.
I'm paid in the 98th percentile for my title and I'm the youngest person with this title in my company, so I think by other people's standards I'm a high performer.
>Republicans have been gutting education spending the entire time
Absolute cop out, considering states control education largely and Californian schools are a mess. Also, why would you even want a higher budget? Since 2000, there's been a growth of 8% in teacher numbers compared to a whopping 75% increase in middle management.
>but you can't disagree with the numbers
I sure can't, hence why I'm amused and not surprised that this ideological union garnered less than 0.1% of Google's workforce in membership.
By joining a union, you are ceding your negotiating power to often corrupt union officials who optimize for protecting the worst employees.
Sorry, but I don't want to work with incompetent people and have the union I pay money to protect them.
Teachers unions protect low performers, sexual predator teachers (multiple instances) and worse. What more proof do you need? They protect child sex predators. Regularly.
What exactly makes you think that demand for SWE jobs will evaporate in the next decade? It looks to me like demand should be higher than ever with all the various car, IoT, security related tech news we've seen recently.
I can't speak the the intent of the union in the article but after all of those things you listed you might want to know that your colleagues are getting treated fairly as well. For example, how would you feel about all your benefits if you learned there were contractors that did your same job that didn't have access to the same benefits that you have and haven't been given an avenue to earn those benefits? (https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/story/2019-11-08...)
Or, how would your feel if the product you worked on was being produced with slave labor? (https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/12/29/lens-te...) Would it be enough to just say, "I'm not ok with that, I'll work somewhere else." or do you think you should have some say about how your work is used?
The contractor mentioned in the article is not doing the same job, but is instead a vendor (the vendor term is only mentioned in passing in the article).
Google classifies contractors that work via an external agency as vendors. Most vendor workers at Google have roles which don't exist as a full time role at all and vendor contracts often even prevent vendor workers from being permanently hired. Cleaners for example are often vendors.
Right, it's my understanding that the situation described in the article can exist for SWEs as well. It matches what was described to me from a SWE at a subsidiary of Alphabet. In their words they were doing the same work at a fraction of the pay without an avenue for conversion since they were engaged through a 3rd party.
The prevailing fixation seems to be on how unionization would help the highly-compensated engineers, when the people who need and would benefit most from unionization are the TVCs, who aren't considered Alphabet employees, don't get benefits, are regularly excluded (from all-hands, mailing lists, even affiliating with Google on LinkedIn).
Suppose a barista's phone dies. Employees are not permitted by policy to chip in to buy a new one, per existing guidance, even if there are 100 people at the office all willing to chip in $10 as gratitude for years of expertly-poured coffees.
Don't get me wrong -- there's absolutely value in using a staffing agency to scale hiring of support staff to fit the needs of rapidly growing sites. But if you've been employing the same worker for 1, 2, even 5 years, why not convert them to employees?
Unions would also add additional hurdles to young engineers looking to join or move up within the company.
We like to think of unions as protecting members against the corporation, but traditionally unions also protect members against outsiders looking to take their jobs. In this case, those outsiders are young people breaking into the industry or trying to move up the ranks within Google. Before going all-in on unions, consider if you’re ready to start making it harder for Googlers to get fired or make it more difficult for someone to get promoted based on their work rather than seniority (number of years worked).
At this point it’s not even clear what the union is demanding or what they expect to change. Google already has industry leading pay and benefits, as well as a reputation for some of the most reasonable working hours in the industry.
> ... but traditionally unions also protect the members against outsiders looking to take their jobs.
Hit the nail on the head. I’ve always heard horror stories about the police union advocating for literal murderers so those murderers can get another job where they can murder again.
But then I joined my first startup and had to install another access point by simply running a 15 ft Ethernet cable through the paneled ceiling. A 15-30 minute job, tops.
But the building had an exclusive contract with a unionized cabling company and I could get my startup evicted if I attempted the job myself. Instead, we had to pay this cabling company $4k and wait 2 weeks for them to come onsite.
I’m sure there are good unions out there. But unions people have encounters with pretty much are all rotten.
Are you not proving my point by bringing the conversation back to "how will unionization impact engineers"?
> Before going all-in on unions, consider if you’re ready to start making it harder for Googlers to get fired or make it more difficult for someone to get promoted based on their work rather than seniority (number of years worked).
There _are_ issues around Google employees being terminated unfairly -- mostly around those who dare to speak out (most recently and notably, Dr. Gebru).
While I do think that poor performers should be fired regardless of seniority, I also think that the current process for identifying and removing poor performers is both inefficient and, frankly, cruel.
After receiving poor performance ratings, an engineer may have responsibilities slashed (thereby making it more difficult to demonstrate level-appropriate impact) and put onto a performance improvement plan (to demonstrate impact, but also siloed from the rest of the team). To add insult to injury, due to performance ratings, the engineer will have compensation slashed to effectively the salary band for a lower level. If the engineer does not meet the lofty goals by the end of the 3-month period, management may offer an ultimatum: take this severance package and voluntarily resign, or go through the review that you most likely will fail, and get nothing when you're fired.
Meanwhile, it can take two performance cycles (i.e. a full year) to identify and remove poor performers, during which time said poor performer can drag down an entire team.
It is already a meme at Google that the easiest way to achieve L+1 (i.e. get promoted) is to leave and re-apply at a higher level after a year or two at a different company. While I don't advocate promoting primarily based on seniority, I _do_ think Google does need to invest more on building up leadership by promoting from within, rather than encouraging people who want to break into senior leadership to leave Google.
I think thats because this unionization attempt is for the FTE to speak out over social justice causes and not face retaliation. Aka not about compensation.
I do wish there was more focus around the contract employees, in fact I think this petition (or whatever its called where they all sign) is only for FTE.
I made this point on HN before but I think it applies here.
The world breaks out into two types of employers: those who try to hire outstanding people and go above and beyond for them, with the expectation that one of the attributes of these outstanding employees is that they likewise go above and beyond for the company. The alternative is employees who treat their employees like cattle and the employees treat the employer as a slaughterhouse.
The first path is much preferable for everyone. The ideal situation (think marriage) is where either partner willingly goes above and beyond for the other.
I am not sure the impact of this particular action, but it's movement in the direction of employees asserting they don't want to participate in such a relationship, instead resorting to the more common power struggle rather than a partnership.
That's OK but taken to the extreme, there's no reason for them to expect the extraordinary treatment google has given them to continue, either.
What a naive world view is this to think that a large enough company goes “above and beyond” for their employees...
As a German these American work ethics are so weird to me. You are being put on a stick and held over a bon fire and all you do is scream “turn me quicker“!
What life is this to work your ass off for a company that demands crazy work hours, that can fire you for any reason with laughable notice period, gives you almost no vacation, no maternity leave and when you get sick, you lose your health insurance and end up on the streets. While the other survivors are celebrating their own luck.
That doesn’t describe even the most down on their luck FAANG engineer in the slightest, and the previous comment tried to make that obvious by defining two entirely separate sorts of employer relationships to consider.
That you didn’t address the second type of relationship, specifically brought your nationality in, and ended by calling their nation a depressing dystopia brings this dangerously close into nationalist flamebait territory.
My point is: No publicly traded company goes “above and beyond” for their employees. They literally work for the interest of their shareholders. Individual workers’ rights do not matter for them. And a high salary is not everything, especially since “high” in the SV is still pretty average at best. I now know of several high skilled engineers who worked at Apple and Facebook who came back because they were burned out and in two cases could not even afford their family anymore in the bay area (with both couples working as engineers).
Your employer is not your friend who was kindly enough to take you in and spread your wings. And my point of bringing in Germany was this: The US labour laws are laughable, thus to make conditions better for workers they __have__ to unionize to put themselves in a stronger position.
I did not address the second type because I think it is a false equivalence. There is never a balance between worker and employer. FAANG companies are the richest and most influential companies in the world, if you think that a union will topple this power distribution, you are really naive.
The experience of people you know flies directly in the face of my experience (not at FAANGs but similar caliber) and that of several hundreds of my friends and acquaintances who work at these companies.
Whatever the exceptions are, if you work at these places, you're living a GREAT life in the grand scheme of things.
Ask employees at Amazon, certain orgs at Apple, and Microsoft (at least pre-Nadella) how this always holds up. Ask workers at AAA gaming studios. It seems like in tech in exchange for high material compensation, the toll is sometimes high psychological and emotional pressure.
>> It seems like in tech in exchange for high material compensation, the toll is sometimes high psychological and emotional pressure.
Hard things are hard. Building something complex in a competitive environment is going to feel difficult because it is. The company can make it more or less painful and the good ones do a good job, but there's no way around it.
The alternative is not to do difficult things and thus have no pressure and no responsibility. By that definition, the homeless guy on the corner is the most relaxed person (and sometimes it's true, you see them chilled out, nobody depends on them and there's nothing for them to achieve) but if that resonates with you then you shouldn't be working at a company like that in the first place. Try working at the DMV instead - I am being a bit facetious but also serious, people chose their careers based in part of how much pressure/adventure/challenge they have an appetite for.
There's no success without risk, hard work and pressure. The top companies give you a chance to go for such success, they can't change the laws of gravity and somehow enable you to change the world without breaking a sweat.
> The company can make it more or less painful and the good ones do a good job, but there's no way around it.
Sure there is. There are corporate cultures that are needlessly toxic and abusive. Stack ranking at Microsoft was not necessary to their success. Uber's culture of harassment and unethical behavior was not necessary to their success. Amazon's burnout culture is not necessary to their success. AAA gaming death marches are not necessary to their success- or maybe it is to that industry, but they could at least pay overtime. Perhaps there are other companies that are better candidates for unionization than Google. But to pretend that every successful company's excesses and dark underbellies can be justified by "hard things are hard" is to excuse abuses and unprofessionalism that go unchecked. Because HR systems are insufficient, workers organize.
OK but we're talking specifically about Google so the non-FAANG is irrelevant. The whole point is the detrimental effect this will have on quality of life at a FAANG.
As the other comment points out, literally none of what you said applies to Google.
Your logic is something like this: because someone somewhere is in a bad marriage, everyone including people in great marriages should treat their spouse like an adversary.
My point is behaving like this will just ruin great marriages/employment relationships (obviously.)
I don't know what you being German and being depressed about dystopias has to do with anything, people who work at FAANGs and that caliber companies are literally some of the most fortunate people on earth. That's why top engineers are way more interested in getting a job there than emigrating to Germany.
> The first path [one of the attributes of these outstanding employees is that they likewise go above and beyond for the company] is much preferable for everyone.
I don’t think this view is as widely held as you might think. Or at least it depends on what you mean by going above and beyond. I want to be paid for a job, which I will do. I will do whatever needs to be done, including things outside my “official” duties, but when that clock hits 40 hours, it’s time to stop working. Maybe that’s going above and beyond or maybe not.
Any system that aggregates power can be used towards detrimental efforts. Unions aggregate power and as such are heavily dependent on their leadership.
When there was no employment law in the US and you had children working, obviously change was necessary and so unions were able to provide worker protections that an individual couldn't establish for themselves since they had no power against the corporation.
If you look at police unions in the US you can see how detrimental unions can be as well. They are focused on protecting their workers even when those same workers are the issue which leads to a very challenging environment around firing "poor" performers.
Often times what is better is intelligent government regulation. Though that in and of itself is an oxymoron.
Things like mandated health insurance, overtime pay, work hours, minimum wage, these are all protections that we need encoded in law, less so in unions.
The other challenge with unions, is that while one can succeed it leaves everyone else that is outside of the union at other companies completely unprotected.
At the same time, if you think of the largest union, it is all of the workers of a country. What if they joined together, to really lobby the government for massive change. Something that goes into law.
Like minimum wage increases, and the like.
The reality though is that any economic system is complex where pushing on one area creates an often unexpected result elsewhere.
You would also need heavier investment in government agencies that are meant to police the enforcement of such policies and to ensure that they are truly operating separately from the industries they are supposed to be policing. The opposite of that is what happened with the FAA and Boeing recently.
> The other challenge with unions, is that while one can succeed it leaves everyone else that is outside of the union at other companies completely unprotected.
The 5 day 40 hour workweek was championed by the trade unions but everyone got the advantage of that eventually.
Yes and I'm saying we should be thinking of unions on a broader basis. Not as a single company union, but as the union of American workers, and directly pushing for legislation. =]
Honest question: are there good examples of unionized companies that continue to innovate post unionization? Unionization seems at the surface like the end stage of disruptor where stakeholders begin jockeying for slices of a pie that now grows linearly.
Naver (the dominant search engine in South Korea) seems innovative to me. They successfully launched e-commerce project in 2018, which became #1 in 2019 beating the incumbent (which is owned by eBay). It's as if Google launched Amazon competitor and won within a year.
Remember that correlation does not imply causation - even if it's true that innovative companies tend to not have unions, it might be (for example) because younger, smaller industries tend to be innovating faster and also haven't developed to the point of unionization yet.
Yeah and they’ve killed off dozens of projects, profits and revenue are down, innovation is long out the window and the quality of their products has gone to hell.
Some of the most highly paid, privileged and marketable individuals in our industry, easily in the top 5% of income in the economy... what’s the point of this? Google employees are a far cry from the romanticized proletariat fighting against the bourgeoisie.
I somewhat agree. Most tech workers are above the median salary in the US ($35k). I don't make nearly as much as a Google employee, but I would like a union for a couple reasons (they could mostly fix this through legislation and avoid the unions) like removing forced arbitration, or having an actual contract rather than a one pager that says they make the rules and can change them anytime without notice.
And speaking of income. It seems like 1% of that group's income is a high number for supporting the union.
With their current membership of just 230 people, the ~$500k annual memberships probably won't get anywhere near to paying for the protracted legal battle they're surely about to enter...
There are practical and legal thresholds, yeah; if X% of the company doesn't join over the next N months, you'll probably see lines in Google-related articles about the "failed attempt to form a union", even if it doesn't warrant headlines.
I should also note that 1% is like, a starting number here. If the union is successfully formed and dues start accumulating "Let's cut the union dues to 0.5%" is going to be an extremely popular position for (prospective) union leaders to take.
Pretty big gamble (even though it shouldn't be) for those people who have signed on if they don't meet that threshold. I think tech has been very resistant to unionize.
1. It includes all workers, including janitors.
2. The unions goal more so here seems to be to democratize the company process over concerns that the corporate structure puts money over people.
>Everyone at Alphabet — from bus drivers to programmers, from salespeople to janitors — plays a critical part in developing our technology. But right now, a few wealthy executives define what the company produces and how its workers are treated. This isn’t the company we want to work for. We care deeply about what we build and what it’s used for. We are responsible for the technology we bring into the world. And we recognize that its implications reach far beyond the walls of Alphabet.
I saw that it was mostly that the contract workers don't get the same benefits. But how is this different than other places? In some cases, benefits need to restricted or you risk them becoming shadow employees (ie hands are tied by law).
Again more details in the article. The verge article links a NYT article which goes in depth on the “two tier system” within google.
That’s not to say that even outsourced contractors couldn’t benefit from unionizing with google employees. Google has the leverage to improve the lives of its subcontractors, but pressuring the contracting company.
"Contractor" is a bit of a misnomer in the case of Google (and other tech companies). You have FTEs and "TVC"s, which is a large group of non-Google employees (of which contractors, the "C" is by far the smallest). The largest are "V", the Vendors. Employees of third party companies contracted to Google to do stuff. Vendors do all kinds of things: clean, cook, manual QA work where necessary, drive cars, etc.
The vast majority of the TVCs Google works with are Vendors, and most of them are paid much, much less than tech employees, because they aren't tech employees. But there are a variety of other requirements around working with vendors. The ability to give them gifts, recognition, and treat them like human people is limited by labor law, as if you start to treat them too much like everyone else at the office, they suddenly turn into Employees, despite being employed by a Vendor company, and Google really doesn't want this to happen.
Yeah, I'd like to see the labor laws change. Some of the restrictions seem stupid. Although I also see how it was originally intended to prevent companies from keeping contractors like regular longterm employees but without benefits. Of course, that's not much different from the current situation.
Our company doesn't include contractors or consultants (both through vendors, never direct, like even typical contractors are brought in through a place like TCS) in our group activities. They also, have term limits of 3 years or less.
Don't know about the US, but 1% is the standard in Germany. (Unions here work a bit different, they are not per-company but nationwide and you get a couple of benefits like legal insurance etc.)
Exactly. And as far as I understand the closest thing to US "to unionize" is a to set up a "worker's council", which is actually mandatory for companies above a certain size.
From a European view it is strange that this is a big deal.
Yeah, I think 1% is standard. I think our dues were 1.5%, but I can’t find my old contract right this second. We got a guaranteed 3% annual raise as part of the contract (in addition to any other raises or promotions), so for us, even in a pure cost perspective, the union was a net win, irrespective of all the other benefits.
Unfortunately, and I say this as a big fan and supporter of unions, I don’t see this drive being successful. Compensation and job security are some of the mains reasons people unionize. Companies like Google already offer cost-of-living raises annually, in addition to stock and bonus compensation.
The challenge for most tech companies attempting to unionize — and by this, I mean staff including engineers, not simply the employees who don’t reap spoils, like janitors, bus drivers, receptionists, cafeteria staff, etc. — is that the reason to unionize is largely not going to be about pay. Because realistically, I have doubts in a CBA (which this is not, but let’s assume there was a scenario with one) being more effective at negotiating salary levels than the current system that exists. This isn’t true for all tech companies; most employees at a game studio, for example, could almost certainly benefit from a CBA.
Still, the challenge for an all-encompassing union like this is that for most employees, a union won’t effect compensation (and when it will, it’ll impact the bottom wrung — which is important, but makes it harder to get mass buy-in from the rank and file), it won’t effect perks, it won't effect medical care, parental leave, insurance. All of these things tend to be best-in-class, at least in the United States. So instead, you’re talking about fighting for a union for equally important, but much more difficult to quantify, areas like a voice in what types of contract bids or programs the company takes, hiring policies, sexual harassment policies, etc.
And it’s specifically that difficulty that has led the CWA to organize this as a minority union. And that’s exactly why although I applaud the efforts to do this, I doubt very much it will be effective at all.
To me, a better approach would have been to have a more organized approach focused on specific types of employees, especially vendors/contractors. This “anyone can join but we don't have a CBA and aren’t recognized by the NLRB” thing strikes me as much more akin to trying to form an employee-focused internal lobbying group, rather than an actual union.
I think a lot of the back and forth in this thread is dancing around the edges of a couple questions. Who really owns a company? I know legally who owns it. But a company is nothing without the people that work in it and who generate the ideas who keep it going. Shouldn't the majority of people in that company benefit and have a say how its run? Why should a handful of people who don't run the day to day operation or generate the majority of ideas, big and small get to own everyone else's ideas and benefit from them in perpetuity?
The workers do benefit, they get paid a salary and get RSUs (whose value increases with stock price). Very large amounts of both depending on the role by both US and world standards. If they want to then they can invest that income into company stock and become shareholders. Then they benefit in perpetuity based on how much they invested.
edit: And this union includes part time cleaning staff which while vital to the functioning of a company hardly generate revolutionary ideas except in movies.
A company is nothing without leadership. A company is nothing without the initial investors. A company is nothing without the it's initial idea.
It takes a lot of people in different roles and a lot of different resources (be it people, money, opportunity) to make a company work.
While there are successful employee-owned companies after, many companies today would not exist if you didn't have the motivation there for certain people. Do you think Tesla and SpaceX would exist if Elon had to give ownership to everyone else? You're not going to see certain kinds of risk-taking by employee-run groups, and that risk-taking tens to require people with top-down responsibility and vision to make them happen.
You can have a thousand investors all chip in to build a factory, but without workers in that factory you have nothing. I'm not sure what this comment is trying to accomplish other than pointing out that the value of initial investment ultimately hinges on the ability to hire and retain workers, and ultimately the value of the labor produced by those workers. The workers have the power.
This depends on the company, size, whether it's structured to give employees some sort of proportional, equitable ownership stake, etc.. There are scenarios where founders/owners put in 100% of the equity at the start and/or ongoing, and it may not make sense for workers who conduct operations to take on ownership stakes, especially if those workers are all part-time for example.
Because we chose to work for them instead of starting our own shops; and so to exchange complete ownership of our labor for a (often very nice) steady compensation.
Note that this also applies to managers; up to and including the CEO. They might get paid more in Stock and less in cash; but they're usually not the Owners in and meaningful sense.
I personally love the idea of workers cooperatives and do try to patronize such businesses as much as I can. But 1) it doesn't scale up and 2) when you're not in that model; you're not.
Interesting and thank you! Perhaps this is a model which can be expanded in the future indeed... It's sort of a logical extension of startups which pay ISOs. With the obvious difference that the employee equity would be immediately realized; and come with corresponding votes.
The reason for these folks unionizing is not for the traditional reasons (higher wages, better benefits, work life balance, keeping the company from running you over, ect...) This is more along the lines of being able to protest work that is consider unethical (IE the AI noted in the article, working with other gov'ts ect...) and not be penalized or fired for it. Unfortunately, I don't believe that a union is the answer for their problem because so long as there is money to fund a project there will be people lined up to work.
This seems like a common tactic with many of these employee activist campaigns. They partner with a sympathetic news media outlet that will amplify their story (examples: Vox, Geekwire, etc.) but leave out details and perspectives that undermine their push - like how few employees are behind it. If you look at past activist campaigns (for example people trying to stop AWS from working with the US government), it's the same story of trying to paint a picture of widespread support where there isn't any.
The assumption is that the employees will be terminated, fired, let go, or quit because creating unions is really hard in the USA, especially in industry which has no precedent.
Many people don't realise this but unions don't just negotiate salaries. They assure rights aren't being violated, promote ethical, safe and healthy workplaces, prevent and fight against discrimination and unfair treatment, fight wrongful dismissal, etc.
Indeed. HR has incentives to side with the employer, where a union rep has incentives to side with the employee.
In Belgium, every company of a certain size is required to have a union rep. They provide a lot of services you would expect HR to provide: being the point of contact for complains, clarify certain rights and obligations, etc. Even when a national holiday falls on a weekend, the company has to agree with the union rep how that will be recuperated. Unions in Belgium typically do not negotiate salaries, except for cases where there's statutes involved (e.g. gov workers like teachers).
Good luck! From a fellow unionized digital worker. I work at Kakao, a South Korean firm known for KakaoTalk (the dominant messenger application in South Korea).
It's pretty good. For example, initially the company was reluctant to transition to remote work for COVID-19 pandemic, but workers' concern was well represented.
My impression is that among South Korean digital companies, unionized companies transitioned to remote work earlier.
I just used the recent example that comes to mind.
The most prominent benefit is fight over overtime pay. In fact overtime pay is what triggered unionization in South Korean IT sector. Pre-unionization, basically no one in South Korean IT paid overtime. It is legally a gray area. Then Naver (the dominant search engine in South Korea) unionized over overtime pay and won. Other companies, including Kakao, quickly followed and all won. Naver union shared their know-how to other union organizers.
Unions are about locking in a minimum standard of work on something that doesn't change, stifling innovation, covering for underperforming colleagues, rewarding people based on how long they've been around, making things cost more than they should be, and worse.
Why would I ever want to support such a system, in an industry that has brought innovative technology and material improvement in living standards and knowledge to billions of people?
Unions are just a way to have some kind of collective voice; what the union does and how it achieves it's goals are up to the members. There are many, many models you can follow, from union-shops to more insurance/mutual aid society models.
Unions at Google strike me as rich people complaining about not enough assigned parking. For an industry of free lunch, massages, and unbelievable perks and benefits, talk of unionizing is just tone-deaf.
What leverage do unions have over salaries? Google is a very profitable company, redirecting half of the profit from shareholders to employees would result in a very significant salary increase.
(Just curious, I'm not stating any opinion on this.)
AWU includes temps, vendors, and contractors (TVCs), who are not at all paid the way full-time employees are. I'm sure there's a lot of gains to make to ensure everyone has equitable pay.
That said, a lot of work that AWU is doing focuses on values organizing and employee ethics. Structures like this union help balance the power between workers and executives at Alphabet.
that's ominous, so if you don't tow the union line on the social issue of the day then they can prevent you from being a member which will be required for employment?
Yeah, they should have taken her punch right to the face with a smile, without flinching, then apologized to her. Instead they said 'yes, right now' when she said 'here are my terms, you got to accept them or I leave'. Who would do that?
I'm confused, is losing your job for disagreement on social issues good or bad now? Or do these concerns about the people and factors that decide who does and doesn't get to work somewhere mysteriously stop and start at unions.
They could at least admit she was terminated and not this “accept resignation” hogwash. I have no issue firing a worker who encourages peers to put less effort into the job. But at least say you’re doing so!
That depends on a number of things. Theoretically the leverage is infinite, as companies can not get anything done without workers. However in practice, strike funds won't last forever, people won't be willing to strike forever, it's in your interest to keep a relatively good relationship with the company, etc.
Granted, it will vary person to person for a lot of good reasons, but it seems to me like the average white-collar tech worker out have a lot more personal savings than the average blue-collar factory worker.
It's either reinvested or saved in the bank so it stays in the ownership of shareholders.
In general, reinvestment is preferred over dividends (or stock buybacks which is similar to dividends) when it's expected that the reinvestment will generate a good return in the future and this return would be given to shareholders.
I've never been in a union, but I have 2 strong impressions of them from friends.
One friend was an electrician, he enjoyed working for a union because it gave him extra freedoms in his work.
The second friends father worked in management for a mine that used union labor. They went through an ugly labor strike where their windows were shot out of their house and their lives felt threatened.
I'm of mixed opinion, but the second scenario weighs heavily.
That certainly sucks, and I'm absolutely against violence in strikes. Of any kind.
But have you considered that perhaps without the union, that strike would have been even worse? Those workers likely decided to do those things on their own, not with union involvement. If they'd been striking without a union to rein them in, things might have been worse.
Of course, it's possible there would have been other problems, especially for the non-union workers.
I'm fairly anti-union, but there are definitely times when I see them as a necessity. My working conditions are not such that I think a union is necessary or even desirable, but mine workers are one situation where I think that unions do their jobs.
I think traditional unions have a lot of issues, but these "members only unions" seem like something that avoids those issues. If someone wants to voluntarily pay a group to help represent their interests, great! If the union no longer represents their interests, they can leave.
> Everyone deserves a welcoming environment, free from harassment, bigotry, discrimination, and retaliation regardless of age, caste, class, country of origin, disability, gender race, religion, or sexual orientation.
Until and unless they demonstrate that they intend to protect conservative employees, there's not a chance I would trust them to actually uphold this value.
> Google contractors have long complained about their unequal treatment compared to full-time staff. While they make up the majority of Google’s workforce, they often lack the benefits of salaried employees
I don't know how it works in the US, but in the UK contractors benefit from tax advantages compared to salaried employees, although HMRC is actively trying to kill the contractor market by tightening IR35 rules. That said, if contractors end up getting the same benefits as salaried employees then their contractor status is on dodgy legal ground. This may be a phyrric victory for them.
This is like buying a house that is built close to an airport and then suing to have it shut down because you don’t like the noise of planes taking off.
Google did not have a union when you asked them to hire you - which you happily accepted. Now your plan is to collectively mutiny against your employer to extort additional control or compensation.
I’ve always believed that you treat your employer with the respect they garner by supporting you and your family. If you are not satisfied with you income or relationship with your employer go seek other avenues. Just my 2 cents.
How soon everyone forgets. Google was caught red handed colluding with other companies to suppress employee wages in the past. This was still during their "Don't be evil." days, too.
Where I live, unions just seem to protect un-productive employees (if they are union members of course) and slow down process by adding another layer of bureaucracy. But maybe it's different in the land of the free?
Good for them. I find it strange that we have this org setup at all. A union illustrates the clear divide between capital owners and workers. It sounds so 19th century, but it's just as valid today, unfortunately.
In the UK we hear horror stories about French unions going so far as to literally kidnap management and hold them hostage, and in one case strip them naked and assault them with bed pans (?!).
I'm not sure a monopoly like Google is something to aspire to. Europe is full of amazing copmanies doing innovative things. If Google is your ultimate measure of success though, you're right, my list won't keep up.
Arm
Ocado
TransferWise
Skype
Nokia
Skyscanner
ASOS
Klarna
Spotify
Deliveroo
Rovio
I've asked before and no one seems to know: what is unionising meant to achieve for these workers? Are they under compensated? Are they getting fired for unfair reasons? I thought big tech had the opposite problem: everyone gets 6 figures, no one gets fired you just get moved to a do nothing team...
Google hired a toxic political activist, then later fired them for being too toxic. In this case, from reading the union goals it looks like they're aiming to make it harder to fire toxic political activists in future.
I hate the political bs side of these things. A bit turn off for me here in the UK is when unions spend capital (political or cash) on issues that don't help or even hurt their members. Teachers unions here supported more work and less money for them because "think of the children". Asking people to collectively bargain is very different to asking them to collectively sign up and forgo their wages over some weird political point of principle. The a two should be separate.
Would it be possible to create a union that opposes this union? If this union lobbies against contracts with the US military and US law enforcement, my union to let the management know that we are actually ok with these contracts? Something like a union to speak for the "silent majority"?
people need to realize they're paid what they're worth (and come on... google pays VERY well). unionizing so you don't work in environments bad for your health is a thing. unionizing so you can extort money from your employer, however, is a slippery slope that leads to a few people at the top of the heap causing lots of trouble for the company, probably its members (dues... or else!) and those union leaders get nice houses on ski slopes. best of luck google!
Everybody here seems to agree that unions have the potential to do good or bad. The next logical step to me is that there needs to be a selection mechanism in place.
For companies, it's competition. If someone else does better, the consumer or worker can choose someone else. And we have anti-monopoly laws to make sure that someone else exists, to foster that competition and choice.
Is there such a mechanism for unions? My ideal scenario wouldn't be me on my own as it is today. I'd want a handful of unions to pick from to represent me, not too differently from my choice of medical insurer. Five unions to represent 120,000 employees would still average 24,000 members each, so it's a huge step forward in collective bargaining. And then people can change unions if one of them ends up how folks are worried about in this and every other union thread.
It seems like it would get at all sides of the issue. We'd get collective representation and a safeguard against the potential pitfalls.
How could this scenario come about? Could it be something like medical insurance with an open enrollment season? There would need to be something akin to anti-competitive behavior built in, so you couldn't end up with an agreement saying you can only hire from our union. What else would it take?
My overall perspective on this whole discourse is that we spend a lot of time attaching a particular union, amongst a particular group of well-paid workers; to titanic struggles amongst Class and Culture.
My personal opinion is that yes, inequality is a huge problem! Solutions which come to mind are Medicare for All, UBI, free public college, and an end to Homelessness; all paid for by higher income taxes on the top 10% (we can start with ending the absurd FICA cap, and then raise rates).
It's not at all obvious to me how coders at an Ad company putting an intermediary between themselves and an employer changes... anything. I get that Unions were THE answer in the past - The Jungle and all that. But it's a different world and I just... don't get it!
(Just to add - some of the "pro capital" comments are just as silly. I don't think Unions will ruin the world, I think they're just sort of 'fine' and super tangential to more important policy topics)
Most of the unions that we have here are public service/trades/transportation related and if I'm honest, the results have been very mixed. We used to have more manufacturing related unions, but with the direction manufacturing jobs have gone in the U.S. they're mostly just gone.
The public service unions (e.g. firefighters, police etc.) seem to do a good job to protect their workers on one hand and keep them fairly paid and serviced, but on the other hand provide a powerful force to keep abusive police employed and fight things like police cameras and other actions that protect the population.
The public transportation unions are widely seen as abject failures, providing protection for overpaid, highly underperforming, employees. There's been numerous investigations about failures in things like our local municipal rail systems and why they're such an abomination of service, and outside of funding issues, the fingers usually get pointed in the direction of essentially unfireable and frankly lazy employees.
The trade unions seem to do a good job. Plumbers, electricians, etc. generally seem to be competent, and paid well, and have good relations between employers, customers, and workers.
There's also a large number of public sector unions here. At one end the usual postal workers, teachers etc. and everything seems to run pretty well there. On the other end are the infuriating government maintenance/labor unions who won't let you move a waste bin to the other side of your desk without causing a problem.
Despite all this, unions are not a major factor of life for most of the people in my area. I actually only know one or two people who're union members personally. Despite this, I live in one of the highest average income areas in the country. But I also recognize that for many people this environment prices them out of livable housing and food, and unions can help bolster their pay to make living in this area reasonable for them.
I'm somewhat at a loss as to what better work conditions Google employees are looking for. They're among the most highly paid employees on the planet with absolutely incredible work conditions. If I had to wager, in exchange for whatever protections these employees are seeking, the tradeoff will be the erosion and removal of most of the perks that make Google a desirable place to work for. On the other hand, with Google leadership's behavior the last few years, they've kind of brought this on themselves so, small violins all around.
If unions are about collective and not selective workers rights, what types of workers rights are missing not only at Google, but FAANG?
We hear lots about unions... or lack of them stifling access to opportunity or innovation, I’m curious to learn more about:
- What a modernized or reimagined practice of a union could look like where it wasn’t anchored in the world changing slowly, instead of quickly?
- How might a reimagined union focused on today’s issues with today’s approaches in the 21st century look and start much differently than one incarnated a few hundred years ago? Is there a step change possible or already occurred in some cases?
- How can unions overcome the issues that other bureaucracies (enterprise, Govt, education, health, etc) experience, including in some cases inhibiting change at the goal of self preservation?
WTH? Most people here don't know recent US history anymore ? Just look at what unions did to the people of Detroit ?
Sure, on paper it seems like a good idea to fight the rich company to give employees a bigger share of the profit, but do remember: it's not the employee that decides how much profit is enough for the company to have. If the investors/CEO/boss doesn't feel the profit is enough, they/he/she can close the company. Unions always will protect the weaker worker (regardless of the domain) and subtract value form the better workers.
If some employees don't like what Google is doing, they can protest (as they did). Also they can leave. Twisting the arm of the boss to give you more, when has that worked in the long run ?
> on paper it seems like a good idea to fight the rich company to give employees a bigger share of the profit
That is explicitly a non-goal of this union.
> Just look at what unions did to the people of Detroit
Let's say for argument's sake that the UAW wasn't formed, the Great Sitdown Strike just lead to policy changes (hard to imagine after how they were treated). Do you think the auto companies would have been as successful without the quality of life the UAW afforded its members? Anecdotally, my uneducated grandfather immigrated to the states for one of those jobs. Do you think that the auto companies still wouldn't have moved production overseas to maximize their profits? Even without the UAW, a job in Mexico still paid a fraction of an American job in the 70s.
> Also they can leave
If your gripe is that your work is now being used in a context you find ethically wrong (like Project Maven), moving companies doesn't solve the problem. Voting with your feet doesn't make any positive change, it just leaves you at the least problematic workplace.
> Twisting the arm of the boss to give you more, when has that worked in the long run ?
I don't know. I guess when it resulted in political action like the 40hr 5dy workweek? Honestly, I don't know though.
230 out 100k+ want to unionize? It would be nice for sure, but unions are not coming back[1].
The campaign to disrupt unions was successful and they are easily dismantled without breaking the law. Yet the employees still need protection. Unions have been sorta replaced by HR. Employees almost always go to HR to resolve issues but they forget that this entity is for the company, by the company.
If we want to make any impact I think HR is where we start. We turn it into a public and legal entity, required by law if the company reaches a certain size. And it reports to the state government.
As the most spoiled class of workers to ever exist, it seems strange to want to unionize. I would think it sounds like inviting the vampire in (legal, HR, etc) without board representation of workers / codetermination similar to the German system. In America's way of doing things, I'm not sure if it's good. Would not look forward to "You have appropriate amount of non-union experience but you are 10th in line so we'll be calling you in 12 months, if we do." A theoretical for tech, not so for film unions which are being excitedly pointed to as good. It can take a very long time to get work under these schemes, which seems incompatible with how tech has worked.
I’m not at all against unions, I think the idea is good for some industries. I truly hate the idea of being FORCED to join one though. I’ve worked union jobs in the past in California, and the idea that I HAD to join an organization and pay them a portion of my minimum wage hourly pay drove me absolutely bonkers. This was on top of the fact that the union never gave me any benefits, the reps were impossible to get ahold of and didn’t care at all even if you did get ahold of them. To me, it was a giant useless bureaucracy that I was forced to pay into.
I hope software unions look and feel different than the experience that I had.
I am not sure what good it will do to join a Union if you can't collectively bargain. You would essentially be paying dues out of your salary, and not getting anything in return. If you don't like Google, then quit.
I'm excited about this, but also dismayed at the huge amount of pushback from the tech community. Exploitation in tech is built into the culture: people worship the guy who never spends time with his family and works 100 hrs per week. Screaming managers are tolerated, even revered. Retaliation is commonplace and keeps people in line, and is justified as "s/he was just lazy" or "not a team player". This needs to end. Unions are a great first step.
-Never seen a manager scream. Note that anyone who does so is bad at their job; and won't last long unless if anyone else wants it.
-Workers commonly take multi-month parental leave breaks; block off afternoons for a kid's event, etc.
-I don't know anyone who works 100 hours a week; and if I did I would think them a fool. And also help them; as this is unsafe and they need some more sleep!
I understand that other gigs, especially perhaps in Gaming, are different! And workers of course have the right to freely associate, and so collectively bargain, if they choose to.
Looks like a continuation of the Gebru show: the SJW leaders are threatening to unionize. If they really cared about the workers, they'd talk about non compete agreements.
Coincidentally I was just watching these Yale lectures which touch on economical history of unions in the 20th century. Might be of interest to HN readers.
I see many valid concerns in this thread regarding the structure and purpose of unions.
What I can't unsee is the lack of will to make something that work. If "union" was a category of software we would be having a couple leading FOSS projects pioneering good practices and we would argue about which is better and do RFCs. Now all we do is complain how nothing works instead of trying to work this out.
I was investigating unions over the holidays and saw that these types of things are specific to companies which didn't make sense to me. I'm not familiar with unions in general, but the ones I hear about most in the trades seem to be exterior to any specific company.
Making unions specific to a company rather than a profession seems less useful...or are trade unions specific to their companies as well?
One of the most common things I see among tech workers is that they think companies are “anti-union”, which is a total lie. They love unions, just not when workers make them. They call them “associations”, “councils”, “chambers of commerce”, etc. They serve on each other’s boards, they form cabals to limit employee pay, and they lobby the government to make it easier to get rid of you whenever they please.
Corporations and the rich love socialism. They need it. It’s socialism for them, brutal capitalism and rugged individualism for everyone else. The fools of tech listen to their words and ignore their actions.
"to opposing Project Maven, to protesting the egregious, multi-million dollar payouts that have been given to executives who’ve committed sexual harassment
I don't see how a union will help these issues. They may demonstrate the power of collective action, but not the utility of a union for these particular types of issues.
So many in this thread talking about a contract, rigidity, voting, etc. This is not a card-signing campaign, nobody will be voting on a CBA. AWU is running a minority unionism campaign which means that it's closer to a lobbying group or non-profit than eg. your standard public teachers' union.
What percentage of Alphabet employees work on profitable products? Since AWU has no contract with Alphabet, their only leverage is work stoppage but if those protesting aren't adding monetary value to the business, then wouldn't work stoppage be net-neutral or positive for Alphabet?
It's sad that they're using card checks instead of secret ballots for the effort. Card checks are a tried and true method organizers use to intimidate people.
Source: several family members worked in union shops. In many cases, they were forced to be part of the union to have a job.
Old tech companies had heavy machinery and workers were relatively easy to train and replace. The high-tech companies are nothing without their workers. I think in the future the high tech employees unions will be able to steer a larger share of profits towards themselves.
Simply, union interest is not the same as company interest. Its maybe good for the employee but not good for the company.
One example of negative things of an union: It makes harder for company to fire people.
Look at teachers union right now, they are fighting by all means to refuse to come back teaching in person. Teaching online benefit the teacher but really sucks for the kids and parents.
That's both reductive and false. The employees benefit when the company does well. A union just fights to have the employees share more in that success.
While I generally support unions, I think this is a pretty bearish signal for Google. I think it totally makes sense for the contractors but less so for the rank and file Googlers as they consistently are at the upper end in the industry benefits and pay.
A tangential point, but I find it weird and somewhat amusing that an article on US Google employees should use a photo of Google's London engineering office. Maybe they don't have a good shot of a lot of people standing in front of some US office?
I am not sure what good it will do to join a Union if you can't collectively bargain. You would essentially be paying dues out of your salary, and not getting anything in return. If you don't like Google, than quit.
I don't disagree with this effort, but I'm a little surprised it wasn't one of the slightly more abusive/hardline of the FAANGM (that is, specifically Apple or Amazon, or perhaps Microsoft) staff first.
Obviously biased, but I tend to agree. My experience with unions is not with them as a partner to the company and advocate of shared success. My experience is them as parasites that hurt the business and the customer, and may (may!) help employees. Out of the dozen or so cases I’m familiar with, only my brother in law loves the union and he does not work like most devs I know; he goes job site to job site for short to medium engagements.
I think on the whole Google leadership is pretty representative of what Google employees want and the ones who want this union will be disappointed with what the union wants if they get enough people on board.
Amazing, the first page of these comments only has a single top level comment, with 550 replies. What is the typical distribution of comments on an HN post?
This is quoted form a different article, but am I the only one who sympathizes with this?
>Everyone at Alphabet — from bus drivers to programmers, from salespeople to janitors — plays a critical part in developing our technology. But right now, a few wealthy executives define what the company produces and how its workers are treated. This isn’t the company we want to work for. We care deeply about what we build and what it’s used for. We are responsible for the technology we bring into the world. And we recognize that its implications reach far beyond the walls of Alphabet.
The "few wealthy executives" are the ones ensuring that the work of the bus drivers, programmers, salespeople, and janitors is rewarded with cold, hard cash instead of empty promises and platitudes. How many $250k+ TC employees can be sustained by a company that refuses to do the "dirty work" of the DoD, that takes an ethical stance against the very anti-privacy technology that drives the profitability behind their inflated salaries?
"Having your cake and eating it, too" barely fits here, it's more like showing up to a fancy steakhouse and demanding that their best cut stop coming from poor innocent cows. If you want to be a vegan, you're free to go do that; yelling at the evil chefs, butchers, and farmers to stop hurting cows while they prepare the sirloin you're paying them for is just absurd.
If you want to work in a mission-focused environment, you can join the rest of us who took a pay cut to work on projects that let us go to sleep at night with that warm and fuzzy feeling. If you're not willing to give up the blood money, then it goes without saying that There Will Be Blood
I suppose why not. Google employs some of the smartest minds walking earth, subseque tly , this is a reflection of their thoughts. I do not think this is a group of extreme left wingers who have infiltrated google to bring change. I think this is a reaction to the some actions they have observed and decided it is time for an intervention. I do not understand the people who are against this, especially the ones not even working there. Nobody is forced to join the union. Maybe the unions are different in the US. But in Europe they have proven to be a good anti exploitation tool and are the foundation of a happy middle class
This union appears to have formed primarily as a means for political activism. This is just the worst type of union, because members are implicitly assumed to agree with the union’s political ideals (can you imagine conservatives joining this union in large numbers?) and also because if it grows large enough, it may make moves to become certified. That will put paid to Googles chances of doing business as it sees fit without any regard to the politics of what they do. How would collective bargaining work at Google? What would be the demands of such a bargaining group, aside from purely political items?
1) "Arranged as a members-only union, the new organization won’t seek collective bargaining rights to negotiate a new contract with the company"
What use will that be, if they don't collectively bargain, as a, em, collective of employees? The next step would be to pressure everyone to join, or the whole thing won't be very effective.
2) If the thing were to work, then I'd expect the very next HN article to read:
Contract bargaining for the members is not the only thing a union usually does. There are loads more to it, great starting point to learn more about unions would be to read through the Wikipedia page before dismissing the idea, here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_union
If it wasn't clear to people working at Google before, if the company moves somewhere in order to lessen the power of their employees, I sure hope the employees start waking up to how their company treats them. My guess is that Google doesn't want to actually show that face though, so unlikely to happen.
Sorry, that was not my intention. My intention was to guide you to read more about the subject you're currently discussing, as your points make it pretty clear that the idea of what a union is, is much wider than what you think.
What is HN doing about serious attempts from the likes of Pinkertons to create FUD in these threads?
We know for a fact that tech companies are their customer, and we know they're ruthless in online disinfo. Is HN doing any monitoring to the discourse to make sure the comments are coming from actual individuals rather than a company buying up a bunch of HN accounts with history and creating disfino and FUD?
It shouldn't be shocking that a site full of tech nerds is going to be rallying for meritocracy when these unions want 1% of salaries.
I don't see how a union would make my life better. When I hate my job, I leave my job and find a new one within a week. If I am swapping into a new role or looking for something specific, a month.
I just see this as creating an additional bureaucratic layer that steals my money and gives me the same rights I currently do.
What more could someone want? Foot massages? Even at a non-FAANG company, life as an SE is very comfortable.
Well if the rest of the tech industry can copy faang Leetcode interviews, at the very least also start copying this union initiative. For once I’d like to see copy-cat culture not completely suck.
No more of the silly fridge full of beers and ping pong tables, copy the real stuff please - salary, 20% time, union, and we’ll study for your Leetcode, no problemo.
It is a bad idea to affiliate with CWA. If CWA was the origin, it is a terrible idea. Tech should be wary and look at what the automobile unions amounted to.
I wish Google well on whatever it (legally) pursues to fight this. I see them as a company that has gone from great to now becoming mediocre, and whose employees are destroying it from within.
Maybe those clever interview quizzes should be updated to identify and filter out political zealots.
I know at least one person who left Google because it became too political, and this was several years ago. It's sad to see what's become of the company.
Who is the “Google” that you say wanted the leftist culture?
Is it the shareholders? The majority of shareholder ownership in Google is held by wealthy non-employees, who probably didn’t want a leftist culture.
Is it the executives? Seeing as unionisation probably reduces their power and their pay, they probably didn’t want it.
Is it the rank-and-file engineers? These people tend to be left of centre, and the younger ones are likely quite socially progressive, but anti-capitalist? Not many. Seems wrong to generalise that they want a leftist culture.
"Leftist culture" is the only way to make any kind of money right now in the US, so of course Google want a "leftist culture" there. Is the rest of the world, it might be different, of course (eg. China).
I mean this in the kindest possible way: have you consulted a psychiatrist? Feeling like you are being persecuted by shadowy, all-powerful enemies is a common symptom of schizophrenia.
Isn't that tale the reverse of that - i.e. a tale of intimidating union members?
I find it hard to believe stuff like this would fly in a major city of a western country in 21st century, even in the United States. Though I can't honestly discount it completely either...
Commissioner Heydon found that corruption was widespread and deep-seated, and recommended a new national regulator with the same powers as the Australian Securities and Investments Commission be established to combat corruption in the trade union movement. The Report highlighted insufficient record keeping (including false invoicing and destruction of documents); "rubber stamp" committees which failed to enforce rules; payment of large sums by employers to unions; and influence peddling by means of the inflation of union membership figures. The Report recommended a toughening of financial disclosure rules, new civil penalties to bind workers and officials on financial disclosure provisions; a new criminal offence.[50] Frank Bongiorno, Professor of History at the Australian National University, has described this report as having "all the impact of last year’s telephone book being dumped in a wheelie-bin.
Mafia boss settles disputes between real estate developers and union boss, no worries mate! "Building industry sources said it appeared the parties had opted to use Mr Gatto to settle their issues rather than involve police."
former resident of your property could have been mixed up with organised crime.
its common enough, you move into a house and random gangs show up looking for money etc that the previous resident owed them. They aren't going to take no for an answer because they'll get punished for not extracting wealth when they report back to el jefe
Why? Many successful companies are fully unionised. How many people creating content at Disney do you think are card carrying members of a union (the answer: nearly all of them).
Less profits would go to shareholders, which could lower its stock price, but that doesn't mean the company would produce less. More share of profits going to employees could increase productivity and social good to the world. I'm not calling that result inevitable, but possible and up to the company leadership.
I know some Googlers who make over $500k annual and in truth are fairly unskilled. Not sure they could survive at any other company. Don’t really see why they need a union to “protect” them from being fantastically wealthy?
I don't understand unions. If they don't like certain behaviors that are legal like selling to government or paying high salaries, why are they working there in the first place? Just quit. Different people like different things, so go work somewhere that suits you.
The point of unions is that individual workers can be easily screwed over with no repercussions for the company because of the power differential between companies and their workers. Unions seek to level the field a little bit by giving the workers collective bargaining power which allows them to secure better pay/benefits/influence the direction the company is going. When they work it is a very rational arrangement for the workers, so companies tend to not like them as it decreases their power over their workers.
Precisely, you can end up having people working for a company under terms that are technically legal, but still exploiting the weakest. The strongest people easily move on to better positions, but some, single parents, less skilled, psychologically weaker individuals and so on are more easily pressed into working conditions they may not like, because they fear losing the job they do have.
In the US the minimum wage haven't moved in decades, at least not significantly. Denmark doesn't even have a minimum wage, yet people are better paid, that's due the Danish unions. Interestingly the Danish unions are actually oppose a minimum wage, because they believe it makes it easier to legally pay people less.
Oh they do something, they help destroy a company’s ability to compete. Take a look at unionization of the auto industry in Detroit back in the 70s and 80s which basically killed our lead in the industry and gave it to Japan and Korean companies on a platter.
I believe the GP is referring to the rapid depression in the area when auto companies started moving south to open-shop states (e.g. Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee), not the original unionization.
I think they think unions would drag down productivity and cost money. I don't know if anyone actually believes unions do nothing at all, neither good nor bad
I called ConEd and union workers were slacking by my house the entire working day. At the end of the day they went out , checked my cord, said nothing wrong and finished the day. I heard many other similar stories like this. If google will face this situation they’ll just move their workforce elsewhere except some numbers of really great talents , and those will be motivated.
Google is nothing but a monster which shares private info with goverments and companies. Use their platforms to rev up their products at the expensive of small business.
For example, I've had people tell me that they don't support unions in tech because they'll be "paid less", or less competent engineers will be promoted faster.
And it's strange, because the other major industry in California - the film industry - is heavily unionised, and you just don't see that happening there. You have vocally supportive multi-millionaire card-carrying members of the Screen Actors Guild, the Writers Guild, and the Directors Guild to name a few. None of these unions are limiting the work their members are carrying out.
This is because those unions are serving a very different purpose to the stereotypical union some engineers seem to fear. SAG, the DGA, and the WGA aren't guaranteeing hours or limiting pay: they're simply trying to curb abuse in what it a very abusive industry, and putting in place procedures to protect members and resolve grievances.
And they don't always get it right, and I don't pretend that Hollywood is a perfect utopia of worker relations, but I think it's pretty undeniable that the industry is a much better place with the unions around.