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.
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.