Is there a precedence for contractors unionizing? I'm curious what prevents Google from simply not renewing their contract since they will presumably be requesting much higher wages.
You're right but it says that the contractors who unionized work for an IT outsourcing firm.
Google has kind of a random relationship with various classes of employees. There are contract cooks and janitors and whatnot but they made the physical security guards full-time.
As someone without any context,
1. Why they are unionizing?
2. Why are they joining a union from a completely different industry? What would this achieve?
It doesn't. Where does the USW come into the picture, if PATP is affiliate of the DPE, considering that USW is _also_ an affiliate of DPE? I don't get it and I wished the article explained it.
> Where does USW come into the picture, if PATP is affiliate of the DPE, considering that USW is _also_ an affiliate of DPE?
The PATP is a new chapter of United Steelworker’s union. Why steelworkers? Because the union isn’t just a steelworker’s union, although it retains that name in common usage for historical reasons (and also because it’s short enough to say). The union’s full name is The United Steel, Paper and Forestry, Rubber, Manufacturing, Energy, Allied Industrial and Service Workers International Union. Years of erosion of union strength and membership in the US has led to a lot of union mergers.
The PATP is not part of the DPE. The DPE is a branch of the AFL-CIO. The AFL-CIO is a federation of unions — a metaunion, if you will. The DPE helped the PATP organize, that’s the DPE’s job. But the DPE isn’t a union itself, it’s an umbrella organization for professional employees represented by the AFL-CIO’s member unions.
I don't see those answers. Why the steelworkers - the article specifies the con: they know how to represent steel workers not programmers - this was never addressed.
Small nit: The article doesn’t specify that con, it quotes an HCL executive who was claiming it’s a con.
I mention this distinction because the claimed “con” is based on an implicit misrepresentation of what the USW is (it is not, counter to its common name, just a union that deals with steelworkers), and it’s important to attribute the misrepresentation to the party that was motivated to misrepresent things, and not the newspaper that merely quoted it.
I think that boils down to false equivalence. If the reporter had dug into rebutting claims in the quoted email from HCL’s management, a lot of people would accuse the article of having a pro-union bias however much it was just trying to provide a full explanation of the situation to readers.
Consequently most news organizations these days just publish two verbatim claims from opposing sides and make no attempt to actually sort out any underlying facts lest they be perceived as “biased”.
Many unions (like the United Steelworkers) have expanded well beyond their original industry and exists as all-purpose unions. The name only exists for historical reasons.
If you don't necessarily agree with a specific decision the union is taking, you're dragged into it. But that's just part of collectivism and it's not necessarily a bad thing.
Depends on the nature of the work and variability of worker skills, along with the union structure. For work where the skills of the workers are mostly consistent, or where skills can be easily grouped into buckets based on training and seniority, unions work out really good for the employees.
For highly variable skill work, and where skill levels are difficult to track (at least in a non-gameable way), you can have lower skilled (or lower performing) employees that drag down higher performers, due to union rules requiring things like seniority-based pay brackets. So people that are really good at convincing their management that they are really good, and work in industries where there is high competition for their specialty, those are the ones that tend to be more anti-union for their line of work.
This is misinformation. Unions are democratically led. They can have whatever rules they want regarding skill and pay. The point is that they reach a consensus and then negotiate as a single unit against their employer.
The commenter was describing what actually happens in unions. It’s technically correct to say unions are democratically led thus possible to change for the better, but it is incorrect to imply they are democratic so are likely to change. And so to point to union voting rules as a way to assuage concerns about common union practices is misleading.
I can imagine plenty of good and bad, and experienced a lot of bad.
My experience with some negatives:
- Unions love to get more and more involved in things, on a granular level because let's face it unfair things happen at every level of a job. The problem is negotiating that all out results in ultra prescribed jobs, job functions, and etc are all defined. Over time flexibility decreases and decreases .. and so on.
- Many unions love seniority, because powerful union members are often more senior. Not all, but many. There's few things less demoralizing than sitting behind a bunch more senior folks (i'm over 40 so this isn't just some ageist thing) who only want to learn what they want to learn ... and the union backs them at every turn. Promotions, choice roles and hours, all become about seniority.
- Limited relationship with your boss is another issue. I LIKE working with my boss and have all my career, but in a union situation it was a very prescribed relationship. My boss no matter what he felt couldn't treat me differently based on merit or anything else, it was all about the union rules. I could be the best, or worst there, it changed nothing. It dramatically changes that relationship. And no matter what anyone says your boss can still be a jerk if they want to and unions are sometimes unable to help. Thus...
- Unions can be surprisingly poor at helping out with individual issues. A lot of situations between the union and employer are negotiated out in detail. That means provided the employer meets various easily measured things, they can (and will quickly learn) all the things not negotiated by the union and can do what they wish there, and unions are surprisingly hands off at that point.
The fact is Unions are another bureaucracy and despite the goals they may not align with what you want, and they're more than happy to limit your options as much as any nasty employer.
I'll give you an example. I have several family members and friends who have been in unions or who are in them.
A friend went to work at a company a few years ago. The copier was broke. They had to get a union guy out to verify that before they could get a new one. They then ordered a new copier. It arrived, but they had to arrange for union people to get it moved to their office. When the union movers saw that the dead copier was plugged in, they stopped what they were doing and left. It turns out they needed a union electrician to come out and unplug the printer. The office manager made sure that everyone in the office would keep their hands off the copier and not unplug it because they would likely be fired unless a union electrician did it. The union electrician showed up a week or so later and unplugged the copier. They then had to get the union movers back out to put the new copier in place and remove the old one. Then, they had to get the union electrician out to plug the new one in. This whole thing took several weeks.
My friend left the company and that company is now out of business, one reason being that they could not compete.
Unions go to extremes to protect jobs and find ways to unionize shops through intimidation. They prefer "card check" voting instead of secret ballots, because they can tell who voted which way. In Illinois, they even forcibly unionized people taking care of family members in their own homes.
Your link (to an obviously-anti-union think-tank) describes government overreach much more than it describes typical activity.
Without knowing more details of the situation, the most glaring problem here is that the State of Illinois asserted that recipients of Medicaid stipends are "state employees". It's wrong to use this situation to ascribe dirty dealing to unions generally.
The state did, but who elected the people making the decisions? Whose candidates were they? It's obvious from the facts that the officials were acting in the interests of the unions here. What interest does a mother have to pay union dues so she can take care of a family member? What state interest is served?
Unions are democratically run by the workers for their own benefit. They should be mostly upside, or tradeoffs in your favor, since they're doing stuff that you voted for on your behalf.
People make a lot of noise about union dues, but they're a drop in the bucket compared to the higher wages the union will negotiate for. The most onerous requirement is being prepared to strike (and a lot of union dues are to set aside emergency funds for people during a strike).
That said, not all unions are equal. And like any small democratic institution, they're going to preferentially represent the people who get involved.
Labor unions are the reason why we have paid time off and 40 hour work weeks in the US. Unions in the US have a lot more negative press compared to other unions in the developed world. Big business has spent decades convincing Americans that unions are bad because for large corporations, they can make more money by reducing benefits and pay for their workers.
I would say in general, unions in Europe are viewed in a much more positive light. Collective bargaining allows for workers from blue collar to white collar work receive their fair share from the company.
> I would say in general, unions in Europe are viewed in a much more positive light.
It depends on the country. When I lived in Poland my father complained a lot about his union (Solidarność, he worked as an industrial electrician), as the management was mostly old people who did as little as possible to not lose their position, and did nothing outside of being in the union (they were retired). You would have a hard time outvoting them because you'd need to get a certain number of votes from multiple plants, around a thousand of people in total - campaigning alone would take most of your time, on top of doing your work. I haven't heard many positive stories about unions to be honest, and I lived in upper Silesia, the most industrialized region - where there were lots of them.
I'm not sure why my question came off as anti-union.
To me, the benefits seem obvious but I couldn't think of downsides. So I was, in fact, trying to broaden my views, just in the other direction, I suppose.
I've never felt the need to join a union but, fundamentally, I see nothing wrong with someone controlling their own capital (time, labor, and skills) and freely associating others to pool those resources into something that's more than the sum of their parts.
I can see where it might be a problem if a group ended up with a monopoly on some skill, but that's a problem with any kind of pooling of resources and we have tools to deal with such a distortion should it arise.
It's mostly anectadata from where I live in the UE, but unions can facilitate/enable abuse: for example once you're an union rep, you can't get fired, so at my previous company, being a rep meant you'd get two years where they could do nothing and be protected by their status. In that company, no negotiations between the unions and the company never went anywhere, since the multiple unions could never agree on what would be acceptable or not, with some unions looking more interested in just membership numbers that anything else. Another I've heard was that unions would cover for employees that should get fired for gross misconduct.
It's cool to have the worker protections laws here, but sometime it feels like unions are just useless/wastefull relics.
Some unions requires all employees to become members and charge a fee.
Some unions abuse their power to negotiate with the employer to make union leaders wealthy instead of granting benefits to the employees.
Some unions work alongside gangs to rake in illegal profit.
Some unions force all employees to take the same position of the union on certain issues meaning that people who oppose the measure may be blacklisted and pretty much terminated if the union uses its muscle.
Again these are just some unions and YMMV, the history of unions has many pros and cons with some being notorious and others being very much necessary in this day and age.
> These 80 employees who work as analysts and trainers for Google’s shopping product
To me, this sounds like low skilled labor.
> Most of the employees organizing hold college degrees, get paid as little as $40,000 a year, and don’t receive sick days or many of the other perks that direct Google employees get.
"perks that direct Google employees get" is irrelevant at best.
The first COL calculator I found (ie, first google hit, let's assume google didn't suddenly game this result) says pittsburgh is 1/3 the cost of SF. $40k = $120k. This is not bad at all (?) for such low skilled labor, if the "COL curve" is linear down to $40k. Also, they say "as little as", so we know that's the floor, not the median. (Shame on the editor for presenting it that way.)
The lack of sick days isn't that bad if the employees have health benefits and are not penalized for sick time off. (Just take away 1-2 weeks of salary -- the typical amount of sick days one would get.) However, if they don't have sick days, I have doubts about the quality of their health benefits and maybe they don't even have 401k?
COL is a terrible indicator. 1/3rd COL isn't really 1/3rd. If you have a large family the requirement of a large house/apartment will make your cost of living much worse in SF than 3x - while if you sleep in your car and cook on a camp stove your COL is the nearly the same in both places (car registration might be slightly more in CA). Both are extreme cases, but they get the point across.
While I would expect a somewhat lower salary outside of SF, it wouldn't be 1/3.
I lived in Pittsburgh for 8 years. It was eminently livable as a single grad student on a ~$30k stipend, but I wouldn't want to raise a family on that or thereabouts. Also, apartments may be cheaper but COL is an average over the whole metro area, and decent apartments or houses in a neighborhood you'd want to live in are a bit more. (Say $1000/mo for a nice 1-bed, or $300k for a decent house.) Keep in mind that cars, electronics, health insurance, and myriad other consumer goods aren't cheaper just because the city COL is cheaper. I'd probably want to make $60k or so to actually be comfortable and put some money away (edit: as a single person, and more than that with a family). (Fortunately, software engineers in Pittsburgh generally make quite a bit more than this, from what I've heard.)
I'm not clear on what these people were doing. $40k is probably more than you can make in fast food in SV. I would expect any programming job in the US would start at (just out of college) 60-70k, with quick raises to around 100k - if you are not making that much you can find a different job or work from home to pay that. Based on that (and other comments here) I'm guessing the people involved are not programmers and so not worth as much.
I am a long-time dev contractor (not with Google), and I am sick of staffing middlemen that keep 40%+ of my hourly rate and hold the money an extra month, simply because they had access to the client's contractor system. It's robbery.
The IRS has made that extremely difficult for software contractors, and most companies will prefer to avoid the high risk of an individual contractor being reclassified as an employee.
Yes of course, but companies will prefer to work with middlemen rather than directly employing individual contractors because it makes legal and accounting easier. There’s often a lot of hurdles to employ an individual directly, like requiring the contractor to have a million dollar insurance policy say
Seems like a lot of money for that, but companies are willing to pay it
1) Isn't this really a "problem" for HCL, and not necessarily Google? Google can just not renew the contract, meaning all the benefits they gain from working "for Google" go away. And if you make the assumption that Google is hiring firms like this primarily because of cost, then their incentive as a public company is to keep costs low and switch to another firm.
(Unless this is primarily to reduce the margins for HCL? i.e. costs to Google stay flat, but workers take home a larger share.)
2) More of a criticism on Unions: why don't these folks just go work for Google if they want the benefits? Either they have the ability and don't want to, which is their choice, or they don't pass the hiring bar, which then means any comparison to what Google employees make is not appropropriate.
Earlier this year I left an IT & engineering contracting company (Alten, one of the biggest here in France) and I heard from a friend who was still working there that it was one of the union that prevented remote working because "it would prevent them from controlling the workers".
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 109 ms ] threadIs there a precedence for contractors unionizing? I'm curious what prevents Google from simply not renewing their contract since they will presumably be requesting much higher wages.
Google has kind of a random relationship with various classes of employees. There are contract cooks and janitors and whatnot but they made the physical security guards full-time.
The PATP is a new chapter of United Steelworker’s union. Why steelworkers? Because the union isn’t just a steelworker’s union, although it retains that name in common usage for historical reasons (and also because it’s short enough to say). The union’s full name is The United Steel, Paper and Forestry, Rubber, Manufacturing, Energy, Allied Industrial and Service Workers International Union. Years of erosion of union strength and membership in the US has led to a lot of union mergers.
The PATP is not part of the DPE. The DPE is a branch of the AFL-CIO. The AFL-CIO is a federation of unions — a metaunion, if you will. The DPE helped the PATP organize, that’s the DPE’s job. But the DPE isn’t a union itself, it’s an umbrella organization for professional employees represented by the AFL-CIO’s member unions.
I mention this distinction because the claimed “con” is based on an implicit misrepresentation of what the USW is (it is not, counter to its common name, just a union that deals with steelworkers), and it’s important to attribute the misrepresentation to the party that was motivated to misrepresent things, and not the newspaper that merely quoted it.
Consequently most news organizations these days just publish two verbatim claims from opposing sides and make no attempt to actually sort out any underlying facts lest they be perceived as “biased”.
What are some downsides to joining a union? Are there onerous obligations?
For highly variable skill work, and where skill levels are difficult to track (at least in a non-gameable way), you can have lower skilled (or lower performing) employees that drag down higher performers, due to union rules requiring things like seniority-based pay brackets. So people that are really good at convincing their management that they are really good, and work in industries where there is high competition for their specialty, those are the ones that tend to be more anti-union for their line of work.
Edit, the article doesn't say this, but others have suggested the people joining the union may not be programmers...
I can imagine plenty of good and bad, and experienced a lot of bad.
My experience with some negatives:
- Unions love to get more and more involved in things, on a granular level because let's face it unfair things happen at every level of a job. The problem is negotiating that all out results in ultra prescribed jobs, job functions, and etc are all defined. Over time flexibility decreases and decreases .. and so on.
- Many unions love seniority, because powerful union members are often more senior. Not all, but many. There's few things less demoralizing than sitting behind a bunch more senior folks (i'm over 40 so this isn't just some ageist thing) who only want to learn what they want to learn ... and the union backs them at every turn. Promotions, choice roles and hours, all become about seniority.
- Limited relationship with your boss is another issue. I LIKE working with my boss and have all my career, but in a union situation it was a very prescribed relationship. My boss no matter what he felt couldn't treat me differently based on merit or anything else, it was all about the union rules. I could be the best, or worst there, it changed nothing. It dramatically changes that relationship. And no matter what anyone says your boss can still be a jerk if they want to and unions are sometimes unable to help. Thus...
- Unions can be surprisingly poor at helping out with individual issues. A lot of situations between the union and employer are negotiated out in detail. That means provided the employer meets various easily measured things, they can (and will quickly learn) all the things not negotiated by the union and can do what they wish there, and unions are surprisingly hands off at that point.
The fact is Unions are another bureaucracy and despite the goals they may not align with what you want, and they're more than happy to limit your options as much as any nasty employer.
A friend went to work at a company a few years ago. The copier was broke. They had to get a union guy out to verify that before they could get a new one. They then ordered a new copier. It arrived, but they had to arrange for union people to get it moved to their office. When the union movers saw that the dead copier was plugged in, they stopped what they were doing and left. It turns out they needed a union electrician to come out and unplug the printer. The office manager made sure that everyone in the office would keep their hands off the copier and not unplug it because they would likely be fired unless a union electrician did it. The union electrician showed up a week or so later and unplugged the copier. They then had to get the union movers back out to put the new copier in place and remove the old one. Then, they had to get the union electrician out to plug the new one in. This whole thing took several weeks.
My friend left the company and that company is now out of business, one reason being that they could not compete.
Unions go to extremes to protect jobs and find ways to unionize shops through intimidation. They prefer "card check" voting instead of secret ballots, because they can tell who voted which way. In Illinois, they even forcibly unionized people taking care of family members in their own homes.
https://www.illinoispolicy.org/news/seiu-fights-to-force-hom...
Without knowing more details of the situation, the most glaring problem here is that the State of Illinois asserted that recipients of Medicaid stipends are "state employees". It's wrong to use this situation to ascribe dirty dealing to unions generally.
People make a lot of noise about union dues, but they're a drop in the bucket compared to the higher wages the union will negotiate for. The most onerous requirement is being prepared to strike (and a lot of union dues are to set aside emergency funds for people during a strike).
That said, not all unions are equal. And like any small democratic institution, they're going to preferentially represent the people who get involved.
My last job had a union and I was being paid 10¢ more per hour than minimum wage. Not exactly a “higher wage”
I would say in general, unions in Europe are viewed in a much more positive light. Collective bargaining allows for workers from blue collar to white collar work receive their fair share from the company.
I would try reading more about the labor movement in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_history_of_the_United_St...
Please try and broaden your views. HN is an anti union echo chamber for the most part.
It depends on the country. When I lived in Poland my father complained a lot about his union (Solidarność, he worked as an industrial electrician), as the management was mostly old people who did as little as possible to not lose their position, and did nothing outside of being in the union (they were retired). You would have a hard time outvoting them because you'd need to get a certain number of votes from multiple plants, around a thousand of people in total - campaigning alone would take most of your time, on top of doing your work. I haven't heard many positive stories about unions to be honest, and I lived in upper Silesia, the most industrialized region - where there were lots of them.
To me, the benefits seem obvious but I couldn't think of downsides. So I was, in fact, trying to broaden my views, just in the other direction, I suppose.
I've never felt the need to join a union but, fundamentally, I see nothing wrong with someone controlling their own capital (time, labor, and skills) and freely associating others to pool those resources into something that's more than the sum of their parts.
I can see where it might be a problem if a group ended up with a monopoly on some skill, but that's a problem with any kind of pooling of resources and we have tools to deal with such a distortion should it arise.
It's cool to have the worker protections laws here, but sometime it feels like unions are just useless/wastefull relics.
Some unions abuse their power to negotiate with the employer to make union leaders wealthy instead of granting benefits to the employees.
Some unions work alongside gangs to rake in illegal profit.
Some unions force all employees to take the same position of the union on certain issues meaning that people who oppose the measure may be blacklisted and pretty much terminated if the union uses its muscle.
Again these are just some unions and YMMV, the history of unions has many pros and cons with some being notorious and others being very much necessary in this day and age.
Better one here: https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/9/24/20880727/google-workers...
> These 80 employees who work as analysts and trainers for Google’s shopping product
To me, this sounds like low skilled labor.
> Most of the employees organizing hold college degrees, get paid as little as $40,000 a year, and don’t receive sick days or many of the other perks that direct Google employees get.
"perks that direct Google employees get" is irrelevant at best.
The first COL calculator I found (ie, first google hit, let's assume google didn't suddenly game this result) says pittsburgh is 1/3 the cost of SF. $40k = $120k. This is not bad at all (?) for such low skilled labor, if the "COL curve" is linear down to $40k. Also, they say "as little as", so we know that's the floor, not the median. (Shame on the editor for presenting it that way.)
The lack of sick days isn't that bad if the employees have health benefits and are not penalized for sick time off. (Just take away 1-2 weeks of salary -- the typical amount of sick days one would get.) However, if they don't have sick days, I have doubts about the quality of their health benefits and maybe they don't even have 401k?
While I would expect a somewhat lower salary outside of SF, it wouldn't be 1/3.
Thanks. That's why I qualified that bit by noting that the COL curve may not be linear. Due to regressive taxes, housing minimum, etc.
But without hearing from folks actually in pittsburgh, it's hard for me, sitting here in SV, to know how good or bad $40k is.
But the relativity to SF isn't the most important part anyway. If the pay is below market, shouldn't HCL quickly find themselves without employees?
Seems like a lot of money for that, but companies are willing to pay it
1) Isn't this really a "problem" for HCL, and not necessarily Google? Google can just not renew the contract, meaning all the benefits they gain from working "for Google" go away. And if you make the assumption that Google is hiring firms like this primarily because of cost, then their incentive as a public company is to keep costs low and switch to another firm.
(Unless this is primarily to reduce the margins for HCL? i.e. costs to Google stay flat, but workers take home a larger share.)
2) More of a criticism on Unions: why don't these folks just go work for Google if they want the benefits? Either they have the ability and don't want to, which is their choice, or they don't pass the hiring bar, which then means any comparison to what Google employees make is not appropropriate.