Google has already been convicted in a wage fixing scheme with other Silicon Valley firms. They wouldn’t even interview me when I was trying to leave Apple. I made a cool $3k from the settlement.
Guys, hey guys, I’m starting to think the “Don’t be evil” thing has always been bullshit, at least when it comes to workers rights.
Yeah a corporation isn't some cooperative integrated intelligence making decisions. Its hundreds of managers all working fairly independently. Hard for it to be anything but a vegetative growth, that locally optimizes for more growth.
Corporations are typically highly coordinated, hierarchical organizations with a chain of command that leads from the CEO to frontline employees. No, CEO's are not omniscient, but they have significant control over company culture and policy and should bear responsibility for patterns of corporate misbehavior. Corporations are absolutely capable of weighing benefits and risks to itself and outside stakeholders and making and acting on decisions.
And managers are motivated to locally optimize their part of the whole. CEO can blather on all they want about corporate morals. But if the managers are rewarded on how efficiently they deploy their resources (and they are), then any rational manager will do that. Locally optimize. Just look at what measure the manager's bonus depends upon, and you can substantially predict their behavior.
Giant companies are not just a CEO and some managers. There are typically half a dozen layers between the CEO and the footsoldier. And its the middle layer folks that create the true behavior of the beast.
This is incredibly untrue of Google, and every other organization I've ever worked in (excluding the tiny ones). I can't imagine how you could've come to this conclusion while ever having worked at a corporation (or indeed, any institution above a certain very low floor of employees).
Note that this isn't directly relevant to the case under discussion, which was coordinated at the CEO level
I can say with confidence that managers at Google are not even fairly independent. Lots of pressure (and toxicity) can float down from higher up in the org chart.
My first eng manager at Google was really mistreated by people higher up in the org and as a result didn't have much freedom to make things right for our team (or our project, which generally struggled a lot as a result). This is not extrapolation or speculation: He confirmed it to me.
If anything, I think engineers at Google probably have more independence and freedom than managers do, because they're really only accountable for their own work and personal results. Managers have to corral all those independent engineers into a group they can get away with taking responsibility for, and the upper levels of the chain don't always act in a way that acknowledges how hard management can be. The disconnect also means that "best for a manager's career" is not automatically going to be compatible with the career health of their reports.
The gap between "labor" and "management" in this scenario is also a great example of why unions for labor are important - it's very difficult to represent the needs of both labor and management collectively, so a good method is for them to each bargain collectively based on their own needs and interests.
Unclear where that's going? Sounds like, managers are responsible for measures (unspecified?) that are not in alignment with direct reports' interests. Sure, agreed. Managers are almost always responsible for some fiscal efficiency measure. Which is why they 'locally optimize'. Right?
My argument is that in many cases it's not local optimization at all. It's not optimal for anyone, their freedom is constrained by upper level management (the hierarchy / the corporation / the hivemind) which means neither the managers or their reports have freedom.
If the managers actually had more freedom, you'd get something closer to a bunch of small groups optimizing locally and producing (ideally, with the right incentive) collectively good results.
Here's a really easy example from my career (not Google, though): A manager needs to deliver on schedule. He has a set number of people on his team. One of those people is going to quit because he has a baby on the way, and the company's salary is not good enough.
If the manager had enough freedom, they'd have options available. The company is going to cut some of those off, but I'll enumerate some of the ones we potentially had at our fingertips (I was one of the team's managers in this situation):
* Give him a raise so he stays
* Promote someone qualified from the team, hire a junior employee to replace them
* Hire a senior employee to replace him and train them up ASAP to fill the gap
* Adjust the schedule to make up for the loss of his contribution
* Adjust the scope of the project to same as the above
In the end the studio head basically told us to go fuck ourselves, and the report ended up quitting. The project came in late, as I expected. This happened multiple times and in multiple cases it was direct interference from higher nodes in the chain - neither us in management or the labor below us were able to optimize at all. The product as a whole ended up shipping multiple years late due to lots of smaller-scale interference like that.
Yeah some middle manager at the next layer up, had a local optimization to spend only the budget they'd allotted. So, the 'screw you' to the manager below.
I think you're redefining 'local optimization' until it covers all behaviour. It's trivially true that everyone acts according to their incentives, extrinsic and intrinsic.
Yep. Google management is unusual relative to management at many other companies; it's less direction and more cat-herding. Engineer empowerment is so high that managers don't have many of the tools in their toolbox for managing that they do at other companies.
...
On this specific case, the sourcer who contacted this Apple employee should not have and will be terminated within the hour. We are scrubbing the sourcer’s records to ensure she did not contact anyone else.
...
From: Shona Brown (Google VP of Human Resources)
Appropriate response. Please make a public example of this termination within the group. Please also make it a very strong part of new hire training for the group. I want it clear that we have a zero-tolerance policy for violating our policies. This should (hopefully) prevent future occurrences.
From Eric Schmidt:
Steve, as a followup we investigated the recruiter’s actions and she violated our policies. Apologies again on this and I’m including a portion of the email I received from our head of recruiting [Arnnon Geshuri—M.A.]. Should this ever happen again please let me know immediately and we will handle. Thanks !! Eric
From Steve Jobs:
:)
From Sergei Brin:
Wow, Steve used a smiley. God, I never got one of those.
Yeah at the highest management levels, managers (VPs?) are responsible to CEO direction.
But at middle manager levels (hundreds of people, not a handful, in very large companies) they're not directly responsible to the CEO. Nor are they directly responsible to the customer/market. They're in 'middle management limbo' where all they have to work with, is local incentives. Usually financial - optimize the budget for results.
Sadly, this usually ends with middle managers trying to maximize their budget and minimize their required output, to increase their chances of success. Which means, the most expensive product possible.
That's a much more general point than the specific one at issue, which is the CEOs illegally conspiring to not hire staff from each other and terminating someone who refused to go along with the illegal conspiracy. This wasn't something the managers organically came up with.
Wage fixing aside, doesn't it shock anyone to see them talking about people in this way? "the sourcer... will be terminated within the hour", "please make a public example of this termination"? You can almost hear them gloating about the crucifixion they're organising
That email exchange is totally lacking any empathy (which is very typical of psychopathy [IANAD]) toward the ones affected, ie. the sourcer who is being fired and the employees whose livelihoods are being illegally depressed.
I believe you misquoted the source. The "Appropriate response..." quote is attributed to Google’s VP for Human Resources, Shona Brown, not Eric Schmidt.
Given the high level attention involved - direct emails between Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt - I'd fully expect that policy to bleed over into "don't interview/hire" to avoid any appearance of having recruited them.
I received damages because I was employed by one of the companies found guilty in the conspiracy. The settlement was so low that the judge threw it out initially.
The fact that they didn’t interview me is just the real outcome of their policy. They called me, unprompted, about 2 months after I left Apple.
I interviewed at Google. They didn't want to hire me, but called me back every year for five years to ask what I was up to until I asked them to stop. That's not normal. I even remember when Google started hiring in the early aughts. Instead of asking for resumes from you directly, they asked you to submit the resumes of any smart people you know. That's not normal.
When I was in undergrad, a Google recruiter found my resume and contacted me about an internship. Google decided I didn't have enough background and they wouldn't even offer me a phone interview - meaning they made the decision purely on that same resume. Fair enough, they probably sent it to an engineer who disagreed. But two days later, another recruiter with no knowledge of the first messaged me about my "very interesting resume".
I still hear from their recruiters at semi-random, each saying they're my "new point of contact at Google". Sometimes there's nothing for a year, then I'll get two "new points of contact' within one week. Recruiting is always a mess, but it's a bit surprising to see an in-house team get up to the same antics I expect from third party services.
The most recent approach was the most persuasive, though:
Dear [appplicant],
I'm writing to because I saw your resume and I think you could be a great fit for Google. I'm particularly interested in your work with [background], which I think prepares you very well for [position].
I wouldn't be surprised if they stole this from academic hiring. It's well known that, when professors go up for tenure at Harvard, their recommenders are required to list other people they think Harvard might want to consider hiring for the spot.
Did you have to interact with a lawyer? There've been a few times where I think it would have been to my advantage to talk to a lawyer about corporate wrongdoings, but I've never known how to go about it, and have zero experience dealing with them.
Wow. Now, I wouldn't be surprised if someone told me that their engagement in the "make software development more accessible" thing is actually intended to increase supply, and then decrease wages accordingly.
What does this have to do with OP's article? These non-poaching agreements (Wall Street has them also) are not related to Union law. I doubt it's even the same people in the company that write these two different policies.
They will probably get an extremely high and disproportionate severance package as is American tradition. But nobody even similar will ever get hired again. Instead Google probably will just pay consultants on how to keep employees in line without them noticing. Perhaps internal data sharing will also be restricted more.
I've thought about this a bit. I don't think we'd get much public sympathy from a working conditions standpoint- generally if you're working for the right place you can arguably make more money than most of your non-engineer peers (look at a percentile breakdown of your annual income if you don't believe me).
I think the way a union like this could succeed is by fighting Big Brother-esque projects and refusing to work on initiatives such as Project Butterfly. Sell it as "we refuse to work on technology that will objectively make you (the layman's) life worse". Once we hit a critical mass we'd have a much bigger say over what projects do and don't get built, and anyone who scabs is arguably on the wrong side of the moral coin or "enabling Big Brother/technocratic billionaires".
This isn't to say that tech workers should be the ultimate moral arbiter, but having a non-financially driven check would at least help.
I think I agree on the public sympathy point, but if anything I think tech workers should assume they will never have public support. Bargaining collectively is the only way that the average tech worker will be able to take steps that might make the public feel as if they can trust us to be on their side. Given what many of our employers do (collectively, as a company) it's hard to expect the average member of the public to look at that and assume tech workers are fighting the good fight.
I think it's entirely plausible for a tech worker's union to build public support around any number of popular causes, e.g. "want facebook to stop listening in on your conversations? FB Local 404 did that for you" or "Sick of Instacart stealing your shoppers' tips? So is the Instacart Developers' Guild" and so on.
I don't think that I'll ever have any sympathy for workers telling business what projects they are willing to work on. If you don't like the kind of work you're supposed to be doing - seek employment at different place.
This. Developers are a very powerful party, but completely unorganized. Everything relies on software and not everyone can build it. We make things that make the world better, but we also make things that make the world a lot worse. If we could group together and have some kind of “do no harm” oath and protections around that, the world would be a better place.
As far as I can tell there's no legal protection for people who attempt to organize or strike for reasons other than working conditions.
Is there any precedent to suggest that workers in the US would be able to refuse the carry out a lawful business strategy set by shareholders without risk of being fired?
there is seemingly a big coordinated push around this idea but i dont really understand it
is this about "soft skill" tech jobs in particular or programming jobs too?
if it's for programmers then i'm completely confused as to why?...
programming is a skilled field. my skills/skill level is unique to me as yours are to you. i dont want my earning potential to be bogged down by some collective bargaining agreement
> earning potential to be bogged down by some collective bargaining agreement
A union doesn't have to touch wages in tech, they aren't a problem. But it would be there if wages started to get bad. It could instead focus on things like work/life balance, privacy issues, etc.
Lots of parallels with SAG, too, IMO. You don't have to bog down the top earners very much to keep a whole lot of people down the ladder from getting shit on too badly, and providing a ton of support to people earning their way to the top who might not make it there without that help.
For the same reason, I don’t think movie actors could ever unionize. They’re skills and talents are obviously very unique to them (I’d argue far more so than developers). Certainly the pay scales between actors of different talents seems to agree with that.
Or, professional football players. Each is pretty unique in their talents. Again, their pay scales differ vastly based on those talents. They could never successfully unionize.
Except both of those fields have strong unions, and collective bargaining, while still allowing individuals with different talents to get paid individually.
I did a double-take when I read the first sentence, then realized you were joking!
For clarification (for other sloppy readers like me), actors are organized in the Screen Actors' Guild, and NFL players are represented by the NFL Players Association.
unions take care of themselves and people with jobs
they get salaries up by restricting/reducing the number of people in the workforce
so, my question to you is: in a field that already struggles to attract minorities, which will be the lucky ones to miss out on a job so that you can be paid more?
i mean i get the appeal. once you get yours and you're in, why burn down the staircase you used to get there. being on top is nice. staying on top is nicer!
it'll be way more fun when a small elite minority get to choose from thousands of jobs and 10X their income. the rest should just wait patiently for their chance to "go pro", join the A league and finally make a living doing what they love!
No we don’t. We are probably the most privileged workers in the world. If we are mistreated, we can quit and get another job down the street, likely with a raise. It’s not worth trading for all the bullshit that comes along with unions.
Both the DOJ antitrust action under the Sherman act as well as the civil class action prevailed in the tech workers wages case, so that seems to indicate ample teeth on that particular issue. And they didn’t even require union dues to fund another giant political bureaucracy, deducted from all of our paychecks in perpetuity, to do it.
Also, organized labor only gains it’s power through contract law and state law (especially in non-right-to-work states, where it’s illegal to opt out of a union and cross the picket line), so this argument doesn’t really work.
Unions get most of their power from their ability to organize mass collective action.
Their leverage in contract negotiations comes entirely from their ability to organize mass action.
Their rights under state law are derived entirely from their political power arising from their ability to organize mass action.
And notably, with respect to the SV anti poaching case: the companies won that case because they ended up paying only a few thousand dollars to each affected worker instead of the hundreds of thousands per employee they would have owed if the case hadn't settled for pennies on the dollar.
A union absolutely would have protected its employees from being exploited so badly. (And note--unions can be organized to respect individual bargaining power, like they are with the SAG, where they set minimum pay scales and benefits but not maximums.)
As others are stating, there is more to unions than pay and working conditions, so being privileged doesn't mean we shouldn't do it. What bullshit do you foresee?
Some issues are across the industry. In a union, you get to decide what you and your coworkers want to bargain about. It's just organizing coworkers so you have a bigger ability to change things than you'd have all alone.
That's the same mentality that longshoremen had before the shipping container and coal miners had before we started importing cheap coal from the East and switching to green energy.
A union would not have solved that. Instead, it would likely accelerate it, like it has with the UAW. Unions don’t fix the economics of globalization. Plus, I am not concerned that something similar will happen anyway.
So a union's purpose is to stop any human progress because it might temporarily inconvenience a subset of the population?
I am told a switch to green energy is necessary to save the climate. Shipping containers enabled affordable products to be sold globally which has improved the standard of living for many. Should we ban modern modes of transport so all the horse drawn carriage factory employees can get their jobs back?
That's an extremely uncharitable interpretation of the utility of unions.
Yes, unions add some friction to an overnight change that is made by grinding up the futures and fates of a company's workforce. That doesn't need to mean it "stops all human progress," for example, it can manifest instead as a requirement that company switching to green energy take a chunk of the money from efficiency gains to give their coal miners comfortable retirements.
If the mistreatment is for example regarding an individual's behaviour, usually some manager, it's much better to talk to a union rep than HR for obvious reasons.
Unions as an abstract idea are valuable; however the implementation is often a nightmare of protectionism. Also unions value conformity which is not exactly a programmer strong suit. Imagine the horrible processes you are stuck in today and double or triple them. I have worked in union places with reasonable interactions between management and labor and places where you were required to negotiate with 4 unions to move a box from one cube to another. Programmers also tend to be idealistic and unions are often hard core realists which might wind up disappointing to work for. I am not convinced any existing union would be able to represent a large group of programmers as opposed to a large group of longshoreman without the programmers jumping ship.
SAG doesn’t exist for the movie stars. It’s for the nobodies and the up-and-comers to avoid getting screwed by excessive unpaid work for “exposure” or who get squeezed into long term contracts before they have star power.
I’d like to see stats on union participation among doctors and lawyers. I’d bet it’s vanishingly small, especially for lawyers.
SAG protections also benefit movie stars. It was created by a group of stars to challenge the enormous commercial leverage of the studios back in the "studio system" era of Hollywood.
Stars have surprisingly little leverage against studios. Only a few actors can consistently sell a movie regardless of quality--currently, only Dwayne Johnson and Tom Cruise. When stars have leverage in negotiations, it's generally because other putative participants (usually investors or producers) have hinged their participation on the participation of one or more specific actors.
I’d like to see stats on union participation among doctors and lawyers. I’d bet it’s vanishingly small, especially for lawyers.
Almost all public sector lawyers belong to a union. This includes those working for the county, state, and federal governments in a legal capacity, as well as those working at most major cities.
The same is generally true of doctors working for the public sector. Notably, in contrast to the legal field, there are a number of doctors unions for doctors employed by private sector employers.
Doctors and lawyers have professional organizations that rate limit entry to their field that functions as a qausi-union in some respects but really doesn't do any collective bargaining with employers. Actors have a union.
Counterpoint: if even the most privileged workers in the world are unionized, it's a strong signal that unionization should be for everybody who is employed by a boss.
Why are you starting your argument with the assumption that unions are good for everyone? That's a very strong statement without any qualifications behind it.
I think unions historically have sometimes been great, and sometimes horrible. Two examples of unions actually making the world a worse place are the police unions and the teachers' unions in the United States.
If you wonder why we can't fix police corruption, it's because the union protects them - so you can't have both. If you wonder why we can't fix education, it's because the union actively defends teachers that are demonstrably bad for learning (and have visible apathy to the point of sleeping in class while "teaching" students) - so you can't have both.
I don't know how you can say police aren't workers - they absolutely are. People are police for their jobs.
The teacher's unions protect teachers at the expense of students. Basically the union doesn't care - at all - about teaching students (it's for the teachers, after all). They only care about stopping teachers from getting fired. It's our youth that suffer from receiving a shitty education. The assumption that "the teacher is always right" is profoundly damaging to our youth. The decline of the American education system (below college) is well studied.
Just to throw out a counterpoint, there are some who feel the education system is not declining, although I disagree. I encourage you to come to your own conclusions.
Ok, you can argue that police have benefits in their work from unions similar to other public sector unions. I was being a bit snarky since police would be the people to carry out violent action against union activity. Police serve the interests of the capitalist class who own the corporations, so that was all i was saying. But i think their union is harmful, too.
As far as teachers unions, that is an argument that a lot of people would disagree with but i've decided i don't want to discuss it in detail here.
I really don't think the world is black and white, but the more I learned about the teachers' unions in the US, I came to realize it actually comes down to one thing:
Do you value the teachers or the students more?
It has become so hostile, the dichotomy really is that stark. All attempts to negotiate with the teachers' union, even offering them substantial bonuses to fire teachers well known for terrible performance, have been met with "fuck you" by the union.
You're right, not everybody will agree. Some people will side with the teachers. I think those people are ruining future generations.
Show me a school where "the teacher is always right", it has largely been replaced with "the parent is always right".
The movie you link "Waiting for Superman" spends allot of time talking about the charter school movement which is not mentioned in your post. Arguably charter schools are an extension of "the parent is always right" motto as it is touted as giving the parent more choices. To talk about the decline of education and this movie without mentioning the role of charter schools is a disservice to the movie and the discussion.
> Show me a school where "the teacher is always right"
It has nothing to do with the schools. You can't fire teachers with tenure (edit: actually it's even worse - this is for any teachers not just with tenure) except under pretty outrageous circumstances. So even if they show up drunk, they are still gainfully employed.
I get what it’s like to be a young idealist, but I just want to plant a thought in your head.
If we have universal disdain for police and perpetuate the idea that they are thugs, what type of workforce do you think will be willing to take that job, and how hard do you think the existing workforce will be motivated to behave better? In your own job, or in school, do you tend to be motivated more by encouragement, or by being made to feel like shit?
If we view it as respectful and honorable work, we are more likely to attract a workforce who values these things. When people are judged prematurely, I find that they tend to live up to those judgments, for better or for worse.
Unionization isn’t for everybody. I’ve been a member of a union. My family members are union members. I have to assume most of the people behind this tech union idea have not had much exposure to unions.
Unions are terrible, and only appropriate when your employer or industry is even more terrible than a union. That does apply to many industries unfortunately, but not Google employees. Not even close. It’s also a safe bet that tech workers will earn less under a union.
A family member works in an industry that has only a single employer within about a 500 mile radius. He has absolutely no leverage and he needs a union. Even under the net-beneficial union, he’s had many negative effects, including losing his job and requiring his family to move, because of the seniority rules that many unions have. Too many older union members moved to his (more prosperous) city, and they get scheduling precedence, so he was reduced to an on-call who was never called. He eventually got “permission” to transfer and was able to move to a remote town where his lower seniority would still allow him to get work.
I constantly hear of stories where senior union members are not doing their jobs and taking the spot of someone who really wants to be there, but it’s nearly impossible to fire them due to union rules and their proficiency in gaming the system.
Don’t get me started on teachers unions. If you have kids, that one should really piss you off.
Something is missing from your family member's story.
Seniority rules in unions are chapter-based, and chapters themselves are city- or business-based. If someone is moving in from a different chapter, that seniority generally doesn't carry over to their new chapter, and even when seniority does carry over it can't result in the transferring member displacing another union member's job.
The problem is, that the large unions in the US are terrible. They keep selling out their members instead of organizing struggle! And very often their leadership is corrupt; and their structure is centralized; and they bargain over your head etc. Just look at what Fiat-Chrysler workers are saying about the UAW these days:
It's a bit like saying that since the Republican and Democratic party are, on the whole, corrupt and subservient to corporate interests (which they are), then political organizations are a bad idea.
It isn't - you just need independent, uncorrupted, accountable, distributed-power organizations. And it's the same with unions.
Right, because tech workers at large SV companies have no choice but to work every waking hour doing grueling labor for meager pay with no benefits. /s
Do these people even understand how the rest of the country lives? Perhaps some of those well compensated but eager to organize tech workers should focus their organization efforts where it can actually help people. For example, setting up a union for the gig economy workers that deliver their food, drive them around, pack their amazon packages, or run their errands
If Uber tech workers organized, they'd have a larger voice to support the drivers if that's what they decided to bargain over. And yes, it's common for unions to fight for expanding the union workforce at their company.
These types of victories build on one another. If you truly care about the gig workers, the best thing you can do is organize YOUR OWN workplace.
> Do these people even understand how the rest of the country lives? Perhaps some of those well compensated but eager to organize tech workers should focus their organization efforts where it can actually help people.
Unions (or some type of effective worker organization) should be an all-workers thing, not a some-workers thing.
> For example, setting up a union for the gig economy workers that deliver their food, drive them around, pack their amazon packages, or run their errands
Tech workers can't "set up" a union for gig economy workers, that would be patronizing and ineffective. The gig economy workers need to do that for themselves if their union is to have any teeth. What tech workers can do is have a union that can give support to the gig worker union.
Also the tech workers who bask in the gig economy are probably a different group than the tech workers who are trying to organize, and it's misleading to conflate them.
Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi has a good bit in it on the perils and triumphs of the Mississippi River Boat Pilots. Their special status on the ante-bellum Mississippi has a lot of parallels to today's tech workers and the challenges you all face. I'll spoil it a bit and say that things did not end up well for the pilots. Techies would be wise to heed their lessons.
Chapters 14 and 15 contain the majority of the lessons of the pilots:
I'm sympathetic to the idea, but I've also yet to encounter a decent pitch. Pitches I've heard so far:
* A union could support privacy efforts
* A union could support other unions
* A union could advance political goals
* A union could impose moral rules for projects members are allowed to work on
None of these are actually reasons I'd want to sign up for an organization where the core value proposition is surrendering autonomy for collective bargaining to improve my working conditions. These are the pitches of people who want to use the political power and funds of a union for their personal political goals.
I want to hear a unionization pitch that's grounded in things relevant to my work. No more overweening unions trying to do everything and sacrificing the workers, thanks. I remember Detroit.
Couldn't the union have some sort of democratic structure for deciding what political goals are popular and enforced? In that case it wouldn't really be any one person's political goals.
The reason these (ex) Googlers are trying to pressure Google's management to drop certain projects is because they know they can't win the argument to eliminate America's borders at the national or even state level via the normal political process. Their goals are not popular and people do not want them to be enforced, hence the dubious and unethical strategies these activists-cum-workers rely on.
Maybe the case for many political matters but there are indeed many things which DO have broad political support that are not currently practiced by large corporations. A union might help for those cases.
Any abusive practices with broad aversion in population. I would have to think of all the examples. I know there are things many don't want Facebook to be doing. Someone below said this: `e.g. "want facebook to stop listening in on your conversations? FB Local 404 did that for you" or "Sick of Instacart stealing your shoppers' tips? So is the Instacart Developers' Guild" and so on.`
I don't know who Instacart are but Facebook don't listen in on your conversations, do they? WhatsApp has end to end encryption and FB Messenger is getting it.
I asked for examples because this sort of wafer thin anti-corporate virtue signalling is insufficient to convince me to pick a fight with my own employer in 'solidarity'. Like most of the population I don't worry about Facebook or Google invading my privacy, instead I enjoy their free services. If they did something I really hated I'd just stop using them: there are other search engines and Facebook isn't especially critical. I already use it much less than I used to. Nothing they're doing justifies being labelled as abusive, let alone taking explicit action.
This sounds like a list of disputes I would like my union to stay out of. A union representing me has one job: to look after the working conditions and compensation of myself and my colleagues. All this other stuff is a series of distractions.
I could have sworn I pointed to this exact behavior as an anti-pattern just a few comments ago, and was told not to worry because democracy. Given how readily this particular goal cropped up again, I suddenly find myself less than completely reassured. I suddenly find myself wondering, once again, if the people who want me to join a union actually care what I want or just want power.
When I have colleagues that have children, I would expect our union to negotiate for parental leave policies. I might expect some minor amount of support to go towards encouraging local politicians to advance that item, but it should be little more than an endorsement of the idea.
When I have colleagues who suffer from diabetes, I would expect our union to ensure excellent health care is provided as part of the contract. I would not expect our union to try to involve itself in something drastically removed from its core competency like how research is managed and pharmaceuticals are regulated. I would certainly not want our union to expend resources on the matter - there are guaranteed to be more substantive matters closer to home that would benefit from those same resources.
You're absolutely right. A union can, should, and must represent a rebalancing of power. It's just perhaps possible that it's not appropriate for this rebalancing to extend into every possible sphere. This is doubly true in a context of limited resources.
In theory, yes! You're absolutely, completely right.
In practice, democratic processes have a tendency to be less than fully detail-oriented and allow a reasonable amount of latitude in leadership. I'm maybe the smallest bit reluctant to sign up for a system where the people doing the organizing are explicitly dreaming about abusing leadership positions.
Unions are businesses. They provide labor in exchange for compensation in a mutually negotiated contract. Thus unions are unquestionably a capitalist constuct.
Perhaps I've missed something? Can you help me if there's anything I've overlooked?
A union is a democratic structure itself, so it could indeed organize around workplace-specific concerns and its members could vote to abstain from larger political actions.
I suppose it could, but I've never heard of a union that does. Generally the union leadership has the power to decide on their own what the union's goals are, and the democratic structure is only there to elect leadership and approve things like strikes and new contracts. (To some degree that has to be true - collective bargaining doesn't work if the union representatives don't have the power to make commitments on the union's behalf.)
A union could also put an end to crunch time, a union could ensure better pay (or pay at all, to hear some salaried people talk about it) for on-call time, a union could protect politically unpopular people from arbitrary firing (i.e. they could be fired, but it would have to follow a process), a union could give workers a seat on the board (codetermination, as it's called), a union could establish a slimmer pay gap between workers and management/shareholders.
A union does not mean: pay/rank based solely on seniority, that you can't plug in your own equipment on your desk, that do-nothing people stick around forever. These are a few of the popular disparagements of unions that are not a built-in function of a unionized workplace.
Better pay, better conditions, and protections against arbitrary firing are all reasonable pitches. Why has nobody I've worked with ever thought that far? Rhetorical, I suppose. Probably too many DSA meetings.
Seniority pay, strict work rules, tenure, and more are all products of the incentives around contract negotiation. Those incentives can easily turn toxic. They're the results of needing to have something to bring back to the membership as a victory over Management, producing the equivalent of pork barrel spending.
As you say, these are not built-in. They're just failure modes of a particular political system.
Please make a public example of this termination within the group. Please also make it a very strong part of new hire training for the group. I want it clear that we have a zero-tolerance policy for violating our [anti-competitive, wage suppressing] policies.
A union could ensure better QOL for tech workers by:
1) capturing more of the value the workers create for them, vs. for capital, in direct dollar compensation or in other benefits, by bargaining from a much stronger position than individual workers, and
2) providing easier and more even access to counsel, support, and protection against all sorts of personal and professional abuses, at work,
Where #2 is a bucket that holds a whole bunch of really nice stuff, including ensuring management doesn't fail to provide what was won in #1 in lots of small ways that aren't worth fighting for an individual but are for a larger group.
Basically the same core things any well-functioning union provides.
Do we live on the same planet? Tech jobs are insanely awesome compared to basically every other job out there. I've consulted for unicorns, the amenities for employees are ridiculous. Employees are incredibly sought after and can (and many do) regularly shop themselves around for better offers.
That doesn't mean there isn't more value to extract for workers—very probably there is—or more that could be done to even out availability of things like parental leave, for example, or that an easy, cheap, acceptable route to professional and legal counsel & insurances outside the direct control of the company one is working for wouldn't be very valuable—and besides, the overwhelming majority of tech jobs aren't the kind you're talking about, even restricting ourselves to the US.
[EDIT] more to the point, if your company doesn't say things like "you know, this contract pays really well, no need to negotiate for more even if we think we could get it" there's no reason employees should have that kind of attitude about their pay & work conditions.
So what? The existence of someone else's profit is not justification for it to be taken. The moral justification for unions is that they prevent mistreatment of employees, not that they can transfer as much of the company's profit as possible to employees.
Do you also oppose companies negotiating "unfair" contracts that extract "too much" of some other company's profit?
[EDIT] I mean... wow, is it immoral if an individual negotiates with the aim to gain as much pay as possible, or only if workers band together to do so more effectively?
I would oppose a cartel of companies acting in a way that extracts too much money from consumers. We have a whole area of law for dealing with this. Unions are a cartel of employees who use the threat of financial harm to limit the freedom of employers and individual workers from freely entering into mutually beneficial work arrangements. I think this is justified if the purpose is to prevent employers from exploiting workers. I don't think it's justified if their sole purpose is to use power to extract more value from the employer.
> Unions are a cartel of employees who use the threat of harm to limit the freedom of employers and individual workers from freely entering into mutually beneficial work arrangements.
Individual workers are in a weaker negotiating position than employers, so without a union it's highly likely that, on average, they are receiving lower compensation than they might absent that weaker bargaining position (the short-version explanation being that, in the typical case, it harms an employee more to miss an opportunity than for a company to pass on an employee, simply due to the nature of the two entities). I don't see why employees being in a weak bargaining position does not cause "harm" but their banding together to be in a stronger position does, nor why, given that position, they should be expected to voluntarily make worse deals than they could. Further, we collectively choose, via government, to permit such a thing as a corporation to exist in the first place, so in my view there's no natural or moral argument for the state of their being in a better negotiating position than labor, and even if we go on to arrange things such that they are made weaker than labor, somehow—not just equal or less-dominant—it's gonna take more than the simple fact of things being that way to convince me they're being harmed in some sense that should make me feel bad for them or that some moral wrong is being committed.
I don't think corporations, provided their privileges and their very existence by force of law, are being particularly harmed in some sense worthy of moral assignment by having to deal with strong collective bargaining entities for labor, nor that we can call gains in negotiations made by those labor entities unfair or immoral if they aim to gain the best deals they can without also having to label much of Capitalism as such (I might follow you down that road, actually, as I'm not sure it's wrong and it seems, at first glance, consistent, at least).
> Individual workers are in a weaker negotiating position than employers
Are they? In normal conditions (which seem to largely prevail in most parts of the U.S. labor market), the negotiating positions of both parties are fundamentally determined, not by either party, but by unrelated 3rd parties who are participating in the same labor market. Employers would like to pay as little as possible and employees would like to earn as much as possible. But the ability of both parties to achieve their desired outcome is dependent on their ability to walk away and obtain a better price (whether they're buying or selling labor).
Yes. Being rejected by an employer in the typical case hurts a prospective employee more than it hurts the employer doing the rejecting. I mean, look at who applies to whom and who’s usually perceived as being the stronger party in interviews. That tells the story right there.
[edit] how about this: you find a case where a normal employee tells a company they need to spend a half hour typing their job ad details and past pay for the same position into a web form especially for that applicant before they’ll even be considered, then also reformat their ad to match new specs the applicant gives them, and submit that to the applicant as a word document, and the company actually does it, and I’ll eat my hat. Employees are plainly the weaker supplicant in those interactions. Yes they’re “free” to do otherwise, but their job search will... go poorly.
Have you ever been in the hiring side of the table? Employers take a risk when they hire. They’re signing up to make large payments twice a month starting immediately. Yet they won’t know if the hire is any good for months. Both parties are taking risks and committing resources. That’s part of kicking the tires on a new economic partnership.
> I would oppose a cartel of companies acting in a way that extracts too much money from consumers. We have a whole area of law for dealing with this. Unions are a cartel of employees who use the threat of financial harm to limit the freedom of employers and individual workers from freely entering into mutually beneficial work arrangements.
How so? An employer has a monopoly of jobs at a particular workplace, so why not let a union have a monopoly of workers to fill the jobs at that workplace. IIRC, union representation is at the workplace level, and different unions can compete to represent the workers at that workplace.
> The moral justification for unions is that they prevent mistreatment of employees, not that they can transfer as much of the company's profit as possible to employees.
In your opinion. In my view, one of the many moral justifications of unions is that they create a more even playing field between workers and already organized management/capital, and that includes the workers receiving a greater share of the profits the they had an essential role in creating.
A worker without a union is like a defendant without a lawyer.
> A worker without a union is like a defendant without a lawyer.
That's a bad analogy. Defendants cannot avoid a hearing. Employees can just get another job. Starting businesses is hard. It entails a lot of risk. Risk that was never taken by employees. And employees are not bound to the fortunes of the company the way owners are. If the company loses money or goes belly-up, the employees get new jobs. But the owners must simply bear the loss.
No, I simply see it as one party to a transaction, similar to any of the company's other suppliers.
Editing to expand: Being able to depend on a regular paycheck is a helluva thing. Sure, you don't participate in the upside of a company. But you don't participate in the downside, either. That's the bargain that labor makes. If you don't like the bargain, then take some risk and start a company. Most people prefer a steady paycheck, though.
> That's a bad analogy. Defendants cannot avoid a hearing. Employees can just get another job.
I don't share your quibbles, but all right. How about this:
A worker without a union is like going to court without a lawyer.
A lot of court cases are optional. You can always just not demand what you're owed or pay whatever your asked. If you lose, just hope the next person you do business with will be more trustworthy.
> Starting businesses is hard. It entails a lot of risk. Risk that was never taken by employees. And employees are not bound to the fortunes of the company the way owners are. If the company loses money or goes belly-up, the employees get new jobs. But the owners must simply bear the loss.
So what? None of that is a convincing argument that non-business-owners should not benefit form organization. It's not like owners are the only ones taking a risk [1], workers do too. Do you think they somehow fantastically shift into equivalent new jobs whenever their laid off? Workers invest in company-specific knowledge and put down roots near their employer that are harder relocate than capital, for instance.
You also oddly fail to differentiate between groups like the struggling small business owner and the private equity firm billionaire who lays off 10,000 workers just because he'd prefer that he and his shareholders be richer. Whatever sympathy the former deserve is not due to the latter.
[1] they're the only ones risking capital, not the only ones taking a risk.
Yes, employees face a hardship if their employer fails. But the hardship is temporary and they are able to get a new job and replace their stream of income. The business owners, on the other hand, lose a stream of income that is fundamentally irreplaceable (since it was tied inextricably with the business). The owners are, thus, invested in a business in a way that employees are not. That doesn't mean I think that business owners are some oppressed class. I am merely pointing out why the owners have no obligation to share in the success of the company beyond the wages which are mutually agreed to.
Here's another way to put it: do you think employee pay should be reduced if a company in unprofitable?
> A worker without a union is like a defendant without a lawyer.
That's a bad analogy, but good unions are about self-organization of workers, not being assisted by _external_ factors.
It's also a bad analogy because unionization is, as its name suggests, forming a collective from individuals. The represented defendant is still just one person facing the justice system - and can thus hardly ever challenge its bounds.
So - unions are important, but think bigger! Take over the playing field, don't let it continue being controlled by management/capital.
Where does the money from to fund those amenities? The surplus generated from their wage labor. You can pay someone $300,000 a year and expect to make $400,000 from their contributions.
It can absolutely be the case the workers are well treated and still be losing their surplus value.
As I replied in another comment, the moral justification for unions is to prevent mistreatment of workers, not to transfer as much of the wealth created by a company to its employees as possible.
I'm not sure who defines 'the moral justification for unions' but I see a moral justification just from balancing the power dynamic between the company and the individual worker. Negotiating as a single worker against a company one has profound disadvantages.
> prevent mistreatment of workers, not to transfer as much of the wealth created by a company to its employees as possible.
The wealth is created by the workers, not the company. And some would argue that keeping too large of a share of that wealth is, in fact, a mistreatment of workers.
Moreover, I'm finding this notion that some economic actors have more "moral" right to a big slice of the profit-pie than others really hard to pin down. As in, it sure seems like the idea collapses as soon as you breathe in its direction, unless I'm missing something big.
[EDIT] that is, I don't follow why it's fine (presumably) for companies to seek to maximize returns, negotiating as a large block of people pooling their labor and capital, but not for workers to do that.
I own a business. I have undertaken lots of work and risk to get this business off the ground. Why should someone else, who has risked nothing, be entitled to anything other than a reasonable work environment and wages that both parties agree to if I decide to hire them?
Why shouldn't they find a way to negotiate from a stronger position and gain a higher price for their time, if they can? Wouldn't you, negotiating a contract for your businesses services with another? Entitled's got nothing to do with it.
If unions are just about extracting higher wages and not about combatting injustice, then, IMO, labor organizing should not be protected by law, since it's desired end is to use the threat of financial harm to force companies and individuals to enter into arrangements that they would not obtain otherwise. Should a company's suppliers enjoy legal protection so that they can band together for the purpose of using threat of financial harm to extract higher prices from the company and preventing the company from doing business with other suppliers?
There's an information imbalance. Free markets only function correct with complete information. You as an employer have access to data on market trends that I as an employee do not. One function of unions is to remove that imbalance, either by removing the ability to negotiate entirely, or by providing employees with more complete information. This leads to a more efficient labor market. Presumably an efficient allocation of labor is what you want, right?
Unions require a moral justification for the legal protections they enjoy because they are a cartel of employees who use the threat of financial harm to prevent employers and individual workers from freely entering into mutually beneficial work arrangements. Generally speaking, some special justification is required to curtail the freedom of an individual or group in order to benefit some other individual or group. In the case of unions, that justification is that some employers held so much power in their relationship with employees that they were able to make the employees suffer to an extent that we find unacceptable. The justification was not merely that there was an extra 10% of salary that could be extracted from the company.
You are assuming that companies somehow hold more power in negotiating with their employees. But it's not at all clear to me that that's the case. Both parties are able to walk away from negotiations and fulfill their needs with other parties. There is a symmetry there that speaks against there being any power imbalance. What is the mechanism by which you think companies wield more power than employees?
Things I'd consider in addition to the two excellent items you mentioned:
3) Negotiating better IP control. Side projects, open source, etc. are locked down at various companies.
4) Better treatment for oncall. I know folks who have had to work for 17 consecutive hours for an incident and got nothing.
5) Better treatment for crunch -- tech workers in games have this particularly bad, but it's not limited to just that industry.
6) Salary minimums
7) More control over how the company outsources/contracts with workers
8) All sorts of other side benefits that could be collectively funded -- union libraries, training, networks, publications, resources for new professionals, discounts on union developed software, etc.
9) Parental leave, sick time, and other basic benefits
Edit:
10) Ensure and oversee processes to protect people who end up on the public stage. If you believe cancel culture is a thing, maybe having a union rep on hand and an established process for managing firings would be in your best interest.
11) Forced arbitration is another thing I'd consider talking with a union about.
So many people have this notion of a labor union built on what it means in an industrial context. But there's plenty of other models that could be applied where you don't have to, for example, promote people based on seniority. I wish it was easier to talk about this stuff without people hand waving away the idea immediately.
I'm never going to go on strike to protect the rights of bizarre anti-border extremists to harass and stalk their colleagues instead of working. I'm pretty sure that 99% of all developers are just like me. Why would we not side with management here? Google's management has to be the tamest, most worker friendly management in the history of management. It's the very last place where workers need to unionise.
I remember Google a long time ago, nearly 15 years ago now. There was an April 1st when someone managed to find a way to send email anonymously to all of engineering, and sent round a call for unionisation as a joke. We found it quite amusing. The idea that Googlers would unionise wasn't just seen as unserious but literally, an idea worthy of being an April Fools.
- We will refuse to work when management wants to upgrade servers to make them faster (takes our jobs away)
- When they get rid of coconut water in the kitchen (abusive conditions)
- We will conduct coding slowdowns and deliberately insert long-lived bugs when we don't get enough free t-shirts, or when our adjustable chairs have only 5 instead of 7 axes of adjustment
We'd better stand up for ourselves and form a Slack channel, otherwise we may find ourselves making less than $125k fresh out of college, relegated to having to email each other like animals, and we just can't have that.
Only a tiny fraction of tech workers have the conditions you mentioned. You're talking about the top tier jobs of one specialty. Also, ignoring the many ways that conditions are unbalanced in favor of the employer.
I've seen places with separate unions for ordinary workers and for lower- to mid-level management. They have different incentives within the company so it's kinda hard to have the shoulder-to-shoulder, but ultimately both are much weaker than upper management and the company as a whole when it comes to negotiating, so it makes sense.
This will never happen, and for one very simple reason: it is the nature of tech workers to believe that they are smarter than everyone else, and this attitude is antithetical to organization.
Think about it. Do you really think very many tech people you know would be willing to go on strike over things happening to tech people at some other company? Or are they going to just blame the victims for being stupid enough to work for that company in the first place?
It won't happen for a much simpler reason: tech workers are not disenfranchised. They enjoy amazing pay and have tons of options. Tech workers, as a class, are generally not suffering under anyone's yoke, much less the yoke of their employer. Companies are falling over themselves trying to attract talent.
1. Aren't there already lots of unionized workers in Tech?
2. If you need it, you need to set it up. Unions created from the outside are weak at best and collaborationst/employer-controlled at worst. I suggest considering the IWW as a framework:
they're much smaller than UAW or CtW - but their organizational tradition is more decentralized-power, grass-roots-based, and not trying to find accommodation and common ground with employers all the time.
I hope this doesn't stay downvoted, because it best reflects the sad state of labor law.
The MOST they'd get is back-pay if Google loses. But truthfully, most people have to find another job when they lose their job, so that new paycheck is deducted from their "damages" and you subtract what they earned while fired from their backpay.
GENERALLY-speaking, there would not be punitive damages. That's why there's usually no disincentive to not just fire the worker who is organizing. The potential payout is tiny to the company.
That's two cases where politicians jumped the gun to make something that isn't decided yet a decisive campaign issue:
- Elizabeth Warren Ramps Up Attacks on Apple Card Bias Claims
- The four got public support from presidential front-runners Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, who took to Twitter to bash Google for alleged “anti-union” actions.
What if this turns out to go out with a whimper? The Apple Card bias was something unrelated to gender that got blown up by someone popular, and these firings were carefully vetted and are legally justified?
Will these politicians apologize for jumping the gun? I bet they will point out they were the first when it turns out any other way...
The Apple Card bias is a real problem. Who cares whether it's about gender or not? If it's not about gender, the responsibility lies on the bad actor to prove otherwise. The most logical conclusion - based on the events that occurred and the info the general public has - is that it's about gender.
They could have defused the controversy almost immediately by identifying the actual cause and fixing it. Part of the reason the story blew up was that DHH and his wife struggled at length to even get an explanation for the problem or find a human who could fix it. The opacity of that whole machine and its resistance to correction is why it became a fuss. I honestly don't care whether it turns out to be about gender, because the end result of that system is that someone got discriminated against in a way that was indistinguishable from being gender discrimination. In the same fashion, if your pricing algorithm accidentally (due to training set bias or whatever) has a 20% higher chance to overcharge people of color, it doesn't really matter how it got that way. It's a racist algorithm and that doesn't mean you're a racist: It just means you have to fix it.
Similarly, if the firings were carefully vetted and legally justified, they could have done a better job of explaining that rationale to the public. As a former Google employee the public rationale was obviously deceptive in some fashion, and undermines any suspicion I might have had regarding the employees in question. I worked with plenty of people at that company who probably deserved to be fired, but when the company behaves that way in public and selects people in a way that coincidentally undermines union organizing, I know who I'm going to suspect.
It is not even close to reasonable to conclude that the Apple Card thing had anything to do with gender. There is no reason to believe that the end result was because of this. Especially given all of the reports of women getting higher limits than their male spouse. This is almost as logical as concluding that vaccines cause autism.
Why is gender discrimination equivalent to autism and vaccines here? There's lots of standing evidence for gender/race discrimination in finance and zero reliable evidence to support vaccines causing autism. You can come up with a better equivalence than that...
People assumed gender discrimination because you had a couple with good credit scores and the woman was discriminated against by the algorithm. The only data we have indicates that it was gender. Of course there could be some other reason, but the obvious conclusion we have based on the information we've got is gender.
It’s ridiculous because there is no evidence, just misinformed anecdotes. There is no field for gender on the application. The “equivalent” factors cited (income, credit score) are all irrelevant for credit limit decisions, which are primarily based on previous revolving credit usage. Given that DHH owns basecamp as an LLC, and not a corporation - known as a disregard entity for tax purposes - means he is likely putting all business expenses on revolving credit cards, which would create a massive disparity. That’s just one of many plausible explanations. DHH didn’t even understand that he is not in fact in a community property state - although this wouldn’t have been relevant either. And there are many counter-examples that our confirmation bias doesn’t seem to be interested in:
Furthermore, Goldman issued a public statement confirming that they reviewed the complaints and they are not using gender as a parameter. This would be trivial for an investigator to confirm, so it’s unlikely that they’d be stupid enough to outright lie about it.
Jumping to the worst possible conclusion based on a twitter anecdote is not helpful to anybody.
> The Apple Card bias is a real problem. Who cares whether it's about gender or not? If it's not about gender, the responsibility lies on the bad actor to prove otherwise. The most logical conclusion - based on the events that occurred and the info the general public has - is that it's about gender.
And I work with credit risk models and can tell you there is a negligible chance that gender is causing a 20x credit limit increase. No protected variable will have so much influence, and Apple/GS are not even legally allowed to directly reference such variables.
It may be the most logical conclusion for the general public, but all they see is the output of a black box. DHH jumped to conclusions that it had to be something about gender, with n=1.
Who says there is a problem that needs fixing? Demanding that women and men always receive equal limits is not about fairness, it is a very radical notion that makes discriminative credit risk scoring almost impossible.
I am not saying that Apple/GS did not mess up here, and could have been more transparent, but, in their defense: Oftentimes you can't be more transparent (like when Google closes an account for posting something illegal, they have to keep mum, while the user loudly complains online that they got banned for doing nothing), an help desk person is never going to be able to give an explanation for a model decision (this is usually a good thing), and DHH seemed to be barking up the wrong tree all together (what if the different limits were the result of a, completely legal, influencer program or randomized trial?).
It really does matter how it got that way. If 20% of people of color vs. white people have a low income (a non-protected variable), I am perfectly allowed to use that variable to deny them a loan more often, even if the result is that 20% of people of color don't receive a loan. That's not a racist algorithm, however it would be racist if I start ignoring income of certain people as to achieve racial demographic parity in loans.
Similarly, as this is an ongoing investigation now, and they probably anticipated that, Google was probably legally very limited in what they could disclose. I bet some people with all the knowledge of the data - and colleague snooping are shaking their heads at some of the public perception of this case as union-busting.
The opposite of accepting a coincidence once in a while is viewing everything through the lens of intentional discrimination.
> It really does matter how it got that way. If 20% of people of color vs. white people have a low income (a non-protected variable), I am perfectly allowed to use that variable to deny them a loan more often, even if the result is that 20% of people of color don't receive a loan. That's not a racist algorithm, however it would be racist if I start ignoring income of certain people as to achieve racial demographic parity in loans.
It's not that simple. The principle of "disparate impact" means that you can't, in general, make the decision in a way that adversely impacts people of color just because you didn't directly consider race in your decision.
You can use income in your decision because considering income "is necessary to achieve one or more substantial, legitimate, non-discriminatory interests." Income is directly related to ability to repay a loan, so you need to consider it. You can't just use any old variable you want to. You can't deny people for a loan based on what genre of music they listen to, because that has no justifiable connection to whether they will repay a loan.
Everything, including income, is eventually correlated with race. The point I was making counters "does not matter how, just the outcome matters": The model disapproved you not because you are black, but because you have a low income. There is societal racism there that needs addressing with policy and regulation, not by handicapping your model by throwing away non-protected variables. The -perfectly legal-outcome will be that fewer people of color receive a loan.
I know that you can't use just any old variable, but I tried enough to know that music genre would probably be an informative feature (dibs on providing loans to classical - and Judeo-Christian religious music lovers, you are free to underwrite the dubstep - and ghetto rap fans).
Music preferences undoubtedly would be correlated with risk. You still can't use them because of disparate impact.
To get away with making a decision in a way that has disparate impact, you need to have a legitimate need to be making the decision that way. In the case of income, you can justify needing to use it in your decision, because income is directly connected to ability to repay. In the case of music preferences, you can't, because there is no direct connection to loan risk.
> If it's not about gender, the responsibility lies on the bad actor to prove otherwise.
How do we know they are bad actor if we don't yet know what really happened? Imposing guilt on someone until they prove themselves innocent is a bad way to run a society.
It is astonishing the continuous attempts by the highest paid workers, in one of the most well-known companies in the world, to keep trying to bring down the "system". The only thing i can think of is "bite the hand that feeds you".
Do the extremely "woke" crowd working in such high tech companies know what could happen to their salaries and perks if they are to be part of a highly regulated industry, or they haven't thought about the second/third order effects yet?
Do these supporters know that they can go work at other places that don't pay $200k+, so that they too can go live like the regular people?
I'm pretty sure that there are N number of refugee camps that could use a basic application built to keep track of refugees. But of course, that doesn't come with 3 chef prepared meals per day and dry cleaning in house.
Oh, the delicious irony! Did you know that not 100 years ago, workers were murdered for going on strike for things like work weeks lower than 60-80 hours? Companies had their own police forces, and they paid you in company scrip. A lot of blood was shed so you could be tone-deaf and ignorant of the labor movement in the United States, all from a comfy office chair and with plenty of time left over to see your family at the end of the day.
If left to their own devices, companies will exploit workers. I don’t want to argue the morality of it, but it happens over and over again. Amazon workers are having the same fights their great grandparents did (fighting for the right not to get killed at work, the right to a decent wage, the right to a goddamn bathroom break that doesn’t get you fired). Tech workers aren’t immune either. Sure, we’re more mobile than most, but that’s still not great leverage. Your employer has more power over you than you do over them. Without a union, this is always true. If you’re fine being potentially fucked that way, that’s your prerogative.
The issue is I don’t believe you’ve ever worked in such places. I also know such “evil places” aren’t good at what they do, hence the weird tactics and shitty management you’re hyperbolizing.
I've frequently seen leftist labour activists claim unions are responsible for the concept of a weekend. But that's not true, and it makes me doubtful about all claims of supposed union "wins".
Wikipedia talks about the history of the weekend. It starts by observing that a day of rest is a feature of society for millenia and has religious roots. Then it says:
The present-day concept of the relatively longer 'week-end' first arose in the industrial north of Britain in the early part of the nineteenth century[1] and was originally a voluntary arrangement between factory owners and workers allowing Saturday afternoon off from 2pm in agreement that staff would be available for work sober and refreshed on Monday morning.[7] The Oxford English Dictionary traces the first use of the term weekend to the British magazine Notes and Queries in 1879.
A voluntary arrangement between factory owners and workers? Doesn't sound like unions.
In America:
In 1908, the first five-day workweek in the United States was instituted by a New England cotton mill so that Jewish workers would not have to work on the Sabbath from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday.[9] In 1926, Henry Ford began shutting down his automotive factories for all of Saturday and Sunday.
Unions only appear on the scene after this point.
In 1929, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America Union was the first union to demand and receive a five-day workweek. The rest of the United States slowly followed.
There's no mention of workers being murdered anywhere in this history, and in fact it's pretty clear that weekends were happening even without unions.
If left to their own devices, companies will exploit workers.
Google is a classic counterexample. It has been left entirely to its own devices and has spoiled its workforce rotten. Now it's in such a state it can barely fire people who aren't even working at all. This is the least exploited workforce in history. If anything from the outside, it looks like the workforce are busy exploiting the management.
Thanks. Maybe I'm misunderstanding your point but that sounds like the union protestors started the violence by throwing bombs (!) at the police. That'd be the other way around to workers being murdered by capitalists because they wanted a weekend.
I’m pretty sure a union shop vote of software engineers would be defeated 80/20 but it would be fun to see someone at google try. These organizers live in fantasy land!
That's true, although I suspect if Google keeps firing people on trumped-up accusations whenever they criticize management, more people may feel they want an organization set up to defend them.
> We dismissed four individuals who were engaged in intentional and often repeated violations of our longstanding data security policies, including systematically accessing and disseminating other employees’ materials and work...
...is trumped-up? I have not seen any articles which dispute that these fired employees were basically tracking other employees work activities.
But that would be more akin to free speech and the marketplace of ideas. If the internet has taught me anything, when you're on the clock the employer/baron owns your speech.
Interesting how the article gloss over the fact that, according to Google, the four fired employees were actually stalking other Google employees to check if they were working on projects they didn’t like – namely, an in-development cloud services for US border cops. Now that the politics are getting involved, it will get worse before it gets any better.
As more and more teenagers flood Reddit, more and more young adults flood HN. ...and so the cycle of quality boom-bust of the threads continues and we see more knee-jerk emotional content like this.
Where is everyone going next so I can stay ahead of the game?
I've read your comment several time and have yet to make actual sense of this. Is your assertion that the parent comment is bad because it's made by a "young adult"?
Somewhat. My assertion is that HN quality has dropped significantly in the last year. This post is an advocacy post - it lacks objectivity and rigor.
My additional assertion is that this is happening more on HN because the demographic of HN is changing to a younger crowd - and my final theory is that that is happening because more young adults are coming here in an effort to escape the further demographic changes on Reddit.
Joke's on you, I first started browsing HN 7 years ago (used another account for a few years), before I even discovered Reddit (and I've never spent much time there)
If I may try to read between the lines of that statement, looking at another employee's work "to check if they were working on projects they didn’t like" might be the only way to find out a project exists at all if management wants it to be secretive. There is zero doubt in my mind their next 'Project Dragonfly' equivalent, for example, will happen behind as many closed doors as possible.
Now that Sundar "McKinsey" Pichai runs the whole thing, you can expect much more of this, irrespective of the outcome of this investigation. In fact, it looks like you can expect more of this at all top tech firms. Just the other day Bezos came out with his "screw the activist employees" thing. Nadella (and MS in general) never really had any sympathy for activist employees in the first place (although they're going full bore on "diversity", openly and unabashedly discriminating against men in their hiring). I also never head any stories of glorious activism from Netflix. That leaves Facebook. I'm pretty sure Zuck is tired of this bullshit as well.
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[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 236 ms ] threadGuys, hey guys, I’m starting to think the “Don’t be evil” thing has always been bullshit, at least when it comes to workers rights.
Giant companies are not just a CEO and some managers. There are typically half a dozen layers between the CEO and the footsoldier. And its the middle layer folks that create the true behavior of the beast.
Note that this isn't directly relevant to the case under discussion, which was coordinated at the CEO level
My first eng manager at Google was really mistreated by people higher up in the org and as a result didn't have much freedom to make things right for our team (or our project, which generally struggled a lot as a result). This is not extrapolation or speculation: He confirmed it to me.
If anything, I think engineers at Google probably have more independence and freedom than managers do, because they're really only accountable for their own work and personal results. Managers have to corral all those independent engineers into a group they can get away with taking responsibility for, and the upper levels of the chain don't always act in a way that acknowledges how hard management can be. The disconnect also means that "best for a manager's career" is not automatically going to be compatible with the career health of their reports.
The gap between "labor" and "management" in this scenario is also a great example of why unions for labor are important - it's very difficult to represent the needs of both labor and management collectively, so a good method is for them to each bargain collectively based on their own needs and interests.
If the managers actually had more freedom, you'd get something closer to a bunch of small groups optimizing locally and producing (ideally, with the right incentive) collectively good results.
Here's a really easy example from my career (not Google, though): A manager needs to deliver on schedule. He has a set number of people on his team. One of those people is going to quit because he has a baby on the way, and the company's salary is not good enough.
If the manager had enough freedom, they'd have options available. The company is going to cut some of those off, but I'll enumerate some of the ones we potentially had at our fingertips (I was one of the team's managers in this situation):
* Give him a raise so he stays
* Promote someone qualified from the team, hire a junior employee to replace them
* Hire a senior employee to replace him and train them up ASAP to fill the gap
* Adjust the schedule to make up for the loss of his contribution
* Adjust the scope of the project to same as the above
In the end the studio head basically told us to go fuck ourselves, and the report ended up quitting. The project came in late, as I expected. This happened multiple times and in multiple cases it was direct interference from higher nodes in the chain - neither us in management or the labor below us were able to optimize at all. The product as a whole ended up shipping multiple years late due to lots of smaller-scale interference like that.
This is a typical example of local optimization?
Do we believe upper management said "screw with your workers until they stop being effective"? That's trivially false.
... On this specific case, the sourcer who contacted this Apple employee should not have and will be terminated within the hour. We are scrubbing the sourcer’s records to ensure she did not contact anyone else. ...
From: Shona Brown (Google VP of Human Resources)
Appropriate response. Please make a public example of this termination within the group. Please also make it a very strong part of new hire training for the group. I want it clear that we have a zero-tolerance policy for violating our policies. This should (hopefully) prevent future occurrences.
From Eric Schmidt:
Steve, as a followup we investigated the recruiter’s actions and she violated our policies. Apologies again on this and I’m including a portion of the email I received from our head of recruiting [Arnnon Geshuri—M.A.]. Should this ever happen again please let me know immediately and we will handle. Thanks !! Eric
From Steve Jobs:
:)
From Sergei Brin:
Wow, Steve used a smiley. God, I never got one of those.
Source: https://pando.com/2014/03/25/newly-unsealed-documents-show-s...
Edit: Fixed the Shona Brown email. She's on the board of Atlassian now so I guess avoid those people too.
But at middle manager levels (hundreds of people, not a handful, in very large companies) they're not directly responsible to the CEO. Nor are they directly responsible to the customer/market. They're in 'middle management limbo' where all they have to work with, is local incentives. Usually financial - optimize the budget for results.
Sadly, this usually ends with middle managers trying to maximize their budget and minimize their required output, to increase their chances of success. Which means, the most expensive product possible.
That's what I mean by 'locally optimize'.
That email exchange is totally lacking any empathy (which is very typical of psychopathy [IANAD]) toward the ones affected, ie. the sourcer who is being fired and the employees whose livelihoods are being illegally depressed.
So already in 2007 a group of people at Google (all the hiring staff) knew about this policy. How much time did it take before someone complained?
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-google-settlement/a...
The fact that they didn’t interview me is just the real outcome of their policy. They called me, unprompted, about 2 months after I left Apple.
Still not sure I think it sounds entirely reasonable. But makes a lot more sense to me now. (Am not American).
I'm sorry you didn't get more from the settlement, but at least you were able to write something on here that made me laugh.
I still hear from their recruiters at semi-random, each saying they're my "new point of contact at Google". Sometimes there's nothing for a year, then I'll get two "new points of contact' within one week. Recruiting is always a mess, but it's a bit surprising to see an in-house team get up to the same antics I expect from third party services.
The most recent approach was the most persuasive, though:
Dear [appplicant],
I'm writing to because I saw your resume and I think you could be a great fit for Google. I'm particularly interested in your work with [background], which I think prepares you very well for [position].
I think the way a union like this could succeed is by fighting Big Brother-esque projects and refusing to work on initiatives such as Project Butterfly. Sell it as "we refuse to work on technology that will objectively make you (the layman's) life worse". Once we hit a critical mass we'd have a much bigger say over what projects do and don't get built, and anyone who scabs is arguably on the wrong side of the moral coin or "enabling Big Brother/technocratic billionaires".
This isn't to say that tech workers should be the ultimate moral arbiter, but having a non-financially driven check would at least help.
I could get behind this reason for unionizing.
Is there any precedent to suggest that workers in the US would be able to refuse the carry out a lawful business strategy set by shareholders without risk of being fired?
there is seemingly a big coordinated push around this idea but i dont really understand it
is this about "soft skill" tech jobs in particular or programming jobs too?
if it's for programmers then i'm completely confused as to why?...
programming is a skilled field. my skills/skill level is unique to me as yours are to you. i dont want my earning potential to be bogged down by some collective bargaining agreement
A union doesn't have to touch wages in tech, they aren't a problem. But it would be there if wages started to get bad. It could instead focus on things like work/life balance, privacy issues, etc.
Hard to argue those players aren't skilled.
For the same reason, I don’t think movie actors could ever unionize. They’re skills and talents are obviously very unique to them (I’d argue far more so than developers). Certainly the pay scales between actors of different talents seems to agree with that.
Or, professional football players. Each is pretty unique in their talents. Again, their pay scales differ vastly based on those talents. They could never successfully unionize.
Except both of those fields have strong unions, and collective bargaining, while still allowing individuals with different talents to get paid individually.
For clarification (for other sloppy readers like me), actors are organized in the Screen Actors' Guild, and NFL players are represented by the NFL Players Association.
they get salaries up by restricting/reducing the number of people in the workforce
so, my question to you is: in a field that already struggles to attract minorities, which will be the lucky ones to miss out on a job so that you can be paid more?
i mean i get the appeal. once you get yours and you're in, why burn down the staircase you used to get there. being on top is nice. staying on top is nicer!
it'll be way more fun when a small elite minority get to choose from thousands of jobs and 10X their income. the rest should just wait patiently for their chance to "go pro", join the A league and finally make a living doing what they love!
This isn't the case, the wage-fixing cartel that Google was part of is proof.
Also, organized labor only gains it’s power through contract law and state law (especially in non-right-to-work states, where it’s illegal to opt out of a union and cross the picket line), so this argument doesn’t really work.
Their leverage in contract negotiations comes entirely from their ability to organize mass action.
Their rights under state law are derived entirely from their political power arising from their ability to organize mass action.
And notably, with respect to the SV anti poaching case: the companies won that case because they ended up paying only a few thousand dollars to each affected worker instead of the hundreds of thousands per employee they would have owed if the case hadn't settled for pennies on the dollar.
A union absolutely would have protected its employees from being exploited so badly. (And note--unions can be organized to respect individual bargaining power, like they are with the SAG, where they set minimum pay scales and benefits but not maximums.)
I am told a switch to green energy is necessary to save the climate. Shipping containers enabled affordable products to be sold globally which has improved the standard of living for many. Should we ban modern modes of transport so all the horse drawn carriage factory employees can get their jobs back?
Yes, unions add some friction to an overnight change that is made by grinding up the futures and fates of a company's workforce. That doesn't need to mean it "stops all human progress," for example, it can manifest instead as a requirement that company switching to green energy take a chunk of the money from efficiency gains to give their coal miners comfortable retirements.
I’d like to see stats on union participation among doctors and lawyers. I’d bet it’s vanishingly small, especially for lawyers.
Stars have surprisingly little leverage against studios. Only a few actors can consistently sell a movie regardless of quality--currently, only Dwayne Johnson and Tom Cruise. When stars have leverage in negotiations, it's generally because other putative participants (usually investors or producers) have hinged their participation on the participation of one or more specific actors.
I’d like to see stats on union participation among doctors and lawyers. I’d bet it’s vanishingly small, especially for lawyers.
Almost all public sector lawyers belong to a union. This includes those working for the county, state, and federal governments in a legal capacity, as well as those working at most major cities.
The same is generally true of doctors working for the public sector. Notably, in contrast to the legal field, there are a number of doctors unions for doctors employed by private sector employers.
I think unions historically have sometimes been great, and sometimes horrible. Two examples of unions actually making the world a worse place are the police unions and the teachers' unions in the United States.
If you wonder why we can't fix police corruption, it's because the union protects them - so you can't have both. If you wonder why we can't fix education, it's because the union actively defends teachers that are demonstrably bad for learning (and have visible apathy to the point of sleeping in class while "teaching" students) - so you can't have both.
There's more to the world than worker's rights.
The teacher's unions protect teachers at the expense of students. Basically the union doesn't care - at all - about teaching students (it's for the teachers, after all). They only care about stopping teachers from getting fired. It's our youth that suffer from receiving a shitty education. The assumption that "the teacher is always right" is profoundly damaging to our youth. The decline of the American education system (below college) is well studied.
https://hechingerreport.org/third-indication-u-s-educational...
Just to throw out a counterpoint, there are some who feel the education system is not declining, although I disagree. I encourage you to come to your own conclusions.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2018/10/15/how-are-...
There's a movie about it if you want to watch it:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1566648/
Yes, it's a documentary with an angle, but there's enough information in there to convince me.
As far as teachers unions, that is an argument that a lot of people would disagree with but i've decided i don't want to discuss it in detail here.
Do you value the teachers or the students more?
It has become so hostile, the dichotomy really is that stark. All attempts to negotiate with the teachers' union, even offering them substantial bonuses to fire teachers well known for terrible performance, have been met with "fuck you" by the union.
You're right, not everybody will agree. Some people will side with the teachers. I think those people are ruining future generations.
The movie you link "Waiting for Superman" spends allot of time talking about the charter school movement which is not mentioned in your post. Arguably charter schools are an extension of "the parent is always right" motto as it is touted as giving the parent more choices. To talk about the decline of education and this movie without mentioning the role of charter schools is a disservice to the movie and the discussion.
It has nothing to do with the schools. You can't fire teachers with tenure (edit: actually it's even worse - this is for any teachers not just with tenure) except under pretty outrageous circumstances. So even if they show up drunk, they are still gainfully employed.
https://www.michigancapitolconfidential.com/17596
If we have universal disdain for police and perpetuate the idea that they are thugs, what type of workforce do you think will be willing to take that job, and how hard do you think the existing workforce will be motivated to behave better? In your own job, or in school, do you tend to be motivated more by encouragement, or by being made to feel like shit?
If we view it as respectful and honorable work, we are more likely to attract a workforce who values these things. When people are judged prematurely, I find that they tend to live up to those judgments, for better or for worse.
Unions are terrible, and only appropriate when your employer or industry is even more terrible than a union. That does apply to many industries unfortunately, but not Google employees. Not even close. It’s also a safe bet that tech workers will earn less under a union.
A family member works in an industry that has only a single employer within about a 500 mile radius. He has absolutely no leverage and he needs a union. Even under the net-beneficial union, he’s had many negative effects, including losing his job and requiring his family to move, because of the seniority rules that many unions have. Too many older union members moved to his (more prosperous) city, and they get scheduling precedence, so he was reduced to an on-call who was never called. He eventually got “permission” to transfer and was able to move to a remote town where his lower seniority would still allow him to get work.
I constantly hear of stories where senior union members are not doing their jobs and taking the spot of someone who really wants to be there, but it’s nearly impossible to fire them due to union rules and their proficiency in gaming the system.
Don’t get me started on teachers unions. If you have kids, that one should really piss you off.
Seniority rules in unions are chapter-based, and chapters themselves are city- or business-based. If someone is moving in from a different chapter, that seniority generally doesn't carry over to their new chapter, and even when seniority does carry over it can't result in the transferring member displacing another union member's job.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/12/10/fiat-d10.html
but nobody said it has to be _those_ unions.
It's a bit like saying that since the Republican and Democratic party are, on the whole, corrupt and subservient to corporate interests (which they are), then political organizations are a bad idea.
It isn't - you just need independent, uncorrupted, accountable, distributed-power organizations. And it's the same with unions.
Do these people even understand how the rest of the country lives? Perhaps some of those well compensated but eager to organize tech workers should focus their organization efforts where it can actually help people. For example, setting up a union for the gig economy workers that deliver their food, drive them around, pack their amazon packages, or run their errands
These types of victories build on one another. If you truly care about the gig workers, the best thing you can do is organize YOUR OWN workplace.
Unions (or some type of effective worker organization) should be an all-workers thing, not a some-workers thing.
> For example, setting up a union for the gig economy workers that deliver their food, drive them around, pack their amazon packages, or run their errands
Tech workers can't "set up" a union for gig economy workers, that would be patronizing and ineffective. The gig economy workers need to do that for themselves if their union is to have any teeth. What tech workers can do is have a union that can give support to the gig worker union.
Also the tech workers who bask in the gig economy are probably a different group than the tech workers who are trying to organize, and it's misleading to conflate them.
Chapters 14 and 15 contain the majority of the lessons of the pilots:
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/245/245-h/245-h.htm#linkc14
* A union could support privacy efforts
* A union could support other unions
* A union could advance political goals
* A union could impose moral rules for projects members are allowed to work on
None of these are actually reasons I'd want to sign up for an organization where the core value proposition is surrendering autonomy for collective bargaining to improve my working conditions. These are the pitches of people who want to use the political power and funds of a union for their personal political goals.
I want to hear a unionization pitch that's grounded in things relevant to my work. No more overweening unions trying to do everything and sacrificing the workers, thanks. I remember Detroit.
The reason these (ex) Googlers are trying to pressure Google's management to drop certain projects is because they know they can't win the argument to eliminate America's borders at the national or even state level via the normal political process. Their goals are not popular and people do not want them to be enforced, hence the dubious and unethical strategies these activists-cum-workers rely on.
I asked for examples because this sort of wafer thin anti-corporate virtue signalling is insufficient to convince me to pick a fight with my own employer in 'solidarity'. Like most of the population I don't worry about Facebook or Google invading my privacy, instead I enjoy their free services. If they did something I really hated I'd just stop using them: there are other search engines and Facebook isn't especially critical. I already use it much less than I used to. Nothing they're doing justifies being labelled as abusive, let alone taking explicit action.
I could have sworn I pointed to this exact behavior as an anti-pattern just a few comments ago, and was told not to worry because democracy. Given how readily this particular goal cropped up again, I suddenly find myself less than completely reassured. I suddenly find myself wondering, once again, if the people who want me to join a union actually care what I want or just want power.
If you have colleagues that are diabetic, would advancing policies for cheaper insulin not represent the interests of the group?
Maybe the answer is no, but for those colleagues who are have more complicated needs the answer might be yes.
Lastly, if a union doesn't at least represent a re-balance of power then it is ineffectual.
When I have colleagues who suffer from diabetes, I would expect our union to ensure excellent health care is provided as part of the contract. I would not expect our union to try to involve itself in something drastically removed from its core competency like how research is managed and pharmaceuticals are regulated. I would certainly not want our union to expend resources on the matter - there are guaranteed to be more substantive matters closer to home that would benefit from those same resources.
You're absolutely right. A union can, should, and must represent a rebalancing of power. It's just perhaps possible that it's not appropriate for this rebalancing to extend into every possible sphere. This is doubly true in a context of limited resources.
In practice, democratic processes have a tendency to be less than fully detail-oriented and allow a reasonable amount of latitude in leadership. I'm maybe the smallest bit reluctant to sign up for a system where the people doing the organizing are explicitly dreaming about abusing leadership positions.
Perhaps I've missed something? Can you help me if there's anything I've overlooked?
What if I don't like what people voted on? Then I'm screwed.
Instead, I would much rather bargain for myself, instead of collectively bargaining with others who might not agree with what I want.
A union does not mean: pay/rank based solely on seniority, that you can't plug in your own equipment on your desk, that do-nothing people stick around forever. These are a few of the popular disparagements of unions that are not a built-in function of a unionized workplace.
Seniority pay, strict work rules, tenure, and more are all products of the incentives around contract negotiation. Those incentives can easily turn toxic. They're the results of needing to have something to bring back to the membership as a victory over Management, producing the equivalent of pork barrel spending.
As you say, these are not built-in. They're just failure modes of a particular political system.
Please make a public example of this termination within the group. Please also make it a very strong part of new hire training for the group. I want it clear that we have a zero-tolerance policy for violating our [anti-competitive, wage suppressing] policies.
1) capturing more of the value the workers create for them, vs. for capital, in direct dollar compensation or in other benefits, by bargaining from a much stronger position than individual workers, and
2) providing easier and more even access to counsel, support, and protection against all sorts of personal and professional abuses, at work,
Where #2 is a bucket that holds a whole bunch of really nice stuff, including ensuring management doesn't fail to provide what was won in #1 in lots of small ways that aren't worth fighting for an individual but are for a larger group.
Basically the same core things any well-functioning union provides.
[EDIT] more to the point, if your company doesn't say things like "you know, this contract pays really well, no need to negotiate for more even if we think we could get it" there's no reason employees should have that kind of attitude about their pay & work conditions.
[EDIT] I mean... wow, is it immoral if an individual negotiates with the aim to gain as much pay as possible, or only if workers band together to do so more effectively?
Individual workers are in a weaker negotiating position than employers, so without a union it's highly likely that, on average, they are receiving lower compensation than they might absent that weaker bargaining position (the short-version explanation being that, in the typical case, it harms an employee more to miss an opportunity than for a company to pass on an employee, simply due to the nature of the two entities). I don't see why employees being in a weak bargaining position does not cause "harm" but their banding together to be in a stronger position does, nor why, given that position, they should be expected to voluntarily make worse deals than they could. Further, we collectively choose, via government, to permit such a thing as a corporation to exist in the first place, so in my view there's no natural or moral argument for the state of their being in a better negotiating position than labor, and even if we go on to arrange things such that they are made weaker than labor, somehow—not just equal or less-dominant—it's gonna take more than the simple fact of things being that way to convince me they're being harmed in some sense that should make me feel bad for them or that some moral wrong is being committed.
I don't think corporations, provided their privileges and their very existence by force of law, are being particularly harmed in some sense worthy of moral assignment by having to deal with strong collective bargaining entities for labor, nor that we can call gains in negotiations made by those labor entities unfair or immoral if they aim to gain the best deals they can without also having to label much of Capitalism as such (I might follow you down that road, actually, as I'm not sure it's wrong and it seems, at first glance, consistent, at least).
Are they? In normal conditions (which seem to largely prevail in most parts of the U.S. labor market), the negotiating positions of both parties are fundamentally determined, not by either party, but by unrelated 3rd parties who are participating in the same labor market. Employers would like to pay as little as possible and employees would like to earn as much as possible. But the ability of both parties to achieve their desired outcome is dependent on their ability to walk away and obtain a better price (whether they're buying or selling labor).
[edit] how about this: you find a case where a normal employee tells a company they need to spend a half hour typing their job ad details and past pay for the same position into a web form especially for that applicant before they’ll even be considered, then also reformat their ad to match new specs the applicant gives them, and submit that to the applicant as a word document, and the company actually does it, and I’ll eat my hat. Employees are plainly the weaker supplicant in those interactions. Yes they’re “free” to do otherwise, but their job search will... go poorly.
How so? An employer has a monopoly of jobs at a particular workplace, so why not let a union have a monopoly of workers to fill the jobs at that workplace. IIRC, union representation is at the workplace level, and different unions can compete to represent the workers at that workplace.
In your opinion. In my view, one of the many moral justifications of unions is that they create a more even playing field between workers and already organized management/capital, and that includes the workers receiving a greater share of the profits the they had an essential role in creating.
A worker without a union is like a defendant without a lawyer.
That's a bad analogy. Defendants cannot avoid a hearing. Employees can just get another job. Starting businesses is hard. It entails a lot of risk. Risk that was never taken by employees. And employees are not bound to the fortunes of the company the way owners are. If the company loses money or goes belly-up, the employees get new jobs. But the owners must simply bear the loss.
Editing to expand: Being able to depend on a regular paycheck is a helluva thing. Sure, you don't participate in the upside of a company. But you don't participate in the downside, either. That's the bargain that labor makes. If you don't like the bargain, then take some risk and start a company. Most people prefer a steady paycheck, though.
I don't share your quibbles, but all right. How about this:
A worker without a union is like going to court without a lawyer.
A lot of court cases are optional. You can always just not demand what you're owed or pay whatever your asked. If you lose, just hope the next person you do business with will be more trustworthy.
> Starting businesses is hard. It entails a lot of risk. Risk that was never taken by employees. And employees are not bound to the fortunes of the company the way owners are. If the company loses money or goes belly-up, the employees get new jobs. But the owners must simply bear the loss.
So what? None of that is a convincing argument that non-business-owners should not benefit form organization. It's not like owners are the only ones taking a risk [1], workers do too. Do you think they somehow fantastically shift into equivalent new jobs whenever their laid off? Workers invest in company-specific knowledge and put down roots near their employer that are harder relocate than capital, for instance.
You also oddly fail to differentiate between groups like the struggling small business owner and the private equity firm billionaire who lays off 10,000 workers just because he'd prefer that he and his shareholders be richer. Whatever sympathy the former deserve is not due to the latter.
[1] they're the only ones risking capital, not the only ones taking a risk.
Here's another way to put it: do you think employee pay should be reduced if a company in unprofitable?
That's a bad analogy, but good unions are about self-organization of workers, not being assisted by _external_ factors.
It's also a bad analogy because unionization is, as its name suggests, forming a collective from individuals. The represented defendant is still just one person facing the justice system - and can thus hardly ever challenge its bounds.
So - unions are important, but think bigger! Take over the playing field, don't let it continue being controlled by management/capital.
It can absolutely be the case the workers are well treated and still be losing their surplus value.
> prevent mistreatment of workers, not to transfer as much of the wealth created by a company to its employees as possible.
The wealth is created by the workers, not the company. And some would argue that keeping too large of a share of that wealth is, in fact, a mistreatment of workers.
[EDIT] that is, I don't follow why it's fine (presumably) for companies to seek to maximize returns, negotiating as a large block of people pooling their labor and capital, but not for workers to do that.
Similarly, just because some jobs produce more value doesn't mean the companies arent otherwise misbehaving.
3) Negotiating better IP control. Side projects, open source, etc. are locked down at various companies.
4) Better treatment for oncall. I know folks who have had to work for 17 consecutive hours for an incident and got nothing.
5) Better treatment for crunch -- tech workers in games have this particularly bad, but it's not limited to just that industry.
6) Salary minimums
7) More control over how the company outsources/contracts with workers
8) All sorts of other side benefits that could be collectively funded -- union libraries, training, networks, publications, resources for new professionals, discounts on union developed software, etc.
9) Parental leave, sick time, and other basic benefits
Edit:
10) Ensure and oversee processes to protect people who end up on the public stage. If you believe cancel culture is a thing, maybe having a union rep on hand and an established process for managing firings would be in your best interest.
11) Forced arbitration is another thing I'd consider talking with a union about.
So many people have this notion of a labor union built on what it means in an industrial context. But there's plenty of other models that could be applied where you don't have to, for example, promote people based on seniority. I wish it was easier to talk about this stuff without people hand waving away the idea immediately.
I remember Google a long time ago, nearly 15 years ago now. There was an April 1st when someone managed to find a way to send email anonymously to all of engineering, and sent round a call for unionisation as a joke. We found it quite amusing. The idea that Googlers would unionise wasn't just seen as unserious but literally, an idea worthy of being an April Fools.
"Anti-ICE" after 2016 = don't support borders
- We will refuse to work when management wants to upgrade servers to make them faster (takes our jobs away)
- When they get rid of coconut water in the kitchen (abusive conditions)
- We will conduct coding slowdowns and deliberately insert long-lived bugs when we don't get enough free t-shirts, or when our adjustable chairs have only 5 instead of 7 axes of adjustment
We'd better stand up for ourselves and form a Slack channel, otherwise we may find ourselves making less than $125k fresh out of college, relegated to having to email each other like animals, and we just can't have that.
Who is in the union and who is on the other side?
This will never happen, and for one very simple reason: it is the nature of tech workers to believe that they are smarter than everyone else, and this attitude is antithetical to organization.
Think about it. Do you really think very many tech people you know would be willing to go on strike over things happening to tech people at some other company? Or are they going to just blame the victims for being stupid enough to work for that company in the first place?
2. If you need it, you need to set it up. Unions created from the outside are weak at best and collaborationst/employer-controlled at worst. I suggest considering the IWW as a framework:
https://www.iww.org/branches/US/CA <- story was about workers in California https://www.iww.org/unions/dept500 <- Relevant industrial branch of the IWW
they're much smaller than UAW or CtW - but their organizational tradition is more decentralized-power, grass-roots-based, and not trying to find accommodation and common ground with employers all the time.
Nothing is going to change until we replace our anti-worker government with pro-worker government.
The MOST they'd get is back-pay if Google loses. But truthfully, most people have to find another job when they lose their job, so that new paycheck is deducted from their "damages" and you subtract what they earned while fired from their backpay.
GENERALLY-speaking, there would not be punitive damages. That's why there's usually no disincentive to not just fire the worker who is organizing. The potential payout is tiny to the company.
- Elizabeth Warren Ramps Up Attacks on Apple Card Bias Claims
- The four got public support from presidential front-runners Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, who took to Twitter to bash Google for alleged “anti-union” actions.
What if this turns out to go out with a whimper? The Apple Card bias was something unrelated to gender that got blown up by someone popular, and these firings were carefully vetted and are legally justified?
Will these politicians apologize for jumping the gun? I bet they will point out they were the first when it turns out any other way...
They could have defused the controversy almost immediately by identifying the actual cause and fixing it. Part of the reason the story blew up was that DHH and his wife struggled at length to even get an explanation for the problem or find a human who could fix it. The opacity of that whole machine and its resistance to correction is why it became a fuss. I honestly don't care whether it turns out to be about gender, because the end result of that system is that someone got discriminated against in a way that was indistinguishable from being gender discrimination. In the same fashion, if your pricing algorithm accidentally (due to training set bias or whatever) has a 20% higher chance to overcharge people of color, it doesn't really matter how it got that way. It's a racist algorithm and that doesn't mean you're a racist: It just means you have to fix it.
Similarly, if the firings were carefully vetted and legally justified, they could have done a better job of explaining that rationale to the public. As a former Google employee the public rationale was obviously deceptive in some fashion, and undermines any suspicion I might have had regarding the employees in question. I worked with plenty of people at that company who probably deserved to be fired, but when the company behaves that way in public and selects people in a way that coincidentally undermines union organizing, I know who I'm going to suspect.
People assumed gender discrimination because you had a couple with good credit scores and the woman was discriminated against by the algorithm. The only data we have indicates that it was gender. Of course there could be some other reason, but the obvious conclusion we have based on the information we've got is gender.
https://mobile.twitter.com/jimcopus/status/11937337466141286...
Furthermore, Goldman issued a public statement confirming that they reviewed the complaints and they are not using gender as a parameter. This would be trivial for an investigator to confirm, so it’s unlikely that they’d be stupid enough to outright lie about it.
Jumping to the worst possible conclusion based on a twitter anecdote is not helpful to anybody.
And I work with credit risk models and can tell you there is a negligible chance that gender is causing a 20x credit limit increase. No protected variable will have so much influence, and Apple/GS are not even legally allowed to directly reference such variables.
It may be the most logical conclusion for the general public, but all they see is the output of a black box. DHH jumped to conclusions that it had to be something about gender, with n=1.
Who says there is a problem that needs fixing? Demanding that women and men always receive equal limits is not about fairness, it is a very radical notion that makes discriminative credit risk scoring almost impossible.
I am not saying that Apple/GS did not mess up here, and could have been more transparent, but, in their defense: Oftentimes you can't be more transparent (like when Google closes an account for posting something illegal, they have to keep mum, while the user loudly complains online that they got banned for doing nothing), an help desk person is never going to be able to give an explanation for a model decision (this is usually a good thing), and DHH seemed to be barking up the wrong tree all together (what if the different limits were the result of a, completely legal, influencer program or randomized trial?).
It really does matter how it got that way. If 20% of people of color vs. white people have a low income (a non-protected variable), I am perfectly allowed to use that variable to deny them a loan more often, even if the result is that 20% of people of color don't receive a loan. That's not a racist algorithm, however it would be racist if I start ignoring income of certain people as to achieve racial demographic parity in loans.
Similarly, as this is an ongoing investigation now, and they probably anticipated that, Google was probably legally very limited in what they could disclose. I bet some people with all the knowledge of the data - and colleague snooping are shaking their heads at some of the public perception of this case as union-busting.
The opposite of accepting a coincidence once in a while is viewing everything through the lens of intentional discrimination.
It's not that simple. The principle of "disparate impact" means that you can't, in general, make the decision in a way that adversely impacts people of color just because you didn't directly consider race in your decision.
You can use income in your decision because considering income "is necessary to achieve one or more substantial, legitimate, non-discriminatory interests." Income is directly related to ability to repay a loan, so you need to consider it. You can't just use any old variable you want to. You can't deny people for a loan based on what genre of music they listen to, because that has no justifiable connection to whether they will repay a loan.
I know that you can't use just any old variable, but I tried enough to know that music genre would probably be an informative feature (dibs on providing loans to classical - and Judeo-Christian religious music lovers, you are free to underwrite the dubstep - and ghetto rap fans).
To get away with making a decision in a way that has disparate impact, you need to have a legitimate need to be making the decision that way. In the case of income, you can justify needing to use it in your decision, because income is directly connected to ability to repay. In the case of music preferences, you can't, because there is no direct connection to loan risk.
How do we know they are bad actor if we don't yet know what really happened? Imposing guilt on someone until they prove themselves innocent is a bad way to run a society.
Do the extremely "woke" crowd working in such high tech companies know what could happen to their salaries and perks if they are to be part of a highly regulated industry, or they haven't thought about the second/third order effects yet?
Do these supporters know that they can go work at other places that don't pay $200k+, so that they too can go live like the regular people?
I'm pretty sure that there are N number of refugee camps that could use a basic application built to keep track of refugees. But of course, that doesn't come with 3 chef prepared meals per day and dry cleaning in house.
If left to their own devices, companies will exploit workers. I don’t want to argue the morality of it, but it happens over and over again. Amazon workers are having the same fights their great grandparents did (fighting for the right not to get killed at work, the right to a decent wage, the right to a goddamn bathroom break that doesn’t get you fired). Tech workers aren’t immune either. Sure, we’re more mobile than most, but that’s still not great leverage. Your employer has more power over you than you do over them. Without a union, this is always true. If you’re fine being potentially fucked that way, that’s your prerogative.
I've frequently seen leftist labour activists claim unions are responsible for the concept of a weekend. But that's not true, and it makes me doubtful about all claims of supposed union "wins".
Wikipedia talks about the history of the weekend. It starts by observing that a day of rest is a feature of society for millenia and has religious roots. Then it says:
The present-day concept of the relatively longer 'week-end' first arose in the industrial north of Britain in the early part of the nineteenth century[1] and was originally a voluntary arrangement between factory owners and workers allowing Saturday afternoon off from 2pm in agreement that staff would be available for work sober and refreshed on Monday morning.[7] The Oxford English Dictionary traces the first use of the term weekend to the British magazine Notes and Queries in 1879.
A voluntary arrangement between factory owners and workers? Doesn't sound like unions.
In America:
In 1908, the first five-day workweek in the United States was instituted by a New England cotton mill so that Jewish workers would not have to work on the Sabbath from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday.[9] In 1926, Henry Ford began shutting down his automotive factories for all of Saturday and Sunday.
Unions only appear on the scene after this point.
In 1929, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America Union was the first union to demand and receive a five-day workweek. The rest of the United States slowly followed.
There's no mention of workers being murdered anywhere in this history, and in fact it's pretty clear that weekends were happening even without unions.
If left to their own devices, companies will exploit workers.
Google is a classic counterexample. It has been left entirely to its own devices and has spoiled its workforce rotten. Now it's in such a state it can barely fire people who aren't even working at all. This is the least exploited workforce in history. If anything from the outside, it looks like the workforce are busy exploiting the management.
So are you alleging that this...
> We dismissed four individuals who were engaged in intentional and often repeated violations of our longstanding data security policies, including systematically accessing and disseminating other employees’ materials and work...
...is trumped-up? I have not seen any articles which dispute that these fired employees were basically tracking other employees work activities.
Where is everyone going next so I can stay ahead of the game?
My additional assertion is that this is happening more on HN because the demographic of HN is changing to a younger crowd - and my final theory is that that is happening because more young adults are coming here in an effort to escape the further demographic changes on Reddit.