Sounds more like a political pressure group than a union. No collective bargaining, no workplace issues, only political problems quite removed from the average worker at Google. Do they call themselves a union to get legal protection, or is there another reason why they don't just drop the term?
A union isn't just about pay or safety, though for many blue collar jobs, that's the most important issue a union might tackle.
They probably could look at pay inequality though, if they get their members to disclose all of that to the union.
The biggest question will be whether or not the AWU gets large enough and chooses to use the power to strike. Basically the one power any union has, that individual members can't employ without simply being fired.
I don't know about the rest of the world, but the power to strike in Germany is tied strictly to workplace-related issues. You can strike for more pay, better workplace conditions, more or less equality in the workplace. The legality of political strikes is doubtful, especially if the issue isn't a really big national one: https://www.bpb.de/dialog/netzdebatte/219308/ein-bisschen-ve...
I know that many Unions get involved in political lobbying though. Regardless of how they get their point across, money is taken and spent on influencing power beyond employers. For example I was part of the Musicians Union in the UK, which has a separate political fund, and members are usually self-employed, but it did create a forum for potential collective action, and for attempting to influence the political discourse.
> The biggest question will be whether or not the AWU gets large enough and chooses to use the power to strike. Basically the one power any union has, that individual members can't employ without simply being fired.
That's not true, strictly speaking. A group of people could theoretically strike together without being members of a formally-recognized union. In practice, it's tough to coordinate that, and they may have a more difficult time actually enforcing those rights without a legal and financial structure of support, but it's not true that people have to be members of a union in order to engage in a strike.
The law unambiguously grants that power to workers acting in concert with each other, whether or not they are doing so with the formal backing of a union.
While the law does grant individual workers the power to strike, the legal protections are weak enough that it's not really practical even if you trust your employer to respect them. Unless you're striking against a specific unfair labor practice, your employer has the right to simply replace you, and reinstate you only when a new job opening is available.
> While the law does grant individual workers the power to strike, the legal protections are weak enough that it's not really practical even if you trust your employer to respect them.
As a counterpoint, tens of thousands of Googlers staged a worldwide walkout two years ago. They were not unionized. They were protected by the same law that protects unionized workers when striking. When Google retaliated against four of those 20,000+ people, the NLRB launched a federal investigation, the same way the NLRB would if they had been unionized.
> Unless you're striking against a specific unfair labor practice, your employer has the right to simply replace you, and reinstate you only when a new job opening is available.
That's not quite true. If it happened exactly as you describe, that would be a pretty clear-cut wrongful termination lawsuit, and the NLRB would come down pretty hard on the employer.
The NLRB guidance (https://www.nlrb.gov/strikes) says that economic strikers "can be replaced by their employer", and are "entitled to be recalled to jobs for which they are qualified when openings in such jobs occur", but are not entitled to immediate reinstatement if the employer has hired bona-fide permanent replacements.
I do agree that informal coordination can do much of the work a union would. You just have to convince the company that it'd be a huge headache to replace everyone, because the actual organization work (which those four investigations you describe were about) is unconditionally protected.
It's worth noting that the vast majority of the Walkout was over Googlers lunch breaks, and most went back to work after lunch was over.
...Everyone who organized the workout was either fired or retaliated against anyways, since you know, Google doesn't care about workers rights or the law.
> ...Everyone who organized the workout was either fired or retaliated against anyways, since you know, Google doesn't care about workers rights or the law.
Whether or not Google does, the courts do. The NLRB determined that two of the four were illegally fired, and there is a hearing scheduled for April 2021.
Indeed. But Google has fired more people for speaking out or organizing on employee issues since then. Which is to say, the NLRB needs to show a lot more teeth if it plans to curb the behavior.
Unions are political pressure groups. The entire point of a union is to pressure employers to not shoot their employees, give them fair wages and working hours, and so on; the union is a political actor on par with the employer.
By questioning whether a group of employees really is a union, you are attempting to strip them of federal protection from retaliation.
I am pretty sure the work environment at Google is extremely oppressive, with low salaries and and top-down evil capitalist only approach. After all how can millionaires Google employees can have their voices heard if they don't unionize? Maybe they will demand better snacks in the cafeteria and a new foosball table at the end of the indoor slide.
Unions are not just for the purpose of getting fair pay, but rather about a broad case of being on equal footing with an employer, as stated in the parent comment. Besides, this union is not just for salaried google employees, but also contractors etc - this will include for example cleaners and cafetaria employees, which are much more likely to be in need of the sort of union support that you mention.
Because there's no union who represents Google, Apple, etc. employees as a single cohesive block, there couldn't have been a union holding folks accountable. You're implying that the courts were successful, but only after Googlers had an employee revolt (read: a non-union-organized strike!) against being taken to forced arbitration.
Well, by a sufficiently lax definition, any gardening club is a political pressure group, because they are of course interested in their members not getting shot, gardens not being outlawed and fair prices for seeds...
The one thing that makes unions special imho is the focus on workplace issues in a specific industry or company. That is the area where a union also has legal protection. Anything else they do isn't necessarily protected, and I find it very odd that that "union" does everything _but_ the protected stuff.
I don't doubt gardening clubs can and will pressure politicians concerning relevant issues such as local politics about community gardening. A small group of 12-15 people can have large swings on public space usages or lobby a low-paid public official that manages approving public or private gardening law in that county/town.
Well, like you say, that's your opinion. And history has a dim view of your opinion. I am not being facetious about protecting people from violence; unions came about in the USA partially because of the Coal Wars [0], an armed conflict between employers and employees.
Gardening clubs are clearly not political pressure groups. I recommend that you do some reading on the history of unions in the USA; it is written in blood.
The question is what the history of unions in the USA has to do with the Alphabet Workers Union. In particular I just don't get what you're trying to say about the Coal Wars; Google employees are not at risk of being gunned down by their management.
The average tenure of a sysadmin at Google is 2yrs. They burn out. In the USA, the shortening of work weeks and work hours, the reduction of unfair responsibilities, and the overall improvement in health and safety for working conditions are all directly attributable to union action.
Googlers suffered Apple's Techtopus salary-fixing collusion. In the USA, collective bargaining is an important component of breaking wage-fixing situations, and "labor union" is legal shorthand for such collective-bargaining groups.
Google routinely appropriates code from its employees using a Microsoft Clause, which reassigns employee-produced code to Google unless the employee can rigorously prove that Google had nothing whatsoever to do with the production of the code. Thousands of commits are appropriated every year, and there is an internal lawyer-driven process for automating the appropriation. Labor unions of artists have successfully attacked such practices in the USA before.
Google owns Youtube and Doubleclick, large advertising systems which both inspire great amounts of abuse and also themselves are abusive tools of user coercion. If Googlers wanted for Google employees to not damage their mental health by working in user moderation for hours on end, or wanted Google to be less of a part of our societal disinformation and spam problem by reforming advertising policies, then a union would be the natural place to start that argument.
It sounds like you've never worked at Google before. Just because Google does not threaten its employees with regular violence, does not mean that Google is a stellar employer above reproach and without need for redress.
Your overall attitude towards unions reminds me of a classic movie scene where disgruntled and confused folks wonder whether the Romans ever did anything for them. Here [0] is but one of many lists enumerating exactly what unions did for us.
I'm not really sure how to respond. This is a long, passionate argument against things I didn't say and an attitude I don't have. I think unions are a great way for employees to organize against mistreatment; that's exactly why it frustrates me to see the Alphabet Workers Union appropriate the history of union activism to serve partisan goals which have nothing to do with the great things unions have achieved in the past.
The AWU's actions only seem overly partisan to you because you are standing in your current vantage point of history. Once, the idea of a weekend and a 40hr work week were also seen as too partisan and idealistic. And yet, after decades of the victory being forgotten, the weekend has become a sacred social institution.
History doesn't care about your frustration. If you're a member or affiliate of AWU or CWA and you feel like your membership has been appropriated, contact your representative and start a formal appeal for redress. Otherwise, your place in this discussion isn't to have feelings, but to learn some facts and context.
I don't see how we can have a productive conversation if you don't think it's my place to have feelings on the matter. I'd suggest that you should avoid participating in discussion forums on issues you don't think can legitimately be discussed.
Members have to pay 1% of their salary to be in it, which is very union-like. I imagine if they dropped the pretense of a union and it was just a non-profit group, they would have a hard time getting that big of a donation from each member.
Maybe I'm just being too cynical, but I can't help think this group is playing into the current trendiness of progressive issues, and some number of well-off Googlers are joining because ~$2000 a year is insignificant to them and they support the cause of unions in general even though they don't personally need any of the protections a typical union offers. Not to say this is necessarily a bad thing, non-profits need to market themselves somehow and if they accomplish positive change in Google's policies this way then great.
It contains about 0.5% of the Gogle proper employees or about 700 people. If it were a Google product, it would have been canned a long time ago with that tiny market share.
0.5% of a big number is a big number. If it were a Google product, I'm pretty sure they'd be happy to get O(10s of millions) users in the first week (or 0.5% of the billions of existing users).
> Sounds more like a political pressure group than a union. No collective bargaining, no workplace issues, only political problems quite removed from the average worker at Google. Do they call themselves a union to get legal protection, or is there another reason why they don't just drop the term?
Yes, it's effectively a PAC, not a union. Just like at Kickstarter where they were more concerned about people deemed 'conservative' not using the platform to promote comicbooks than anything related to work conditions.
A union shouldn't be telling their boss who they can or cannot work with, partner with or have as clients, it's plain insubordination especially when it has absolutely nothing to do with their own compensations or work conditions.
Obviously anybody can claim that employer B working with X or Y make their employees of class Z emotionally 'distressed' or 'unsafe'...
The irony/hypocrisy here is people claiming 'unions are political' when that thing at google is really just about being partisan, yet these people don't have the courage to call a PAC...a PAC, and hide behind the word 'union'.
I'd argue it's more fashion than a lack of courage. Amazon's equivalent group is called Amazon Workers for Climate Justice - they regularly pressure Amazon on topics that have nothing to do with climate justice, but climate change was a trendy topic when they first organized. Sponsorship and support from the CWA is another factor, although I don't know if it's public how much the AWU is actually getting from that relationship.
> A union shouldn't be telling their boss who they can or cannot work with, partner with or have as clients
I don't agree with that assessment. If Google employees have a strong opposition to working with, say, federal agencies to share data they've gathered on users, then I think it makes perfect sense for them bring that concern to the table.
Honestly, I don't see why a union shouldn't have the ability to bargain anything it wants to try and bargain. I'm open to someone changing my mind on that.
I think the appropriate way for the employees to have a say in the direction of the company is probably to give them voting shares. Otherwise the employees may end up disagreeing with a decision that the shareholders voted on and that seems like a recipe for a bad situation. I could be wrong, but I believe the officers and directors of a C corporation (unlike a B corp) owe a fiduciary duty to the shareholders so to some extend they must prioritize growth over social purposes
Edit: to clarify, letting the employees of a public corporation decide the direction/priorities would be like if the employees of a non-profit had a union which could force the non-profit to change from planting trees to something unrelated like washing dogs. The people who donated money would probably be upset that they were deceived about what the donation would be used to accomplish.
This is not my area of expertise so I could be 100% wrong, but the idea is basically you have to do what you've advertised to your shareholder that you're doing so growth is valued in a C corp over everything else because that's what the shareholders want and expect. If you want your company to value something over money you could establish a non-profit or a B corp and that's equally acceptable, but you can't just decide one day that growth isn't the primary goal of a C corp because then you've misled your shareholders. The same way if you established a non-profit or B corp with a specific social purpose and then decided to prioritize growth over accomplishing that social purpose, that would be misleading your donors/shareholders
But doing things the way in line with what is “acceptable” for your employees could be seen as a cost that should be substracted from the profits as any other cost is. I don’t see why would it be bad? We already don’t do things like working children (unfortunately we still do it in third world countries) and the like, even though it could increase margins.
> Otherwise the employees may end up disagreeing with a decision that the shareholders voted on and that seems like a recipe for a bad situation.
Yes, this is where negotiation between owners & the union comes in. Sometimes reality can disagree with a decision shareholders voted on and that is okay.
> to clarify, letting the employees of a public corporation decide the direction/priorities would be like if the employees of a non-profit had a union which could force the non-profit to change from planting trees to something unrelated like washing dogs.
Who's forcing anyone? If the company doesn't want to play ball they are free to hire replacements when the workers strike. If the workers don't care enough to risk their jobs over it then their bluff has been called.
If the company does play ball and the shareholders don't like it they are free to elect a new board or sell their shares.
I commented exactly the same last time this subject came up last week or so.
IANAL, but I did some research then, and my understanding is that the Supreme Court has ruled that to the extent that a union spends money on political activities, the dues they collect are no longer mandatory.
The point being that it’s not just a moot point whether they are actually a PAC. It is recognized in law that the purpose of a union is for collective bargaining in the workplace, and some of the special legal protections that a union holds (like mandatory dues and legal immunity) can fall away when the union is actually operating like a PAC.
They are engaging in collective bargaining. And they are bargaining around how the wealth and power they help generate is used in the broader society.
A union is a PAC. It's a PAC that allows the workers to exercise some level of collective control over the business they create through their work. It's not just about bargaining for better pay or working conditions - that's a fabrication of the propaganda spread in the US as part of the effort to dismantle our labor movement.
If you look at the history of labor organizing, it's always been about power - whether power is held in the hands of those with capital, or whether it's shared with those who do the work.
> A union shouldn't be telling their boss who they can or cannot work with, partner with or have as clients, it's plain insubordination especially when it has absolutely nothing to do with their own compensations or work conditions.
A union can negotiate on whatever the workers want to negotiate.
“Politics” is simply the means by which we distribute power and resources. There is no division between labor organizing and politics. We just think there is in the US because worker movements have been systematically dismantled for decades.
I don’t think Democrats represent workers’ issues any more than Republicans if that’s what you’re asking. The point of labor organization is to enable workers to leverage their fundamental role in the mechanism of capitalism in order to make demands with teeth. That’s the only way to gain concessions from the establishment political parties.
> Sounds more like a political pressure group than a union. No collective bargaining, no workplace issues
Collective bargaining for contracts (e.g. compensation) are only one possible role a union can play. It's the most common one in the US for legal and historical reasons, but it's not the only one permitted.
Incidentally, the structure of the AWU is actually much more similar to how unions operate in Europe, where unions are not required or expected to have exclusive representation over a bargaining unit, and therefore quite commonly focus on a range of issues, rather than centering mostly on collective bargaining for contracts.
The perception that "it's not a union if it only represents a small number of people" or "it's not a union if it doesn't engage in collective bargaining" is a very American perspective (and even then, a perception which is inconsistent with the actual rights granted under the NLRA to minority unions in the US).
Tesla also didn't start with the Model 3, but instead built a roadster for the rich enthusiasts first (who were more forgiving of the lack in range, charger network, and other issues). It's the old boiling the frog adage.
Perhaps the political issues were a better bang for the buck because they were easier to formulate and addressed the needs of the most fanatical base? Once they make any progress in that area (and a quick formulation of the demands is a sign of such progress), the momentum will continue to build.
Rather than a plan to do that, it could be that if you get together all of the 0.05% most pro-union Google employees, and have them fairly vote to determine their average desires, you'll end up with something different from the average of all Google employees.
Unions are political pressure groups. Collective bargaining rights are not just limited to worker compensation, they touch on every aspect of business - including how the business wields its power in the larger society.
This really shouldn’t be called Googles union since there isn’t anything exclusive about it - 15 employees could start another ‘union’ tomorrow to put pressure on google for opposite political issues
The gist of it seems to be that "YouTube must no longer be a tool of fascist recruitment and oppression. Anything less is to countenance deadly violence..."
I'm quite a fan of the abstract idea of unions: typical corporate power structures are derived from the principle of 1 share = 1 vote[0], whereas unions provide a competing power structure derived from the principle of 1 employee = 1 vote.
Many fear/detest unions for their past failures, but any organization can be poorly run or corrupt. If you believe in democracy then you should believe that a power structure derived from 1 person = 1 vote has the potential to be more fair and more just, for the represented individuals, than the alternative power structure derived from dollars.
I would love to see more innovation in this space: How can we design better charters for unions (or governments, really) so that the resulting power structure better represents the people?
Should there be some kind of justice system for large unions to ensure there is no corruption and that decisions are made fairly in the best interests of the constituents? Should we elect representatives based on say department as a re-creation of the principles of federalism, or should we be a direct democracy? At what level of scale do these decisions matter?
Many people study democracy, but I fear not enough people study the ongoing process of creating effective and resilient new democracies from scratch.
[0] Although, many modern tech companies have perverted this by creating separate ultra-powerful voting shares reserved for founders
Most unions I suspect already have some form of within-union democracy. The small union I'm a member of works on a sort of federation basis, broken up by physical location. So members of District 26 vote for a District 26 rep, who goes to a meeting of the union leadership and then votes there.
In this way, representatives are not exclusively associated with job classifications (e.g., all the programmers vote for programmer reps, the accountants for accounting reps, etc.) but are instead only loosely associated with classification. So one rep mostly, but not exclusively, represents the accountants, but also might represent the secretary in the same office.
I think it's an okay system, and I'm sure different intra-union democratic structures have been studied, but to an extent I think you have the same problems as with local elections: it's difficult to get people to be informed and care, absent some huge community-wide issue. What was the difference between Rep A and Rep B in the last election? Who knows?
Because google employees hold extremely comfortable jobs, meaning they have more time for activism. There is a massive entitlement culture within the company.
For many years, Google leadership fostered a particularly open culture with vigorous internal debate and discussion. They held weekly all-hands Q&A sessions with Larry and Sergey, built an internal tool for sharing company-related image memes (including those critical of leadership), and hosted high-traffic internal mailing lists on a wide range of political and non-work related subjects.
Some of this has been curtailed in recent years, as leaks to the press increased and activist employees became increasingly critical of management.
Because Google attracted a lot of employees who care about corporate ethics with its "don't be evil" reputation. That reputation has faded as people learned about cases when Google didn't live up to it [1] but there are still a _lot_ of Googlers who want to hold Google to the old standard.
If there were another large tech company with a reputation for great ethics, many of these people would probably go there instead. But in spite of a lot of disillusionment, Google still seems to be the best of the FAANGs IMHO.
Full disclosure: I just left Google. I'm taking a break before looking for something new, but if someone knows of a tech company that is as ethical as I once thought Google was, I'd love to hear it...
[1] The wage-fixing cartel, several exec sexual harassment complaints and Andy Rubin's $90 million severance, double-speak around Project Maven, the complaints behind the walkout and ultimately Google firing the walkout organizers, etc.
Wait people were fooled by the "don't be evil" thing? That's just willful ignorance, in my opinion. I don't fault anyone for wanting to work at Google. The pay and reputation it carries are hard to ignore. But anyone expecting Google to be a moral authority, or to ever "do the right thing" when it comes to ethics vs money are just plain delusional.
I disagree. I pointed out some times Google didn't live up to this reputation, but there are also many times Google did something contrary to their short-term interests due to ethics and/or long-term "enlightened self-interest" thinking. A few examples:
* Google pulling out of China and ending their censorship. [1] I was proud to work there when this happened.
* They also generally treat their employees quite well compared to say Amazon. They treated me (a long-time SWE) personally quite well over the years, with the obvious exception of the wage-fixing that the other companies also participated in. They also do relatively well for non-SWEs, including temps and contractors. Eg, I believe they're still paying all the food staff even when they haven't been preparing meals on the same scale for months, which is pretty extraordinary.
* Their internal privacy attitude and controls are a lot better than many external people believe.
* They have a $10,000/year match for charitable donations.
I would not join, we’re I a Google employee. It is fine, IMO, to work on projects for my employer and privately, outside of work, to apply efforts to lessen and eventually remove the need for such work. But those efforts are my own business and not the business of any other person at the company. If the conflict of interest becomes too great, then I feel the company is within their right to reassign or terminate, or more likely, for me to remove myself from the conflict.
But, I also have a strong tendency and desire to leave my politics at home. I’m also careful to choose who I work for.
Just a helpful tip if you ever find yourself managing someone: firing someone because you feel like the "conflict of interest" from their union involvement is too great is illegal.
Harboring and stating these views online is likely to cause more damage for whatever company you're working for than the "conflicted" employee.
I’m speaking only about myself. If someone is a member of a union, they are due all legal protection due to that membership.
I also avoid any possibility of managing others because I’m very aware of my tendencies to “cold-shoulder” anyone with whom I have a severe disagreement. And in general, I’m not qualified for management, nor do I seek it.
> We will ensure Alphabet acts ethically and in the best interests of society and the environment.
I guess they don't consider global mass surveillance for the purpose of selling ads to be an ethical or societal problem, then. Good to know there's no reason to take anything they say seriously.
I don't. However, their site and the statements I've read from them don't mention anything about that, while certainly being very outspoken about pretty much all other issues related to Alphabet. It almost seems as if they've knowingly avoided that particular issue altogether.
The group says it now has more than 700 dues-paying members.
Dues are 1% of total compensation [0]. With 700 members, that’s already 7 whole Google salary and bonus packages. No small chunk of change. I hope the union will be transparent with their spending.
They want to become an inside government enforcing their own extreme ideology on everybody.
They can refuse working and cancel entire projects even if everyone working on the project is fine with it, ask for changes in management up and down based on rumors or tweets about a person or something they've done 25 years ago, stop serving meat in the cafeteria or allowing ICE cars to park for free and other "environmental" demands, mandatory quotas for each group they deem a "minority" based solely on their own discretion, stop work near deadlines or industry events just to show off their power etc.
Each one of those already had several very large and opinionated internal forum discussions there and many have made it into actions over the years.
In their minds they believe they're proletariat in a holy battle against the oppressive regime, any regime they fall under and are ironically turning into what they claim to be fighting against.
Whatever you may think of them, they are in the objective sense proletariat. They do not own the mean of production, but instead must sell their labour.
They are also labour aristocracy, the segment of global proles that are relatively comfortable and well compensated. It’s good if they wish to show solidarity to the rest of us.
The Wikipedia one (which I am not saying is correct, but is the first one I can find) mentions "..oppressed by capitalism, forced to accept meager wages" and "..who owned little or no property".
250k/year for L4 (out of college + 2 years average) isn't "meager wages" anywhere in the world, objectively.
My criticism is that this doesn't seem to be about showing solidarity and getting a better deal and working conditions, rather it's primarily about enforcing their environmental and state political ideology over the rest of the company. I would never object to a group of people who want me to work more efficiently and get a better financial deal.
Call me whatever you like, but I don't want to suddenly find beef off the cafeteria menu, be forced to pay extra for parking because I am not driving an electrical car (or because I am driving at all instead of biking) or be told my project is cancelled because it helps the democratically elected US government and that I have to donate from paycheck to entities I disagree with to help them in goals that hurt me at a personal level because the media that they follow managed to portray them in a positive way.
I really don't know who "the rest of us" you mean are, that they want to show their solidarity to, so I can't comment on that part. Did you mean they like to show solidarity to software engineers in other companies? Because I don't know how would they do that given their current direction.
Whatever little freedom we have left should be cherished at all cost because once we lose it, it won't ever come back.
Wikipedia is generalising, but does strike on the important part: even most Google engineers don't own private property, like means of production. They may have high wages and even some personal property (like a home), but they don't have significant ownership of any company.
Google engineers could show solidarity with the rest of us workers (that don't work at Google, aren't paid as well and aren't in the US) by changing Google's policies on surveillance, collaboration with US state agencies, abusing their monopoly, perpetuating the acceptance of sexual harassment in the workplace, etc.
I don't know why you're so obsessed with food and electric cars, the article says nothing about that. And if you really do feel so strongly about beef, you can join the union and express your views democratically.
You have no democratic control over Google's behaviour right now. If you work there and join the union, you can gain a small measure of it.
100k in appreciating stocks and 50k cars qualify as private property, or it can be converted into one fairly easily. For example, many Googlers from other countries like India buy land and houses there.
There are very long threads on eng-misc about those and other "environmental" topics, there aren't ones I randomly came by. Arguments using logic and majority of population preferences all get thrown off the window whenever someone mentions the E word (ethics). We're not living in a Utopia. If you think something is so wrong, pass a law to ban it or make it illegal, but don't enforce on me something that the vast majority of the US and world population is okay with.
I don't want to pay money to them in order to have a vote. If they want to enforce a police on the entire company, they should allow the entire company to vote on it, rather than only the ones who give them $$$. Otherwise, they'll keep coming up with all sorts of very controversial policies just to get everyone to give them money to have a chance vote against it!
Monopoly abuse goes both ways. They're okay with it when it allows them to silence the person who two months ago was chosen by seventy five million people in a democratic election, but it becomes an evil monopoly when it goes into helping same said democratically elected government. There is so much double standard in tech.
It’s true that many well-meaning people are idealists, when they would be well served by dialectical materialism. Thankfully, a union is a materialist endeavour of people that understand no amount of asking nicely will bring about as much change as the threat of a strike. Members tend to be quite realistic and class consciousness in my experience.
Why would union members assume the risk of being fired just to give everyone in the company control over the fruits of that risk? If you want democratic control over your workplace, you can collectively act together with your coworkers. That’s all a union is. The funds are collected to further that goal, often to protect workers from retaliation.
Seems that the whole thing is just a bunch of rich kids getting mad at daddy, not a serious union in the way we generally think of them.
It seems that this union is more like a political party. Well, why should I join a party if I don't know their policies? Who gets to decide the policies? What if I don't agree with their policies?
Does anyone have any experience managing engineers that are actively working on changing the way the company does business? Curious if engineers that excel at doing what they're told would get more done in the same amount of time.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 145 ms ] threadThey probably could look at pay inequality though, if they get their members to disclose all of that to the union.
The biggest question will be whether or not the AWU gets large enough and chooses to use the power to strike. Basically the one power any union has, that individual members can't employ without simply being fired.
> The biggest question will be whether or not the AWU gets large enough and chooses to use the power to strike. Basically the one power any union has, that individual members can't employ without simply being fired.
That's not true, strictly speaking. A group of people could theoretically strike together without being members of a formally-recognized union. In practice, it's tough to coordinate that, and they may have a more difficult time actually enforcing those rights without a legal and financial structure of support, but it's not true that people have to be members of a union in order to engage in a strike.
The law unambiguously grants that power to workers acting in concert with each other, whether or not they are doing so with the formal backing of a union.
As a counterpoint, tens of thousands of Googlers staged a worldwide walkout two years ago. They were not unionized. They were protected by the same law that protects unionized workers when striking. When Google retaliated against four of those 20,000+ people, the NLRB launched a federal investigation, the same way the NLRB would if they had been unionized.
> Unless you're striking against a specific unfair labor practice, your employer has the right to simply replace you, and reinstate you only when a new job opening is available.
That's not quite true. If it happened exactly as you describe, that would be a pretty clear-cut wrongful termination lawsuit, and the NLRB would come down pretty hard on the employer.
I do agree that informal coordination can do much of the work a union would. You just have to convince the company that it'd be a huge headache to replace everyone, because the actual organization work (which those four investigations you describe were about) is unconditionally protected.
...Everyone who organized the workout was either fired or retaliated against anyways, since you know, Google doesn't care about workers rights or the law.
Whether or not Google does, the courts do. The NLRB determined that two of the four were illegally fired, and there is a hearing scheduled for April 2021.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/04/technology/google-gender-...
By questioning whether a group of employees really is a union, you are attempting to strip them of federal protection from retaliation.
The one thing that makes unions special imho is the focus on workplace issues in a specific industry or company. That is the area where a union also has legal protection. Anything else they do isn't necessarily protected, and I find it very odd that that "union" does everything _but_ the protected stuff.
Gardening clubs are clearly not political pressure groups. I recommend that you do some reading on the history of unions in the USA; it is written in blood.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_Wars
Googlers suffered Apple's Techtopus salary-fixing collusion. In the USA, collective bargaining is an important component of breaking wage-fixing situations, and "labor union" is legal shorthand for such collective-bargaining groups.
Google routinely appropriates code from its employees using a Microsoft Clause, which reassigns employee-produced code to Google unless the employee can rigorously prove that Google had nothing whatsoever to do with the production of the code. Thousands of commits are appropriated every year, and there is an internal lawyer-driven process for automating the appropriation. Labor unions of artists have successfully attacked such practices in the USA before.
Google owns Youtube and Doubleclick, large advertising systems which both inspire great amounts of abuse and also themselves are abusive tools of user coercion. If Googlers wanted for Google employees to not damage their mental health by working in user moderation for hours on end, or wanted Google to be less of a part of our societal disinformation and spam problem by reforming advertising policies, then a union would be the natural place to start that argument.
It sounds like you've never worked at Google before. Just because Google does not threaten its employees with regular violence, does not mean that Google is a stellar employer above reproach and without need for redress.
Your overall attitude towards unions reminds me of a classic movie scene where disgruntled and confused folks wonder whether the Romans ever did anything for them. Here [0] is but one of many lists enumerating exactly what unions did for us.
[0] https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2012/5/15/1092027/-Thanks-a...
History doesn't care about your frustration. If you're a member or affiliate of AWU or CWA and you feel like your membership has been appropriated, contact your representative and start a formal appeal for redress. Otherwise, your place in this discussion isn't to have feelings, but to learn some facts and context.
Maybe I'm just being too cynical, but I can't help think this group is playing into the current trendiness of progressive issues, and some number of well-off Googlers are joining because ~$2000 a year is insignificant to them and they support the cause of unions in general even though they don't personally need any of the protections a typical union offers. Not to say this is necessarily a bad thing, non-profits need to market themselves somehow and if they accomplish positive change in Google's policies this way then great.
Your original figure of 0.5% was correct and your edit is wrong.
FTR: total employee number is 130k. 700/130000 = 0.054
Yes, it's effectively a PAC, not a union. Just like at Kickstarter where they were more concerned about people deemed 'conservative' not using the platform to promote comicbooks than anything related to work conditions.
A union shouldn't be telling their boss who they can or cannot work with, partner with or have as clients, it's plain insubordination especially when it has absolutely nothing to do with their own compensations or work conditions.
Obviously anybody can claim that employer B working with X or Y make their employees of class Z emotionally 'distressed' or 'unsafe'...
The irony/hypocrisy here is people claiming 'unions are political' when that thing at google is really just about being partisan, yet these people don't have the courage to call a PAC...a PAC, and hide behind the word 'union'.
I don't agree with that assessment. If Google employees have a strong opposition to working with, say, federal agencies to share data they've gathered on users, then I think it makes perfect sense for them bring that concern to the table.
Honestly, I don't see why a union shouldn't have the ability to bargain anything it wants to try and bargain. I'm open to someone changing my mind on that.
Edit: to clarify, letting the employees of a public corporation decide the direction/priorities would be like if the employees of a non-profit had a union which could force the non-profit to change from planting trees to something unrelated like washing dogs. The people who donated money would probably be upset that they were deceived about what the donation would be used to accomplish.
Money is not the only value here, so I don’t see why it has precedence over what other’s find valuable?
Yes, this is where negotiation between owners & the union comes in. Sometimes reality can disagree with a decision shareholders voted on and that is okay.
Who's forcing anyone? If the company doesn't want to play ball they are free to hire replacements when the workers strike. If the workers don't care enough to risk their jobs over it then their bluff has been called.
If the company does play ball and the shareholders don't like it they are free to elect a new board or sell their shares.
IANAL, but I did some research then, and my understanding is that the Supreme Court has ruled that to the extent that a union spends money on political activities, the dues they collect are no longer mandatory.
The point being that it’s not just a moot point whether they are actually a PAC. It is recognized in law that the purpose of a union is for collective bargaining in the workplace, and some of the special legal protections that a union holds (like mandatory dues and legal immunity) can fall away when the union is actually operating like a PAC.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25634087
A union is a PAC. It's a PAC that allows the workers to exercise some level of collective control over the business they create through their work. It's not just about bargaining for better pay or working conditions - that's a fabrication of the propaganda spread in the US as part of the effort to dismantle our labor movement.
If you look at the history of labor organizing, it's always been about power - whether power is held in the hands of those with capital, or whether it's shared with those who do the work.
A union can negotiate on whatever the workers want to negotiate.
When Amazon’s managers are Democrats you think any progress will get made on workers issues?
Collective bargaining for contracts (e.g. compensation) are only one possible role a union can play. It's the most common one in the US for legal and historical reasons, but it's not the only one permitted.
Incidentally, the structure of the AWU is actually much more similar to how unions operate in Europe, where unions are not required or expected to have exclusive representation over a bargaining unit, and therefore quite commonly focus on a range of issues, rather than centering mostly on collective bargaining for contracts.
The perception that "it's not a union if it only represents a small number of people" or "it's not a union if it doesn't engage in collective bargaining" is a very American perspective (and even then, a perception which is inconsistent with the actual rights granted under the NLRA to minority unions in the US).
Perhaps the political issues were a better bang for the buck because they were easier to formulate and addressed the needs of the most fanatical base? Once they make any progress in that area (and a quick formulation of the demands is a sign of such progress), the momentum will continue to build.
This Google group can advocate for wheat ever it wants.
The gist of it seems to be that "YouTube must no longer be a tool of fascist recruitment and oppression. Anything less is to countenance deadly violence..."
Many fear/detest unions for their past failures, but any organization can be poorly run or corrupt. If you believe in democracy then you should believe that a power structure derived from 1 person = 1 vote has the potential to be more fair and more just, for the represented individuals, than the alternative power structure derived from dollars.
I would love to see more innovation in this space: How can we design better charters for unions (or governments, really) so that the resulting power structure better represents the people?
Should there be some kind of justice system for large unions to ensure there is no corruption and that decisions are made fairly in the best interests of the constituents? Should we elect representatives based on say department as a re-creation of the principles of federalism, or should we be a direct democracy? At what level of scale do these decisions matter?
Many people study democracy, but I fear not enough people study the ongoing process of creating effective and resilient new democracies from scratch.
[0] Although, many modern tech companies have perverted this by creating separate ultra-powerful voting shares reserved for founders
In this way, representatives are not exclusively associated with job classifications (e.g., all the programmers vote for programmer reps, the accountants for accounting reps, etc.) but are instead only loosely associated with classification. So one rep mostly, but not exclusively, represents the accountants, but also might represent the secretary in the same office.
I think it's an okay system, and I'm sure different intra-union democratic structures have been studied, but to an extent I think you have the same problems as with local elections: it's difficult to get people to be informed and care, absent some huge community-wide issue. What was the difference between Rep A and Rep B in the last election? Who knows?
Apple might be different because they’re mostly just making devices? The social implications are less obvious.
Some of this has been curtailed in recent years, as leaks to the press increased and activist employees became increasingly critical of management.
If there were another large tech company with a reputation for great ethics, many of these people would probably go there instead. But in spite of a lot of disillusionment, Google still seems to be the best of the FAANGs IMHO.
Full disclosure: I just left Google. I'm taking a break before looking for something new, but if someone knows of a tech company that is as ethical as I once thought Google was, I'd love to hear it...
[1] The wage-fixing cartel, several exec sexual harassment complaints and Andy Rubin's $90 million severance, double-speak around Project Maven, the complaints behind the walkout and ultimately Google firing the walkout organizers, etc.
* Google pulling out of China and ending their censorship. [1] I was proud to work there when this happened.
* They also generally treat their employees quite well compared to say Amazon. They treated me (a long-time SWE) personally quite well over the years, with the obvious exception of the wage-fixing that the other companies also participated in. They also do relatively well for non-SWEs, including temps and contractors. Eg, I believe they're still paying all the food staff even when they haven't been preparing meals on the same scale for months, which is pretty extraordinary.
* Their internal privacy attitude and controls are a lot better than many external people believe.
* They have a $10,000/year match for charitable donations.
[1] https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-chin...
But, I also have a strong tendency and desire to leave my politics at home. I’m also careful to choose who I work for.
Harboring and stating these views online is likely to cause more damage for whatever company you're working for than the "conflicted" employee.
I also avoid any possibility of managing others because I’m very aware of my tendencies to “cold-shoulder” anyone with whom I have a severe disagreement. And in general, I’m not qualified for management, nor do I seek it.
I guess they don't consider global mass surveillance for the purpose of selling ads to be an ethical or societal problem, then. Good to know there's no reason to take anything they say seriously.
They're welcome to prove me wrong.
Dues are 1% of total compensation [0]. With 700 members, that’s already 7 whole Google salary and bonus packages. No small chunk of change. I hope the union will be transparent with their spending.
[0] https://alphabetworkersunion.org/power/faq/
They can refuse working and cancel entire projects even if everyone working on the project is fine with it, ask for changes in management up and down based on rumors or tweets about a person or something they've done 25 years ago, stop serving meat in the cafeteria or allowing ICE cars to park for free and other "environmental" demands, mandatory quotas for each group they deem a "minority" based solely on their own discretion, stop work near deadlines or industry events just to show off their power etc.
Each one of those already had several very large and opinionated internal forum discussions there and many have made it into actions over the years.
In their minds they believe they're proletariat in a holy battle against the oppressive regime, any regime they fall under and are ironically turning into what they claim to be fighting against.
They are also labour aristocracy, the segment of global proles that are relatively comfortable and well compensated. It’s good if they wish to show solidarity to the rest of us.
The Wikipedia one (which I am not saying is correct, but is the first one I can find) mentions "..oppressed by capitalism, forced to accept meager wages" and "..who owned little or no property".
250k/year for L4 (out of college + 2 years average) isn't "meager wages" anywhere in the world, objectively.
My criticism is that this doesn't seem to be about showing solidarity and getting a better deal and working conditions, rather it's primarily about enforcing their environmental and state political ideology over the rest of the company. I would never object to a group of people who want me to work more efficiently and get a better financial deal.
Call me whatever you like, but I don't want to suddenly find beef off the cafeteria menu, be forced to pay extra for parking because I am not driving an electrical car (or because I am driving at all instead of biking) or be told my project is cancelled because it helps the democratically elected US government and that I have to donate from paycheck to entities I disagree with to help them in goals that hurt me at a personal level because the media that they follow managed to portray them in a positive way.
I really don't know who "the rest of us" you mean are, that they want to show their solidarity to, so I can't comment on that part. Did you mean they like to show solidarity to software engineers in other companies? Because I don't know how would they do that given their current direction.
Whatever little freedom we have left should be cherished at all cost because once we lose it, it won't ever come back.
Google engineers could show solidarity with the rest of us workers (that don't work at Google, aren't paid as well and aren't in the US) by changing Google's policies on surveillance, collaboration with US state agencies, abusing their monopoly, perpetuating the acceptance of sexual harassment in the workplace, etc.
I don't know why you're so obsessed with food and electric cars, the article says nothing about that. And if you really do feel so strongly about beef, you can join the union and express your views democratically.
You have no democratic control over Google's behaviour right now. If you work there and join the union, you can gain a small measure of it.
There are very long threads on eng-misc about those and other "environmental" topics, there aren't ones I randomly came by. Arguments using logic and majority of population preferences all get thrown off the window whenever someone mentions the E word (ethics). We're not living in a Utopia. If you think something is so wrong, pass a law to ban it or make it illegal, but don't enforce on me something that the vast majority of the US and world population is okay with.
I don't want to pay money to them in order to have a vote. If they want to enforce a police on the entire company, they should allow the entire company to vote on it, rather than only the ones who give them $$$. Otherwise, they'll keep coming up with all sorts of very controversial policies just to get everyone to give them money to have a chance vote against it!
Monopoly abuse goes both ways. They're okay with it when it allows them to silence the person who two months ago was chosen by seventy five million people in a democratic election, but it becomes an evil monopoly when it goes into helping same said democratically elected government. There is so much double standard in tech.
I agree with you on one point, sex-based discrimination needs to end in Google (and Microsoft too): https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/04/technology/google-gender-...
Why would union members assume the risk of being fired just to give everyone in the company control over the fruits of that risk? If you want democratic control over your workplace, you can collectively act together with your coworkers. That’s all a union is. The funds are collected to further that goal, often to protect workers from retaliation.
It seems that this union is more like a political party. Well, why should I join a party if I don't know their policies? Who gets to decide the policies? What if I don't agree with their policies?
So just what's the point anyway?