> So far, AWU has called on YouTube to permanently ban Donald Trump
So one of the top priorities of the union is to push the company to cancel more freely, to shrink the overton window, to be more politically partisan and to conceal more from their customers for their own good.
Of course they have every right to do so, but it doesn't give me confidence that this union will be a positive force.
Don got 5 killed during an attack on the capital, last I checked. A lot of good can come from private companies choosing not to give oxygen to his lies and hate.
I agree. Joe Biden should be taken off the air for allowing 4000 Americans to die from COVID every day and countless others to be blown up by the military that he commands.
Biden spent months talking about how much work he was going to do to fix everything on day one. Literally nothing that matters has even been done yet. No excuses
I actually agree with that, Biden is responsible for his feeble COVID response. From Summer onwards, it was quite clear that Biden was going to be President, and his team had 6 months to come up with a coronarecovery program to be implemented day 1 of his presidency. Instead, we are seeing a reliance on the vaccination program that was instituted by Trump (and works better than expectations) but nothing else. No word about elevated and long-term unemployment, branches of industry that are not coming back, low salaries and high asset prices. Everyone is worried about the stock market bubble, yet Biden's economic team is the usual Wall Street subjects.
Some serious mental gymnastics required if you think Biden had a silver bullet from Day 1. I'm sure he will come to disappoint us in the end, but the guy has been hard at work for the last 2 weeks reversing all kinds of Trump stuff. https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/us/biden-sets-to-work-...
In seriousness, if we had this as a norm (and not just a bludgeon for whatever politician we don't like), we'd be in a better place as a society. Obama has admitted that he continued the drone strikes because he couldn't afford to look soft on terrorism as a Democrat, for instance. No law compelled him to, just the court of public opinion. How would we get to the point where, instead, he couldn't afford to look excited about bombing?
And, similarly, different countries have had wildly different rates of success at dealing with covid, but history will not remember Ardern or Phúc as a hero for the lives they saved, and it won't remember any national leader who didn't manage to do the same (Trump, Biden, or especially Löfven and Tegnell) as villains. It will remember Trump and Biden as leaders of a superpower, and it will remember, falsely, that covid surprised everyone and everyone dealt with it as best they could. Again, the incentives are bad. Why bother to try your hardest if people don't mind if you fail and you get some temporary popularity from saying "Everything is fine, go party"?
People respond to incentives, and this applies to everything from national politics to, oh, workplace politics. Remember that Twitter banned Trump because enough of their employees finally had enough (https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/01/16/how-twi...) more than any policy reason per se. Companies listen to unions when having the unionized employees present enough of an incentive for management to listen. Companies listen to non-unionized employees under the same conditions, too. A union just makes things more formal.
The fact that Biden did not feel compelled to suspend all military activity and lock down the country immediately upon assuming the presidency is certainly a failure of our society. If you want to say it's a personal failure, I (a Biden voter) will gladly join you. Let's just make sure we keep saying it for every president.
According to the actual covid death rates, infection rates, and projections, Sweden is doing about as well as the rest of Europe, and much, much better than the US:
I’m not sure why Tegnell gets so much hate for doing a softer economic shutdown, and getting similar results as more draconian approaches. As a bonus, projections say they’ll hit herd immunity sooner than many
countries (assuming vaccine rollouts).
I guess, as you point out, history is written by the victorious, and Sweden’s minority approach will always be backed by a minority political voice.
This article says, "Our World in Data shows Sweden’s government response stringency never reached 50, peaking at about 46 from late April to early June." and "Norway’s lockdown stringency has been less than 40 since early June, and fell all the way to 28.7 in September and October. Finland’s lockdown stringency followed a similar pattern, floating around the mid to low 30s for most of the second half of the year, before creeping back up to 41 around Halloween."
Sweden's stringency peaked around 65 and has never dropped below 55. Since early June, Norway has mostly been above 40.
So I'm curious what happened - did Our World in Data change their methodology? Did they add new data?
They also mention that 1) they are aggregating all policies, so this isn't a measure of "lockdown," 2) they are measuring the stringency of policies, not their effect (e.g., "Hard curfew at 10pm unless you're going to/from work" is pretty stringent, but probably less effective than "No indoor dining"), and 3) that they measure the maximum stringency of any subnational unit. I'd be very curious to see how exactly they compute their numbers. For instance, if there's a weak national policy on things like travel and quarantine that causes municipalities to do whatever smaller things are in their power like restricting visits to nursing homes, does that add up to a "more stringent" response in their measurement?
Or put more simply - apart from numbers on this chart, what is it that backs up the claim that Sweden had a more aggressive response than Norway and Finland did?
(Furthermore, FEE is a hard-capitalist advocacy organization and is interested in pushing a narrative around reduced government policies around everything, so their interpretations should be taken with a grain of salt, which is why I'm trying to find the original data. The conclusion of their article offers no policy position other than admitting we are powerless to control the course of virulent disease, which seems ... rather contradicted by history.)
Covid is transmitted by interpersonal contact, and Sweden has a low population density. There is no equivalent of the Boston/NYC/DC megalopolis, Greater Los Angeles, or even the Bay Area in Sweden. Frankly, there isn't an equivalent of most of central Europe. See this map: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Population_density_b...
So for Sweden to be doing about as well (in deaths per capita) as the rest of Europe is a sign of failure on Sweden's part. To be doing better than the US is no comparison at all.
Anyway, isn't this all my point? Sweden gets an excuse because other countries aren't doing well. Nobody is expecting anyone to do well. Why bother trying to save lives if nobody else is trying either? Why bother trying to do as well as Vietnam (which literally shares a land border with China!) if nobody is going to hold you to that standard?
> In fact, my hyperacctive chief of staff [Rahm Emanuel] - who'd spent enough time in Washington to know that his new, liberal president couldn't afford to look soft on terrorism - was obsessed with the list, cornering those responsible for our targeting operations to find out what was taking so long when it came to locating number 10 or 14.
> I took no joy in any of this. It didn't make me feel powerful. I'd entered politics to help kids get a better education, to help families get healthcare, to help poor countries grow more food - it was that kind of power that I measured myself against.
Keep in mind the very same people supported organizations like antifa and blm who killed or got killed a lot more than 5 people over the past few years...
You believe that 10s of thousands of people broke into the capital building?
How would that even be possible? I want to know the logistics of your theory of the 10s of thousands of people who were in DC that day, all being funneled into a single building
The problem is Youtube almost certainly will not filter on "lies and hate."
Youtube will filter on some blackbox intersection of heightened speech that has the potential to rile people up on the one hand, and a balance of cases such that Republicans cannot grandstand in Congressional testimony that Google is targeting the right.
So Jimmy Dore-- who generally yells, is unpleasant, and calls people names as he spews truths (mixed with the occasional naive opinion)-- might hit the filter. Or some boring socialist collective that nobody's heard of, like that case that Dorsey clearly used just so he'd have the name of a left-leaning organization that Twitter had banned.
Another way to say this: I do believe in "more speech" as a way to fight "bad speech," but if "more speech" does not include the freedom to read, understand, modify, and publish modifications of the recommendation algos that prime over a hundred million people then it's a dangerously constrained and misleading debate.
Furthermore-- if we depend on the "temporary" solution of trusting the companies to do cherry-picked bans to appease hundreds of millions of users, the companies will use all their data, money, and connections to paint that as a long term solution and leverage it to their bigger fight against monopoly regulation.
They will filter "lies and hate". But that doesn't mean the "lies and hate" will magically disappear. Only the Government-approved(TM) lies and hate will be allowed to justify wars and authoritarian policies and you will be demonized and depersoned if you even try to question it. This is going to happen.
It reads like there are wreckers in AWU that just wanted it to be a generator of #resistance press releases, and they're becoming very angry that it might be used for the sake of Google workers around the world.
That being said, CWU looks to have screwed this up royally, and having a vote on international affiliation surrounded by a bunch of pomp would have been a great way to generate press.
Having Google TC and deciding to unionize and risk it all is certainly a risky choice. Google at E5/E6 is a “comfortable FIRE in 10 years” place if levels.fyi is correct.
Isn't it the opposite? If you're at a FIRE point, there's no downside to trying to do possibly-job-ending things at your workplace. You're ready to leave anyway.
And anyone who's been at Google for a few years, even not at L5, will have no trouble finding a job elsewhere that pays as much (or more - last time I had a Google offer they flatly refused to match fintech salaries). Just make sure your name doesn't get into stories like this and resign a bit early if it seems like you're losing.
This seems... exaggerated and not particularly newsworthy, like the journalist's trying to make a big story out of something tiny:
> In a statement, AWU executive council member Auni Ahsan said: “We want to honor the concerns that have been raised, but our primary focus as a union isn’t affiliation or disaffiliation.”
> After the article came out, however, multiple AWU members told The Verge they were blindsided by the news. A Google worker in Europe also said they hadn’t known about the announcement, but noted they typically don’t find out about union news before it becomes public.
> Uni told The Verge that McEnany was “very involved” in the alliance, and during the meeting, McEnany acknowledged he was partly to blame — he’d told Uni to attribute the quote to Koul.
So... just your standard communications mixups? I mean, if the journalist has to quote a Googler who didn't know about the announcement but admits they don't typically get non-public union announcements anyways... it tells me there isn't much here.
This doesn't really seem like "turmoil" to me, but more of a journalist trying to create a sensationalistic narrative.
I imagine the real issue is whether affiliating with a larger union is something that should be up for vote with the members, or at least an open debate.
“We want to honor the concerns that have been raised, but our primary focus as a union isn’t affiliation or disaffiliation.”
That sounds very much like condescendingly downplaying the seriousness of affiliation as something they should not be worrying about, when in fact it is something that the members are concerned about.
After her previous “Exclusive” quoted people who didn’t say what they’re quoted as saying, I’d imagine there is pressure to frame it as a bigger union fuckup to deflect blame. Either it’s an everyday thing, in which the earlier article was poor journalism, or it’s a bigger deal the journalist couldn’t have expected and then this is a Story! I’m surprised the earlier article hasn’t been corrected yet.
The entire "Google Union" story has been exaggerated.
Everyone got so caught up in the unionization narrative that they didn't even read the details of the union in the first place. Specifically, this union isn't the kind of union with collective bargaining rights, which is what most people assume when they see the word "union".
> The Alphabet Workers Union will push for change without traditional collective bargaining rights.
This pseudo-union is more like a Discord group of 100-200 Google employees who will try to influence change together, without actually forming a traditional union.
It is a bit more than that. Members give 1% of their TC to the union (which is exceptionally high, by the usual standards of union dues and the actual member services the union provides).
The model of unionism you reference isn't universal or even the most common cross culturally. Even within the US, pre-New Deal minority unionism was the dominant form of worker organization.
The fall out between CWA and the employees was predictable, but faster than I would have guessed.
I don’t understand why they teamed up with CWA in the first place. What possible alignment of incentives were they hoping for? What were they thinking?
They don’t know what they are doing or what they want. Some of the main organizers are 1-2 years out of college and this is their first job. It’s really silly.
It tells you what kind of life experience they have to inform their decisions, including to unionize with a job like that to begin with. I think it speaks for itself.
Experience would help, especially when dealing with old, politically-connected organizations.
Going on their own would probably also be hard, since union laws in the US are complicated.
None of this stuff is taught in engineering courses in college. I think lack of real world experience is a pretty good explanation. Hopefully they can course correct before it snowballs. Finding a trustworthy old-hat union organizer or ten, and having them act as an advisor might help.
A few googlers teaming up can presumably afford to pay some labor lawyers to draw up the paperwork and guide them through the process. It'd also leave googlers' more in control of their destiny than quickly becoming a franchise of a larger union.
With the hundreds of members they now have, they could cover a few staff and/or consultants. Maybe even with some sort of loan to the union for spin-up costs that could be repaid from future dues if successful?
UAW is another common choice, but they have a terrible track record of squashing workers rights in the University of California system. (Read up on the 2020 UC Santa Cruz wildcat strikes, or when they negotiated to reduce health care coverage for female grad students and also forced student salary caps through a decade or so ago.)
>Amr Gaber, a Google engineer who helped organize the 2018 walkout, told The New York Times that the union has been more concerned with claiming turf than listening to the needs of organizers.
I wonder how many people are using this news to say "See, I told you so"
I further wonder how many people are replying to them with some form of "That's a anti-union sterotype, you just don't understand unions."
Um this is the CWA i.e. local to the USA not the Global alliance which is UNI - the former President is Friend.
Realistically AWU has to partner with another union initially standing up a brand new stand alone union with all the costs and difficulties is not practicable.
What kind of costs and difficulties? Filing paperwork isn't terribly expensive, and with an average member wage 5-10x higher than the median wage in the US the union should hit above its weight class.
A larger union is likely to bring its own set of office politics and costs.
It's not that simple to create an effective professional union you need to hire specific skills there is a limit to what lay officers/activists can do in there free time.
Just remaining within the absolute letter of the law is complex and panties for failure can be heavy - I know I have dealt with this aspect in the UK.
As a tech worker in the US, the prospect of some form of a tech employee associatation seems like the right way to go.
- Employees are regularly screwed on misrepresented equity compensation
- Employees are expected to work uncompensated on-call shifts which vary from "doesn't affect me" to "impossible to function on" such as being paged once per hour for 1 week with the expectation to do it again in a weeks time.
- Employees are subject to highly opaque performance review processes that take into account employee performance, as well as what work they happened to be assigned - Some assignments may be incompatible with the companies expectation for a given role e.g. Software Engineers assigned to put together excel reports
- Employees may be asked to perform ethically or legally dubious activities where they may be held criminally liable ( see dieselgate, and to a lesser extent the 737 max ).
- Employees may be asked to work 80+ hours to hit goals which were underfunded or poorly planned (see CDPR and every other software project which misses a deadline)
This is a small list of reasons an industry employee group such as a guild/union/certification board/association could be a good idea. However very few of these items relate to traditional union activities. The thought of pulling in specific hires with specific union skills seems like either forcing a square peg through a round hole or just paying to support someone who will fill their time with activities related to "unions" to little employee benefit.
> Spiers spoke about her experience with CWA and said she wanted to acknowledge that the alliance announcement was not an isolated incident. Now, she’s participating in a campaign to disaffiliate from the larger organization.
It's important to choose allies carefully. If you opportunistically work with an individual who's more invested in making scenes and silly sloganeering than using good judgment to accomplish meaningful change, you shouldn't be surprised when it turns out she's not much of a team player. Can't feel too bad for the CWA here.
> The news was an unwelcome surprise to union members who expect the Alphabet Workers Union to run democratically.
Sounds like the AWU members need to unionize and form an AWU Members Union to make their voices heard within AWU.
Sarcasm aside, this really is a bad look for a group that needs some non-controversial wins to gain support, rather than focusing on just “gaining turf” as quoted in the article. I get the impression CWA is trying to use this to get a foothold in big tech at all costs, AWU members be damned. Maybe they can call it growth hacking.
> As a so-called minority union, it isn’t recognized by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and can’t require Alphabet or its subsidiaries like Google to negotiate a contract for its members. Its power comes in part from uniting Alphabet workers and swelling its membership base to mount public pressure campaigns.
So what makes this different from say forming a Facebook group for like minded employees? Or how is it different from internal affinity groups, most of which are heavily political in US tech companies?
The parent union is basically the mob/mafia. Once you join you cant unjoin and they will extort the union till they bankrupt it or the company. Ours is terrible too.
> As a so-called minority union, it isn’t recognized by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and can’t require Alphabet or its subsidiaries like Google to negotiate a contract for its members.
Can someone explain this? What would be the requirement to be non-minority union?
That they have a majority of workers in that category on their side. Since they have a few hundred and Google have tens of thousands of software engineers in USA they are pretty far from becoming a majority union.
73 comments
[ 0.17 ms ] story [ 145 ms ] threadSo one of the top priorities of the union is to push the company to cancel more freely, to shrink the overton window, to be more politically partisan and to conceal more from their customers for their own good.
Of course they have every right to do so, but it doesn't give me confidence that this union will be a positive force.
And, similarly, different countries have had wildly different rates of success at dealing with covid, but history will not remember Ardern or Phúc as a hero for the lives they saved, and it won't remember any national leader who didn't manage to do the same (Trump, Biden, or especially Löfven and Tegnell) as villains. It will remember Trump and Biden as leaders of a superpower, and it will remember, falsely, that covid surprised everyone and everyone dealt with it as best they could. Again, the incentives are bad. Why bother to try your hardest if people don't mind if you fail and you get some temporary popularity from saying "Everything is fine, go party"?
People respond to incentives, and this applies to everything from national politics to, oh, workplace politics. Remember that Twitter banned Trump because enough of their employees finally had enough (https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/01/16/how-twi...) more than any policy reason per se. Companies listen to unions when having the unionized employees present enough of an incentive for management to listen. Companies listen to non-unionized employees under the same conditions, too. A union just makes things more formal.
The fact that Biden did not feel compelled to suspend all military activity and lock down the country immediately upon assuming the presidency is certainly a failure of our society. If you want to say it's a personal failure, I (a Biden voter) will gladly join you. Let's just make sure we keep saying it for every president.
https://covid19.healthdata.org/sweden?view=total-deaths&tab=...
I’m not sure why Tegnell gets so much hate for doing a softer economic shutdown, and getting similar results as more draconian approaches. As a bonus, projections say they’ll hit herd immunity sooner than many countries (assuming vaccine rollouts).
I guess, as you point out, history is written by the victorious, and Sweden’s minority approach will always be backed by a minority political voice.
But that doesn't seem to match what Our World in Data is actually showing right now: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/covid-stringency-index?ta...
Sweden's stringency peaked around 65 and has never dropped below 55. Since early June, Norway has mostly been above 40.
So I'm curious what happened - did Our World in Data change their methodology? Did they add new data?
They also mention that 1) they are aggregating all policies, so this isn't a measure of "lockdown," 2) they are measuring the stringency of policies, not their effect (e.g., "Hard curfew at 10pm unless you're going to/from work" is pretty stringent, but probably less effective than "No indoor dining"), and 3) that they measure the maximum stringency of any subnational unit. I'd be very curious to see how exactly they compute their numbers. For instance, if there's a weak national policy on things like travel and quarantine that causes municipalities to do whatever smaller things are in their power like restricting visits to nursing homes, does that add up to a "more stringent" response in their measurement?
Or put more simply - apart from numbers on this chart, what is it that backs up the claim that Sweden had a more aggressive response than Norway and Finland did?
(Furthermore, FEE is a hard-capitalist advocacy organization and is interested in pushing a narrative around reduced government policies around everything, so their interpretations should be taken with a grain of salt, which is why I'm trying to find the original data. The conclusion of their article offers no policy position other than admitting we are powerless to control the course of virulent disease, which seems ... rather contradicted by history.)
So for Sweden to be doing about as well (in deaths per capita) as the rest of Europe is a sign of failure on Sweden's part. To be doing better than the US is no comparison at all.
If you compare it to other Nordic countries (which are more comparable in terms of population density), it's doing much worse: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1113834/cumulative-coron...
Anyway, isn't this all my point? Sweden gets an excuse because other countries aren't doing well. Nobody is expecting anyone to do well. Why bother trying to save lives if nobody else is trying either? Why bother trying to do as well as Vietnam (which literally shares a land border with China!) if nobody is going to hold you to that standard?
Citation?
> In fact, my hyperacctive chief of staff [Rahm Emanuel] - who'd spent enough time in Washington to know that his new, liberal president couldn't afford to look soft on terrorism - was obsessed with the list, cornering those responsible for our targeting operations to find out what was taking so long when it came to locating number 10 or 14.
> I took no joy in any of this. It didn't make me feel powerful. I'd entered politics to help kids get a better education, to help families get healthcare, to help poor countries grow more food - it was that kind of power that I measured myself against.
100% of the Capitol Protests are known to break into the capitol.
You’re also wrong on that 100%.
How would that even be possible? I want to know the logistics of your theory of the 10s of thousands of people who were in DC that day, all being funneled into a single building
Second, there wasn't just one Capitol Protest. So no, you're wrong.
Youtube will filter on some blackbox intersection of heightened speech that has the potential to rile people up on the one hand, and a balance of cases such that Republicans cannot grandstand in Congressional testimony that Google is targeting the right.
So Jimmy Dore-- who generally yells, is unpleasant, and calls people names as he spews truths (mixed with the occasional naive opinion)-- might hit the filter. Or some boring socialist collective that nobody's heard of, like that case that Dorsey clearly used just so he'd have the name of a left-leaning organization that Twitter had banned.
Another way to say this: I do believe in "more speech" as a way to fight "bad speech," but if "more speech" does not include the freedom to read, understand, modify, and publish modifications of the recommendation algos that prime over a hundred million people then it's a dangerously constrained and misleading debate.
Furthermore-- if we depend on the "temporary" solution of trusting the companies to do cherry-picked bans to appease hundreds of millions of users, the companies will use all their data, money, and connections to paint that as a long term solution and leverage it to their bigger fight against monopoly regulation.
That being said, CWU looks to have screwed this up royally, and having a vote on international affiliation surrounded by a bunch of pomp would have been a great way to generate press.
Having Google TC and deciding to unionize and risk it all is certainly a risky choice. Google at E5/E6 is a “comfortable FIRE in 10 years” place if levels.fyi is correct.
And anyone who's been at Google for a few years, even not at L5, will have no trouble finding a job elsewhere that pays as much (or more - last time I had a Google offer they flatly refused to match fintech salaries). Just make sure your name doesn't get into stories like this and resign a bit early if it seems like you're losing.
> In a statement, AWU executive council member Auni Ahsan said: “We want to honor the concerns that have been raised, but our primary focus as a union isn’t affiliation or disaffiliation.”
> After the article came out, however, multiple AWU members told The Verge they were blindsided by the news. A Google worker in Europe also said they hadn’t known about the announcement, but noted they typically don’t find out about union news before it becomes public.
> Uni told The Verge that McEnany was “very involved” in the alliance, and during the meeting, McEnany acknowledged he was partly to blame — he’d told Uni to attribute the quote to Koul.
So... just your standard communications mixups? I mean, if the journalist has to quote a Googler who didn't know about the announcement but admits they don't typically get non-public union announcements anyways... it tells me there isn't much here.
This doesn't really seem like "turmoil" to me, but more of a journalist trying to create a sensationalistic narrative.
That sounds very much like condescendingly downplaying the seriousness of affiliation as something they should not be worrying about, when in fact it is something that the members are concerned about.
Everyone got so caught up in the unionization narrative that they didn't even read the details of the union in the first place. Specifically, this union isn't the kind of union with collective bargaining rights, which is what most people assume when they see the word "union".
Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/01/04/google-...
> The Alphabet Workers Union will push for change without traditional collective bargaining rights.
This pseudo-union is more like a Discord group of 100-200 Google employees who will try to influence change together, without actually forming a traditional union.
The model of unionism you reference isn't universal or even the most common cross culturally. Even within the US, pre-New Deal minority unionism was the dominant form of worker organization.
I don’t understand why they teamed up with CWA in the first place. What possible alignment of incentives were they hoping for? What were they thinking?
Going on their own would probably also be hard, since union laws in the US are complicated.
None of this stuff is taught in engineering courses in college. I think lack of real world experience is a pretty good explanation. Hopefully they can course correct before it snowballs. Finding a trustworthy old-hat union organizer or ten, and having them act as an advisor might help.
A few googlers teaming up can presumably afford to pay some labor lawyers to draw up the paperwork and guide them through the process. It'd also leave googlers' more in control of their destiny than quickly becoming a franchise of a larger union.
With the hundreds of members they now have, they could cover a few staff and/or consultants. Maybe even with some sort of loan to the union for spin-up costs that could be repaid from future dues if successful?
Why work with any of them?
I wonder how many people are using this news to say "See, I told you so"
I further wonder how many people are replying to them with some form of "That's a anti-union sterotype, you just don't understand unions."
Realistically AWU has to partner with another union initially standing up a brand new stand alone union with all the costs and difficulties is not practicable.
A larger union is likely to bring its own set of office politics and costs.
Just remaining within the absolute letter of the law is complex and panties for failure can be heavy - I know I have dealt with this aspect in the UK.
- Employees are regularly screwed on misrepresented equity compensation
- Employees are expected to work uncompensated on-call shifts which vary from "doesn't affect me" to "impossible to function on" such as being paged once per hour for 1 week with the expectation to do it again in a weeks time.
- Employees are subject to highly opaque performance review processes that take into account employee performance, as well as what work they happened to be assigned - Some assignments may be incompatible with the companies expectation for a given role e.g. Software Engineers assigned to put together excel reports
- Employees may be asked to perform ethically or legally dubious activities where they may be held criminally liable ( see dieselgate, and to a lesser extent the 737 max ).
- Employees may be asked to work 80+ hours to hit goals which were underfunded or poorly planned (see CDPR and every other software project which misses a deadline)
This is a small list of reasons an industry employee group such as a guild/union/certification board/association could be a good idea. However very few of these items relate to traditional union activities. The thought of pulling in specific hires with specific union skills seems like either forcing a square peg through a round hole or just paying to support someone who will fill their time with activities related to "unions" to little employee benefit.
I have seen a lot of cases relating to "PRP" and Performance reviews.
It's important to choose allies carefully. If you opportunistically work with an individual who's more invested in making scenes and silly sloganeering than using good judgment to accomplish meaningful change, you shouldn't be surprised when it turns out she's not much of a team player. Can't feel too bad for the CWA here.
Sounds like the AWU members need to unionize and form an AWU Members Union to make their voices heard within AWU.
Sarcasm aside, this really is a bad look for a group that needs some non-controversial wins to gain support, rather than focusing on just “gaining turf” as quoted in the article. I get the impression CWA is trying to use this to get a foothold in big tech at all costs, AWU members be damned. Maybe they can call it growth hacking.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teamsters_for_a_Democratic_U...
I thought to myself, "you have no idea what you're getting into, do you?"
So what makes this different from say forming a Facebook group for like minded employees? Or how is it different from internal affinity groups, most of which are heavily political in US tech companies?
Can someone explain this? What would be the requirement to be non-minority union?