HN will make snarky comments about doing no evil and avoid reading the part where the NLRB forced their hand by classifying worker protection of subcontractors as de-facto employee status. Good job NLRB.
That case could still be appealed and overruled. And then it could go to the Supreme Court, which would likely take years to resolve. Better to be safe than sorry, rather than hope that the case will stand.
It also doesn't fix the problem where a number of contractors sue you even if they might be wrong. It could very easily be a class action lawsuit like the one that cost Microsoft a lot of money. They could use those rules as a start and then throw a few other things together such that Google thinks it might have a problem in court and wants to settle rather than risk getting sued by every single contractor.
There are two things in the article: the NLRB rule (temporarily paused) and a bargaining order from an Administrative Law Judge who said Google is a joint employer for a particular group of contractors under NLRB case law.
The NLRB makes nearly all its law via adjudication, not rules. The aggressive interpretation of joint employer is what is causing companies to put up walls between employees and contractors so they don’t get swept up by the NLRB.
It appears that they started this as one of their virtue signaling projects, and they seem to have run into real world legal implications. If someone specifies the working conditions including wage and hours they are considered as employers of the contractors.
Conquering the press strategy always works for corporates. They can declare programs and initiatives to virtue signal whatever is catch of the season and they can choose either delay to implement or rollback with less fanfare. They've already gained political currency with in the initial barrage of press releases.
Google has really shifted their “vibe”. The constant layoffs, deals with the Israeli military, shuttering daycare etc. They don’t seem to care anymore.
While I didn’t care too much about all my email going to a google system Ive definitely been looking for an alternative lately.
I shifted to Fastmail because people here tend to recommend it and I wanted less google in my life.
Two things I didn’t expect was a better web UI and better spam filtering. On top of that I can write to human support and they are both responsive and seem knowledgeable.
Found the same with Zoho, and it's free. Used it because I didn't really care about the account and expected some shitty roundcube thing, but have been blown away. The app, website, and spam filtering absolutely crush what Gmail is offering.
> Used it because I didn't really care about the account and expected some shitty roundcube thing, but have been blown away.
For what it's worth, I self host a few e-mail servers and modern Roundcube is actually a pleasant experience, even if I like connecting Thunderbird directly.
I still very much rely on some cloud vendor e-mails for uptime and deliverability, though. Otherwise, with random VPSes you risk the IPs having bad reputation or having a plethora of issues (such as some providers not allowing e-mail ports).
I agree with you on the UI, but left Fastmail and went back to Google workspace because of Fastmails poor spam filtering. 1-2 pieces of spam were hitting my inbox daily. On Workspace it's 1-2 a month.
I think you should state your ideas more clearly. Are you saying there is an equivalence between Germany in WW2 and Israel? If not, what’s the point of your comment?
Omar Shakir, the Israel and Palestine director at Human Rights Watch, said he saw no evidence that the numbers were being manipulated.
“We have been monitoring human rights abuses in the Gaza Strip for three decades, including several rounds of hostilities. We’ve generally found the data that comes out of the ministry of health to be reliable,” he said.
“When we have done our own independent investigations around particular strikes, and we’ve compared those figures against those from the health ministry, there haven’t been major deviations.
“Their numbers generally are consistent with what we’re seeing on the ground in recent days. There have been hundreds of airstrikes per day in one of the most densely populated areas of the world.
“We’ve looked at satellite imagery. We’ve seen the number of buildings, and the numbers that are coming out are in line with what we would expect with what we’re seeing on the ground. So you put all those things together and we’re quite confident in the overall casualty numbers.”
Yes, you should condemn Hamas for putting them in peril! They just need to keep their soldiers and weapons away from the children instead of using them as meat shields and banking on their supporters like you to help them with the information war.
You want Israel to value the lives of Palestinian children more than the Palestinians themselves do? Would you support rounding up the children and getting them adopted elsewhere in the muslim world and sterilising the adults? If not, I think you're just talking out of your ass.
The assertion was that "running a business with paying customers" is A-Ok.
The counter example was of businesses that aided in war crimes.
The question posed was whether "business trumps all as long as it pays" is an absolute or whether there are qualifications depending on the type and application of paying business.
> A decade later, it was a Nazi Party donor and, after the Nazi takeover of Germany in 1933, a major government contractor, providing significant material for the German war effort. Throughout that decade it purged itself of its Jewish employees; the remainder left in 1938.[9] Described as "the most notorious German industrial concern during the Third Reich",[10] in the 1940s the company relied on slave labour from concentration camps, including 30,000 from Auschwitz,[11] and was involved in medical experiments on inmates at both Auschwitz and Mauthausen.[12][13] One of its subsidiaries supplied the poison gas Zyklon B, which killed over one million people in gas chambers during the Holocaust.
> The Nazis made extensive use of Hollerith punch card and alphabetical accounting equipment and IBM's majority-owned German subsidiary, Deutsche Hollerith Maschinen GmbH (Dehomag), supplied this equipment from the early 1930s. This equipment was critical to Nazi efforts to categorize citizens of both Germany and other nations that fell under Nazi control through ongoing censuses. This census data was used to facilitate the round-up of Jews and other targeted groups, and to catalog their movements through the machinery of the Holocaust, including internment in the concentration camps.
Because of that, I guess the critique of saying it's "just business" makes sense.
I'm not a history major, nor am well versed in what's going on in the Middle East, I'm just thankful to be from a more boring part of the world where I'm not exposed to a variety of horrors nowadays. Or at least that I live in a time where I don't have the risk of being taken to the Corner House by the KGB, which was an issue in my country under Soviet occupation.
Yeah, but by leaving gmail, Google's artificial "intelligence" can't randomly decide to take your digital life away from you.
Also, in most cases, the other end an email isn't a gmail user but a corporate bot. So Google may actually not have all your emails if you move away from it.
I worked part time at google through an employment agency back in college. So I was one of those “not employed by google”-google employees, working part time on a 2 month project.
Almost 10 years later the employment agencies call me out of the blue to tell me google has conducted an internal investigation showing that contractors had lower pay than “real” employees and they are now making up for it and if I could submit my updated bank information.
I mean, that sounds like a Nigerian scammer, but since I did in fact work with the agency that called me, I updated my info and two month later they added ~$200 to my account.
It's ok to share the link, but do it in the discussion over there. It's not original. Don't split/start a new thread. There's also usually archive.is links posted there also.
Here in the UK the minimum wage act was introduced in 1998.
It was sold to the public as a way to stop employers abusing employees by under paying them and to prevent slave wages.
Constantly stating the so called "sweat shops" (the clothing manufacturing factories) in the north of England employing foreign and illegal workers and paying them a poultry £2 per hour.
What really happened was this:
Early on it was quite clear that the act was developed for the benefit of employers to reduce their overall wage budget and not to help employees by paying them more.
Large companies started to get rid of staff who were being paid a decent liveable wage only to re-employ new staff on the minimum wage. Early retirement was another way to get swathes of people out and employ more and more people on mimimum wages.
Right across the board from building site workers to Airline staff. No job was safe.
Minimum wage!
We as a company will pay you the minimum wage which is preset through our intensive lobbying of government to continue with our vast profits for shareholders.
In the Oxford dictionary the word "Employ" means "to use".
There is nothing wrong with minimum wage regulations, but they aren't enough on their own.
What is also needed are strong unions that fight on behalf of the workers to make sure wages are higher than the minimum (plus everything else that unions do for workers).
That only helps those with strong unions. Those with strong unions are often hugely overpaid (train drivers in the UK for example - one reason are trains are expensive).
THose in a weaker position with regard to striking (easily replaced, no short term loss or employers who are better off absorbing it, large numbers of small employers rather than one or two big ones...) cannot benefit as much.
> Anyone who complains train drivers are overpaid is always free to retrain as one
And anyone who complains CEOs are over paid is free to become one too, in theory.
I do not want to retrain as a train driver, but many people in occupations that are more skilled (such as nursing) would make more money if they did so.
It sounds to me that the issue isn't that train drivers are being compensated too much, but rather that nurses and pilots (among many others) are not being compensated enough.
They should take a page out of the playbook that the train drivers have been using.
> And anyone who complains CEOs are over paid is free to become one too, in theory
I think you know that’s a specious argument because in reality it’s far easier to become a train driver than a CEO
Yes, UK train drivers might be better paid than most of their European counterparts but we still don’t have enough of them and their representatives have negotiated well
Nurses being underpaid doesn’t make train drivers overpaid that’s just Tory politicians talking points
This makes no sense? If employers could replace high paid workers with minimum wage on-mass after minimum wage law then why didn't they just replace them with even cheaper workers before minimum wage law?
Some companies pay more that the minimum wage as they’re competing for staff e.g. supermarkets, and the more people are paid the lower in work benefits will cost
I personally prefer the Swedish system of wages set by union negotiations instead of having a state minimum wage.
There should obviously be special wages for particularly strenuous work, that leaves people exhausted and for certain professions that have special characteristics, and that's not for the government to decide, rather it must be set by collective agreements between large groups of workers and employers.
Politics and laws are too slow, and this provides an intermediate flexibility level in-between politics and direct negotiation.
It's at odds with some EU law though, which is a huge problem. It's designed to work in a closed system, so when people can bring in strikebreakers from abroad there's a major problem which will eventually have be solved at the EU level, or we'll eventually be unable to remain (since this is more core to our politics than our EU membership).
52 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 73.2 ms ] thread(Read the link. This is all about who's the real employer in indirect-employment situations.)
[1] https://www.morganlewis.com/pubs/2024/03/nlrb-blocked-from-i...
It also doesn't fix the problem where a number of contractors sue you even if they might be wrong. It could very easily be a class action lawsuit like the one that cost Microsoft a lot of money. They could use those rules as a start and then throw a few other things together such that Google thinks it might have a problem in court and wants to settle rather than risk getting sued by every single contractor.
The NLRB makes nearly all its law via adjudication, not rules. The aggressive interpretation of joint employer is what is causing companies to put up walls between employees and contractors so they don’t get swept up by the NLRB.
Conquering the press strategy always works for corporates. They can declare programs and initiatives to virtue signal whatever is catch of the season and they can choose either delay to implement or rollback with less fanfare. They've already gained political currency with in the initial barrage of press releases.
While I didn’t care too much about all my email going to a google system Ive definitely been looking for an alternative lately.
Two things I didn’t expect was a better web UI and better spam filtering. On top of that I can write to human support and they are both responsive and seem knowledgeable.
For what it's worth, I self host a few e-mail servers and modern Roundcube is actually a pleasant experience, even if I like connecting Thunderbird directly.
Here's the mail server I like: https://github.com/docker-mailserver/docker-mailserver
I still very much rely on some cloud vendor e-mails for uptime and deliverability, though. Otherwise, with random VPSes you risk the IPs having bad reputation or having a plethora of issues (such as some providers not allowing e-mail ports).
I'm certain there's overwhelming retroactive support for IBM and IG Farben within Israel on the grounds that it was just business.
Why would infomation systems for tracking tattoos on not-Aryans in work and death camps be a problem?
Why would developing and selling Zyklon-B be a problem?
By your comment above, and I quote: "Why would taking on paying customers be a problem? It shows they are running a business".
Do you truly believe that making sales and profit is all that matters?
Does that make it okay for Israel to kill 13,000 children... ?
Sure, I can understand Israel accidentally killing 1 or 2 children. Maybe even accidentally killing 10 children.
But 13,000 ?
It is hard to comprehend accidentally killing 13,000 children.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-68625406
"The United Nations children's agency, Unicef, says 13,000 children in Gaza have been killed by Israel since the war began"
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/26/can-we-trust-c...
--
Omar Shakir, the Israel and Palestine director at Human Rights Watch, said he saw no evidence that the numbers were being manipulated.
“We have been monitoring human rights abuses in the Gaza Strip for three decades, including several rounds of hostilities. We’ve generally found the data that comes out of the ministry of health to be reliable,” he said.
“When we have done our own independent investigations around particular strikes, and we’ve compared those figures against those from the health ministry, there haven’t been major deviations.
“Their numbers generally are consistent with what we’re seeing on the ground in recent days. There have been hundreds of airstrikes per day in one of the most densely populated areas of the world.
“We’ve looked at satellite imagery. We’ve seen the number of buildings, and the numbers that are coming out are in line with what we would expect with what we’re seeing on the ground. So you put all those things together and we’re quite confident in the overall casualty numbers.”
For a March 2024 casualty update, ~13,000 children killed seems, sadly, plausible.
The counter example was of businesses that aided in war crimes.
The question posed was whether "business trumps all as long as it pays" is an absolute or whether there are qualifications depending on the type and application of paying business.
IG Farben: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IG_Farben
> A decade later, it was a Nazi Party donor and, after the Nazi takeover of Germany in 1933, a major government contractor, providing significant material for the German war effort. Throughout that decade it purged itself of its Jewish employees; the remainder left in 1938.[9] Described as "the most notorious German industrial concern during the Third Reich",[10] in the 1940s the company relied on slave labour from concentration camps, including 30,000 from Auschwitz,[11] and was involved in medical experiments on inmates at both Auschwitz and Mauthausen.[12][13] One of its subsidiaries supplied the poison gas Zyklon B, which killed over one million people in gas chambers during the Holocaust.
IBM: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM#History
> The Nazis made extensive use of Hollerith punch card and alphabetical accounting equipment and IBM's majority-owned German subsidiary, Deutsche Hollerith Maschinen GmbH (Dehomag), supplied this equipment from the early 1930s. This equipment was critical to Nazi efforts to categorize citizens of both Germany and other nations that fell under Nazi control through ongoing censuses. This census data was used to facilitate the round-up of Jews and other targeted groups, and to catalog their movements through the machinery of the Holocaust, including internment in the concentration camps.
Because of that, I guess the critique of saying it's "just business" makes sense.
I'm not a history major, nor am well versed in what's going on in the Middle East, I'm just thankful to be from a more boring part of the world where I'm not exposed to a variety of horrors nowadays. Or at least that I live in a time where I don't have the risk of being taken to the Corner House by the KGB, which was an issue in my country under Soviet occupation.
IBM computers were helping the nazis keeping track of, among other people, the jews, to better exterminate them.
Google is providing AI systems to Israel. AI systems are used to target and exterminate Gaza residents.
Also, in most cases, the other end an email isn't a gmail user but a corporate bot. So Google may actually not have all your emails if you move away from it.
I suspect they share data with a belligerent with its murder victim chooser algorithm, so you might drop "digital".
At least Microsoft and Apple have some identity with Tim and Satya.
Almost 10 years later the employment agencies call me out of the blue to tell me google has conducted an internal investigation showing that contractors had lower pay than “real” employees and they are now making up for it and if I could submit my updated bank information.
I mean, that sounds like a Nigerian scammer, but since I did in fact work with the agency that called me, I updated my info and two month later they added ~$200 to my account.
Avoid syndicated content.
Actual article & more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40092328
It was sold to the public as a way to stop employers abusing employees by under paying them and to prevent slave wages.
Constantly stating the so called "sweat shops" (the clothing manufacturing factories) in the north of England employing foreign and illegal workers and paying them a poultry £2 per hour.
What really happened was this:
Early on it was quite clear that the act was developed for the benefit of employers to reduce their overall wage budget and not to help employees by paying them more.
Large companies started to get rid of staff who were being paid a decent liveable wage only to re-employ new staff on the minimum wage. Early retirement was another way to get swathes of people out and employ more and more people on mimimum wages.
Right across the board from building site workers to Airline staff. No job was safe.
Minimum wage!
We as a company will pay you the minimum wage which is preset through our intensive lobbying of government to continue with our vast profits for shareholders.
In the Oxford dictionary the word "Employ" means "to use".
What is also needed are strong unions that fight on behalf of the workers to make sure wages are higher than the minimum (plus everything else that unions do for workers).
THose in a weaker position with regard to striking (easily replaced, no short term loss or employers who are better off absorbing it, large numbers of small employers rather than one or two big ones...) cannot benefit as much.
Laws that treat everyone equally are far better.
The best solution would be UBI.
Their median salary is £59,000 and considering their responsibilities that seems fine to me
Anyone who complains train drivers are overpaid is always free to retrain as one
it is higher than train drivers are paid in other European countries: https://www.dw.com/en/german-train-drivers-earn-less-than-yo...
It is far more than than a nurse earns.
> Anyone who complains train drivers are overpaid is always free to retrain as one
And anyone who complains CEOs are over paid is free to become one too, in theory.
I do not want to retrain as a train driver, but many people in occupations that are more skilled (such as nursing) would make more money if they did so.
They should take a page out of the playbook that the train drivers have been using.
I think you know that’s a specious argument because in reality it’s far easier to become a train driver than a CEO
Yes, UK train drivers might be better paid than most of their European counterparts but we still don’t have enough of them and their representatives have negotiated well
Nurses being underpaid doesn’t make train drivers overpaid that’s just Tory politicians talking points
The reality is that the minimum wage has hugely boosted incomes for the least well off - https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/mar/27/minimum-wage...
And the real issue is that wages have stagnated since the 2008 financial crisis with many people receiving below inflation pay rises e.g. medical staff being 35% worse off in real terms - https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/mar/20/uuk-workers...
Some companies pay more that the minimum wage as they’re competing for staff e.g. supermarkets, and the more people are paid the lower in work benefits will cost
There should obviously be special wages for particularly strenuous work, that leaves people exhausted and for certain professions that have special characteristics, and that's not for the government to decide, rather it must be set by collective agreements between large groups of workers and employers.
Politics and laws are too slow, and this provides an intermediate flexibility level in-between politics and direct negotiation.
It's at odds with some EU law though, which is a huge problem. It's designed to work in a closed system, so when people can bring in strikebreakers from abroad there's a major problem which will eventually have be solved at the EU level, or we'll eventually be unable to remain (since this is more core to our politics than our EU membership).