Google hired union-busting consultants to convince employees “unions suck”
arstechnica.comGoogle Had Secret Project to ‘Convince’ Employees ‘That Unions Suck’ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29876068 - Jan 2022 (385 comments)
Having worked for both union and non-union employers - it's a mixed bag. Unions have advantages and disadvantages. They are great for worker representation - but that's a double-edged sword. Ideally, unions protects worker's interests. In practice, they often lead to abuse, stagnation and corruption. I've personally witnessed union employees who contributed nothing for years, get perpetually shifted from team to team to team and even promoted because it was too complex and costly to fire them. I've seen union stewards padding their own pockets with members dues through lavish "retreats" to five-star resorts. We must not forget that unions are made up of people - and people can be awful.
These can all be true things.
But could you imagine if we spoke about corporations in this manner? "I've worked for corporations and they are a mixed bag. In practice, they often abuse their employees. I've personally witnessed bosses who contributed nothing for years and just played politics."
For some reason we hold unions to an incredibly high standard of "no problems, ever" but this is never used to discourage all participation in the labor force because employers are often shitty.
Unions are democratically controlled worker organizations. Like democratic nations, they can contain abusers, they can be inefficient, and they can fail to solve problems effectively. But like democratic nations, they provide a powerful resistance to authoritarian abuse and on balance improve the quality of life for their people.
> But could you imagine if we spoke about corporations in this manner? "I've worked for corporations and they are a mixed bag. In practice, they often abuse their employees. I've personally witnessed bosses who contributed nothing for years and just played politics."
We definitely talk about corporations in this way. All the time, in fact!
The point which i don’t think was articulated well by the GP is that depsite these objections to corporate power nobody (ok,few people) in HN threads ever seems to endorse getting rid of corporations.
On the other hand, we rarely see HN threads about contractors in which corporations are argued to be a panacea for problems faced by busy well paid contract developers, and anybody suggesting any potential downsides of contractors moving onto payroll is assumed to be a dupe of propaganda pushed by Big Tim Ferriss.
(We can take that comparison further: people on HN sometimes do suggest that Uber drivers might be better off if they could only be hired as salaried employees but almost never say that about highly paid freelance developers. It's pretty similar when we're looking at the respective cost/benefit of collective bargaining arrangements for local bus drivers vs highly skilled developers earning two orders of magnitude more than bus drivers in an job market that offers practically unrivalled opportunities for people with their skillset.)
Corporations creates enormous amounts of value, as far as we know modern society cannot function without those structures. Unions however are optional, even if they help they still aren't nearly as important as corporations.
Edit: For those who disagree, how many modern societies are there without corporations running a majority of the economy? Not a single one. So as far as we know it doesn't work. It can work in theory, but it has never worked in practice. There are however many examples of modern economies with very little union influence, USA is an example, and USA is a better place to live than most countries. Unions can help, but countries that focused on strengthening unions and banning corporations did much worse than for example USA. Strengthening corporations and weakening unions however might have had some small negative effects but nearly not at the same level.
> There are however many examples of modern economies with very little union influence, USA is an example, and USA is a better place to live than most countries.
The US is arguably pretty subpar in terms of quality of life compared to other developed nations (little vacation, really expensive school system, poor health system for the masses leading to a lower life expectancy, high criminality rate, etc.). Of course, not all of it is due to unions, but they are all the consequences of policies being “pro business” instead of “pro people”.
I didn't argue otherwise. USA is however not subpar compared to any country hostile to corporations, which is the important part. A country being hostile to unions isn't nearly as bad as a country being hostile to corporations.
Bucketing countries into the false "hostile to unions vs. hostile to corporations" dichotomy is IMO disingenuous; it makes unions sound scary and unable to exist in a healthy corporate landscape.
Taxes are "hostile to corporations", but you wouldn't categorize a country as "hostile to corporations" based solely on the corporate tax rates. There's much more to the corporate landscape than just taxes.
Canada, the UK, Sweden, Germany [1]— there's plenty of countries that have higher union membership than the USA and are also arguably better places to live.
[1]: https://www.statista.com/chart/9919/the-state-of-the-unions/
> A country being hostile to unions isn't nearly as bad as a country being hostile to corporations.
This is a very subjective conclusion that is likely very dependent on what economic class you fall into. Many folks on HN (myself included) fall into the category white collar or professional workers. For many other parts of the labor market, you're literally trading sweat and toil for money.
Add to this that labor intensive jobs tend to lead to a lot of physical wear and tear with less medical benefits than white collar professionals typically receive, then just by quality of life and welfare alone most people doing physical labor would come to opposite conclusions re: pro union vs pro cooperation economic/governmental policies.
Not sure you understand, but every single developed nation has pro-corporation policies. Some of them also have pro-worker policies. But none of them are hostile towards corporations like for example Soviet or old China was. There are plenty of billionaires in Scandinavia etc.
"Every single developed nation" is a very broad generalization that I'd be skeptical of being true. I'd also dispute that all countries are pro-corperation and instead state that most countries are pro-economy.
Corporations are just a vehicle for organizing work and profit around a venture. There are many other ways to organize work that have nothing to do with corporations or unions. Consider partnerships, sole proprietorships, cottage industries, co-ops, and more specific arrangements within those vehicles like profit sharing, limited partnerships, and employee ownership (not to be confused with stocks/options, though they are similar in concept).
Capitalism can take many forms, and not all of them require we turn the way we organize work and wealth generation into a zero-sum game between entrepreneurs and laborers. It's just the first thing we've found that's worked out in the environments it's been attempted in. I think there's room for businesses and economies to try out novel models for organizing work, and I suspect many of them could get us better or more efficient trade-offs between profit, productivity, and general welfare for all parties involved.
> Consider partnerships, sole proprietorships, cottage industries, co-ops, and more specific arrangements within those vehicles like profit sharing, limited partnerships, and employee ownership (not to be confused with stocks/options, though they are similar in concept).
None of those have proven to work at scale though. So as far as we know corporations is how you have to do it. You can believe that there are other ways, but you cannot know that there are other ways as nothing else has proven to work.
It's worth pointing out that in many countries small companies under governance models as the ones listed make up a large portion (or even the majority) of the overall GDP. For example in Germany the "Mittelstand" employ 63.7% of all employ and contribute 54,4% of the total economic activity (sorry not sure how that is defined exactly) [1]. So saying they don't work at scale is not quite correct I'd argue, things are definitely more complicated.
[0] https://www.mittelstandsbund.de/themen/internationalisierung...
John Lewis & Partners, an employee-owned cooperative and the largest and most successful high end chain of department stores in the UK, springs to mind as a larger scale success story for alternative models.
I agree, though I suspect viability of models is heavily driven by the economic/regulatory/cultural environment.
In the US, we have:
1. A poor social net, meaning employers need to take on the onus of providing many basic benefits like health care.
2. A political environment that conflates communism/socialism/collectivism, which really muddies the waters around organizations that aren't hierarchical.
3. A work culture that prizes profits over all else. Orgs do not have to be this way, and if you look at expectations/obligations of similar entities in other countries they're expected to balance profitability with things like social welfare.
I think you're right in that within the US, corporations have shown the best ability to scale, but I believe this is a consequence of the economic/regulatory/political environment of the US than inherent superiority of corporate governance.
> USA is however not subpar compared to any country hostile to corporations
There are too little countries hostile to corporations remaining today to compare, but I'd still argue that today's US has subpar QoL compared to France in the 80s which was arguably on the anti-corporation side (with price control and a state-owned monopoly for most economic activities – or, when it wasn't a monopoly, the biggest actor was state-owned)
Anyway, I'm not arguing that we should get rid of corporations, but we should dramatically reduce their power and influence on the economy, which is now at a level far above what's desirable.
>USA is however not subpar compared to any country hostile to corporations
The comment you're replying to didn't say anything about hostility to corporations, just hostility to unions, which are categorically not the same measurements. Germany, for example, is extremely pro-union while also being very pro-corporation. Their quality of life metrics are generally much higher than the US as well.
You can pick a different definition of modern society though, which then unions are a requirement
> There are however many examples of modern economies with very little union influence, USA is an example
No there aren't. USA is not an example, every significant aspect of modern employment in the US has been shaped by unions.
That is a lie, labor movements shaped those long before there were a legal concept of unions. Unions != labor movements. Unions are often a result of labor movements, but they are not the same thing. For example, the 8-hour work week was demanded by labor movements who weren't organized as modern unions are organized.
Edit: Labor movements often called themselves unions though, but that was just a group of people getting together to protest and demand rights and has nothing to do with how modern unions works.
I would say that an organized group of workers that calls itself a union and advocates on behalf of those workers for labor rights is a union, and I think most people and dictionaries would agree with me. If that's not what you meant by the word "union", I think the burden is on you to provide an alternate definition for this discussion.
For example: "an organization of workers formed to protect the rights and interests of its members" - https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/union
A union is recognized by the NLRB and has certain statutory entitlements regarding strikes and the ability for employers to fire striking workers. "Labor movements," writ large, do not require those statutory entitlements. Modern unions can be understood in terms of their ability to collectively bargain without fear of direct reprisal in terms of employment. Otherwise, collective bargaining has always been an option (it's just humans acting in concert), and long predated the concept of "unions."
I feel confident that most people would say a formal organization of workers that engaged in collective bargaining and strikes without legal protections was a union, even if it existed before the NLRB. If what you really want to talk about is "modern legally-recognized unions" then just say that.
Maybe, but when they say union membership is down, they mean NLRB recognized unions. We do not have good stats on labor movements writ large. To the OP’s post, Google’s not tackling a labor movement. They’re tackling “unions” with statutory privileges.
So you would call a labor party a worker union? Labor seems to be able to organize just fine regardless if there are unions or not, as long as they are allowed to vote.
If it's a party composed of workers and it advocates specifically on behalf of the interests of the members, then yes I would call it a union. If party membership is open to anyone and labor issues are only some of the planks in its platform, then no I would not call it a union.
Honestly I think this is just continuing a very uninteresting semantics discussion - now we have to decide what "labor party" means. The point here is that you seem to have a different definition of "union" than the average person, which is fine, you should just be aware of that and watch out for misunderstandings when you're discussing with someone so you aren't talking past each other.
I'm not from the US so I'm probably misunderstanding this whole conversation. What's the difference between "a group of people getting together to protest and demand rights" and a union apart from the union being a legal entity?
What you wrote in your edit is what a Union means in Europe, it's just formalized as an entity.
Would you say that a labor party is a union? I wouldn't. A labor party is a labor movement though. If you call labor parties unions and say we should be thankful to them, then I agree, but that is totally different from workplace unions.
I guess my question is: how are those two different?
> how many modern societies are there without corporations running a majority of the economy?
Playing devil's advocate, what you say is probably true on the supply side. However, the other side, consumer demand, is mostly driven by people unaffiliated with corps. That is, families arguably drive the majority of the economy. (That said this argument feels more than a little pedantic, but it must be made!)
What, pray tell, are those corporations made of?
A corporation in the US is a legal fiction that creates a pseudo-person distinct from the owners, providing privileges to operate and legal protections for the owners. A corporation does not require many employees, which you seem to imply are required. The owners are the main component of a corporation not the employees.
By the way corporate personhood is not a legal fiction as in the term of art, it's a legal principle. More like a fact of law than a fiction.
I know in context you don't intend that but just a pejorative based around the fact corporations are a legal structure. Although I'm always puzzled by what the actual problem with this is. And I'll go on a tangent from the topic.
The legal system is fictional in basically the same way a corporation is. So is all other aspects of a government. Even the legal rights that a real person has are just about as far removed from flesh and blood as the legal entity of a corporation is from the brick and mortar and people that make up a corporation (for those corporations that have such corporeal bodies).
Having almost no appreciation for legal systems or their history, I would also guess that the idea a stroke of the pen suddenly gives birth to corporations which spread their ruin across the earth is backward, or at least much more complicated. Usually it is the legal system catching up with reality, solving problems like regulating existing practice of the time. Laws are shaped by society as much or maybe more than society is is shaped by laws, in my opinion.
I mean, argue specific problems of corporate law, but the general disparagement of "legal make-believe" I don't understand. The entire legal system is built on it, there's a lot of good things that are done with it.
I appreciate your comment, but I'm not sure what your point is. Corporate personhood is literally a legal fiction due to the granting of personhood in order to fall under the umbrella of existing law. This personhood is accepted as true, even though it is objectively untrue; this is a textbook example of a legal fiction.
Maybe I have the wrong understanding. I thought the legal concept of a "person" can be said to be a legal fiction https://www.jstor.org/stable/1342652, but a corporation is not. It's a real thing that is created and exists according to corporate law. That might happen to use legal fictions as part of its definition, but the corporation is not a legal fiction.
But even if I was right there, I would agree I was trying to be overly pedantic and ended up distracting from the point I was trying to make.
Thanks. I understand now what you meant. I see that I should have worded my comment better, now that you have pointed that out to me. A corporation is a legal creation which has the legal-fiction of personhood associated with it.
A corporation doesn't require any employees. Like you said, it's a legal fiction. My point was that the corporations that "create enormous amounts of value" (GP's words) are those same corporations that have employees, and the "value" described therein is really the value of the labor of those employees.
There's no metaphysical Lockean value production going on inside of a corporation. When it produces value, the value it produces is the value that its employees produce. Waxing poetic about the value of corporations is thusly mostly a game of smoke and mirrors that obscures the real source of that value (the humans doing the work), and detracts from the actual advantage that comes from incorporation (i.e., solving the coordination game and thereby extracting more value from workers).
> from the actual advantage that comes from incorporation (i.e., solving the coordination game and thereby extracting more value from workers).
In my experience the value of incorporating has not been to hire people but the legal protections and ability to create certain tax structures for retirement planning that benefit the owners.
> A corporation doesn't require any employees.
In reality some employees are required in order to keep the corporate designation that allows the use of certain retirement plans.
Corporations are a structure of workers. Both the structure and the workers are essential. Workers without structure doesn't produce much value leading to a poor society. Politically created structure leads to bad outcomes so also leads to a poor society. Capitalist created structure creates a lot of value and leads to rich societies. There might be alternatives, but so far capitalism is the only known way to create such structures at scale.
I don't understand the argument in this response: unions exist within capitalist systems, and are an integral part of our capitalist system. Our concept of a "union" does not apply to non-capitalist systems. Extolling the virtues of capitalism is, at the absolute best, completely orthogonal to the legitimacy and value of unionization.
Likewise, unions aren't "politically created structure": they're not created in a top-down manner by the state. They're a form of collective organization and bargaining, the sort that is singularly responsible for the quality of life and workplace protections that we all take for granted.
> Likewise, unions aren't "politically created structure": they're not created in a top-down manner by the state.
Then why are you so upset that people don't want to create the "politically created structure" version of unions? Why not just organize as workers and call yourself a union? Can even create a workers party, like they have in basically every other single other developed country, and then that workers party can stand up for your rights. But that workers party isn't a union. Basically every single developed country except USA has labor parties. Democrats aren't a labor party, they are a party of mostly lawyers.
> Then why are you so upset that people don't want to create the "politically created structure" version of unions?
I'm not. I'm not a communist, and I don't think I asserted that I wanted a state-enforced union anywhere. Stronger protections for collective organization and bargaining would suffice in my book.
Edit: And, for what it's worth, you can't just create a union in the US. You need to be recognized by the NLRB for any collective action to be considered legitimate and protected under the law.
It is also ownership of said structure. If you have a thousand workers. One person can own the output of those workers. Those workers can produce 10 billion dollars in revenue and the owner gets owns all the profit and the workers pocket 1 billion in aggregate.
It's fair trade in the beginning because of high risk during the founding of the company but the tradeoff becomes less fair as the risk lowers and the company becomes more mature.
Corporations are a pattern of relations (social and economic) that are socially reproduced and codified by the legal system. The current body of law is a strange attractor for among other things, the reproduction of corporations as they exist today[1]. The way capitalism is coded is at the expense of experimenting with other systems[2]. Instead of experimenting with alternative systems of economic organization, we see an ongoing attempt to level all forms of alternative economic organization. In effect, the notion of "capitalism is the only known way" becomes a prescriptive rather than descriptive - a normative statement rather than a observational one.
If we were truly looking for more advanced forms of organization beyond the status quo, I would expect that economic imperialism would not exist. Instead, even more aspects of basic society are capitalized and in recent decades also codified using the inflexible mechanisms of computer code. The last remaining hold outs do so at their own expense[3]. So no, I don't think we're exploring the possibility space of superior economic technology, we're stagnating.
1. As a self-preservation principle
2. See M. Fisher, Capital Realism - https://libcom.org/files/Capitalist%20Realism_%20Is%20There%...
3. Market, political, cultural, economic forces all contribute to the complete and total capture of universal capitalism. Those who wish not to comply face political, social, and economic sanctions from the individual to national levels.
I take it you work 7 days a week, no vacation, no lunch break, in incredibly unsafe conditions?
No? Do you consider the fact that very few people have working conditions like those outlined above an enormously valuable thing for society?
Great. Then you agree that Unions have created enormous amounts of value as well.
Those were thanks to labor movements, not unions. They are not the same thing, labor movements happens thanks to Democracy. Democracy is crucial, I agree, it lets groups organize, protest and fix problems with how society works. But what we call unions today are not that.
I'm all for labor engaging in politics, but they can do that without paying union dues for working at a company. The problem USA's workers face today isn't lack of unions, it is lack of proper representation in their democracy.
>Those were thanks to labor movements, not unions.
Ahahaha, do you also think that voting rights and anti-segregation laws were due to the 'civil rights movement', and not civil rights activists such as MLK jr or civil rights organizations such as the NAACP?
Labor movements are made up of people, yes. Not sure how that is related to unions. Labor organized in every single democracy regardless if there were unions or not. Labor movements tend to create unions, so unions are often a result of labor movements and not the source of labor movements.
>Labor movements are made up of people, yes.
And so if the people in these movements made smaller organizations to advance the goals of the movement at their workplace, in their local communities, and the national level... we might even credit those organizations, yes? Just like we do with the civil rights movement?
>Labor organized in every single democracy regardless if there were unions or not.
Some economies skipped steam power too, but every early industrial economy had labor unions predate modern labor standards.
Not a single one of those unions had legal backing though, they were just political movements and people working together. Not sure why you say they have anything to do with the theatre that are modern unions. Rather the concept of modern unions limits worker power, since it created a lot of laws preventing workers to organize as they wish and instead have to fit the very narrow framework that are modern unions. Workers had more power back then when they were free to organize without the limitations of modern unions.
For example, why even have a vote? Why have enforced term limits for unions that you can't kick them out before the limit is up? Why no bargaining as a group without a vote?
Organizations have bylaws largely because without them, chaos reigns.
A movement that hopes to continue must become an organization, that is, a collection of humans who agree to engage with each other according to an agreed upon set of rules.
Your whole “movement != union” is a distinction without a difference.
To claim that labor movements are somehow divorced from unions is ahistorical.
> what we call unions today are not that.
Unions don't involve organizing, protesting, or fixing problems? How do you think unions ever get a contract?
Your comment makes frustratingly little sense to me.
Socialist movements which pushed for workers rights in Europe are more based on Marx than unions. Most modern worker parties has their roots there, but of course some of the more extreme socialist policies has been dropped in favor of capitalism.
Unions in Scandinavia are pretty strong, doesn't look worse than the USA.
I never said that unions makes things worse. I am saying that corporations are more important than unions. Scandinavia's economy is still run by corporations and has among the highest concentration of billionaires in the world.
They're also embedded in very different societies and legal structures.
Unions don't have to be bad. I'd just argue that the labor law system in the US is pure awful.
The purpose of Unions is a check on corporate and government power.
Just like the US has three branches of government there are really four fundamental organizations in society: government, corporations, religion and unions.
They work best by keeping each other in check. Right now unions have been decimated and corporations have bought out the government and religion.
Unions aren't optional, we're just slowly and corrosively finding out why, despite their flaws, they need to exist (and they don't work if people aren't involved in them).
> For those who disagree, how many modern societies are there without corporations running a majority of the economy?
"running a majority of the economy" doesn't seem to necessarily be the relevant metric to be optimizing for. But I'll cede that many of the largest countries in the world do not have solid union rights.
Isn't it by force of the US nuclear arsenal that modern societies must have corporations? You can do something else, but Americans will always try to assassinate you, and make sure you don't have access to resources
There's reasons other than being an absolute requirement for why everyone's currently using something
The US will not try to assassinate people for lacking corporate governance.
Not so much on HN (perhaps because its a forum sponsored by a VC and filled with people that either own their own business or hope to one day), but one of the fastest growing subreddits - r/antiwork - is dedicated to precisely that premise.
That's probably a point that wasn't being made, since it wasn't mentioned. Neither was getting rid of unions ever mentioned.
As important HN may be it is big world out there, so why wouldn't someone simply try eliminating at least a single corporation of medium size (200-1000 people) with plain union organization for employment. I am sure it wouldn't need HN approval.
> We definitely talk about corporations in this way. All the time, in fact!
But it is always about individual bad actors, not "corporations".
When MacDonald's franchises get press showing they're stealing employees' wages, people blame MacDonald's, or the individual franchises.
When some union leader embezzles money, people talk about "those unions".
Partly this is a consequence of the relatively small number of unions compared to corporations (which is by design). For example, if you work in the auto industry, there are a lot of different corporations you could work for but only one major union. It also means that you generally have more choice in your employer than your union representation.
>For example, if you work in the auto industry, there are a lot of different corporations you could work for
There really aren't. Perhaps if there were, union representation wouldnt be so desperately needed.
Moreover, the market often takes care of corporations that contribute nothing. Especially of the private ones. For the public ones, there's no "union" that protects their stock price on the stock market.
Open market operations of various central banks certainly impacts equity prices of publicly traded stocks. In some cases the holdings are enormous: https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Markets/BOJ-tops-pension-wh...
But corporations rarely get busted. Talk is cheap, but unions have to face actions.
Right, but we don't oppose their existence on that basis.
The original poster didn't oppose unions' existence and acknowledged they had advantages.
I am very pro-union, but I feel like a part of situation you are describing is because we needs businesses. We don’t necessarily need unions. Without unions, businesses would still be here. Without businesses, where would the unions be?
Edit: I would like to reiterate that I am pro-union. I am just saying that unions are optional, but businesses (or the government as some have pointed out) are more necessary from the standpoint you don’t usually form a union and then start a business. I like unions, but they are technically optional and I think that fact is what leads to people being more critical of them. When businesses/government sucks, there’s kind of a “well that’s how it is I guess.” When a union sucks, there’s a “why even do this then?”
Yeah, I think talking about the benefits of "unions" in the abstract is a little weird because - at least in the US - unions are highly regulated by laws that were written primarily envisioning the model of early-20th-century manual labor. That is to say, unions were designed in a way that fit not just for-profit businesses but very particular types of for-profit businesses.
So you need to separate the more conceptual parts of unions - that maybe we should value sustainable and secure employment over shareholder value, that laborers should be able to negotiate collectively and not individually, that you can do good work that is beneficial to the public by prioritizing happy laborers - from the very specific implementation of unions that we happen to have. Without our current model of for-profit businesses, the implementation of unions would not be a coherent concept (and admittedly they are a bit less coherent now and when applied to e.g. tech companies than they were in the past for the businesses for which they were designed - which isn't to say they're the wrong answer, just that they're an awkward fit). But the values are still valid.
As a sibling comment said, worker-owned cooperatives are one model here. Another similar option is very small companies: the concept of a solo founder unionizing makes no sense, but the solo founder of a bootstrapped "lifestyle business" has most of the benefits one generally wants from unions, and communities of such businesses can choose to federate for a better voice in the market. There are certainly a lot of other options besides the idea of a large business owned by its founders or publicly traded.
Union organizers always want GM style unions.
But really developers would be better off with something along the lines of a trade guild. Something that enforces standards on employers and employees.
The Saturn corporation had a labor-management partnership which did exactly that for standards, and was a subdivision of GM. Unfortunately it's stressful for corp and union leadership when high standards are set, so it eventually lost support despite high worker approval.
You know unions also operate in the public and non-profit sectors, right?
> We don’t necessarily need unions
But we do.
I'd argue that if you hop into other threads about how everyone is worried about financial/societal collapse in the US that it is the end result of decimating unions in the 80s.
You just don't notice right away that you need unions when you lose them, corrosively much later you notice that society has gone off the rails.
I think that has much more to do with legislation in the US (not from there). Unions make sense for professions with a large amount of workers with very similar conditions. This is what brings members together and especially low wage workers have not much room to bargain. Tech paints a completely different picture.
Support and call center staff? Certainly can use a union. Developers? Far too diverse conditions.
>We don’t necessarily need unions.
I guess we dont necessarily need child labor laws or the weekend...
Remember when the cacophony of calls to "End the Olympics Now" when the IOC was found to be grossly corrupt? No, me neither. The investor owned media called for reform. As it will for literally any other institution.
Tennis is necessary.
I feel like the first line is kind of a little hyperbolic. I know that unions gave us a lot of the luxuries we take for granted today and I will state once again, for the record, that I am pro-union. I’m just saying that they are in a position where it is easy to criticize and reject them if they do something wrong. For better and for worse.
I think it would be remiss to characterize child labor laws as luxuries.
I could point to a hundred nonluxuries America doesnt have because it doesnt have enough union density, too - e.g. paid maternity leave.
Do we need child labor laws? In countries that are reach enough to have various forms of social security there is no need to send little Timmy to work in a coal mine. In countries that aren't - they do help their parents with sustenance farming and those laws, even if they exist on some level, don't change anything.
A lot of people don't know just how corrupt the IOC is, I suspect if this was common knowledge there would be a hugely increased number of people calling for boycotts of the Olympics.
co-operatives?
The are police and other public sector unions. The point of unions is to protect labor interests. Unions can exist as long as labor does.
And those police unions are exactly why in many cases, an officer gets to see ALL evidence and video about a situation, with a required rep or lawyer, before making an official statement in many jurisdictions. Something you and I certainly don't get. In fact, they often try to trick suspects.
I mean, police unions do exist solely to protect police officers which means their incentives are sometimes opposed to the public they serve, and so they should absolutely not be in charge of things like self investigations and time-limiting records of abuse, etc.
But that's not inherent to a union. Cities shouldn't cede these extraordinary powers to the union in the first place, and if they already have, they should take them back.
> But could you imagine if we spoke about corporations in this manner? "I've worked for corporations and they are a mixed bag. In practice, they often abuse their employees. I've personally witnessed bosses who contributed nothing for years and just played politics."
Who doesn't talk about corporations in this manner? Doesn't everyone?
> Unions are democratically controlled worker organizations. Like democratic nations, they can contain abusers, they can be inefficient, and they can fail to solve problems effectively. But like democratic nations, they provide a powerful resistance to authoritarian abuse and on balance improve the quality of life for their people.
Democracy doesn't make sense in every situation. It makes sense for countries because we are born into citizenship. If you dislike a company you can just leave.
In situations where you can't "just leave," unions may make sense. Google is not an example of this. Everyone who works at Google could leave and find a job elsewhere tomorrow.
>Who doesn't talk about corporations in this manner?
Corporations are usually horrendously corrupt so we should abolish them all?
No. Bit of a fringe view, that.
The rule is, if it's a court, company, government, NGO or serbian tennis club then corruption should be met with reform.
In the predominantly investor owned media, corruption in unions leads to calls to abolish them. It's standard.
> "Corporations are usually horrendously corrupt so we should abolish them all?"
People voluntarily don't work for corporations whose mission or behavior is incompatible with their values; they do not have that option with unionization. If the union allows workers to not join the union, not charge dues for being an non-member, and not support them, then nobody would have a problem with them.
FWIW in the UK it's a legal right not to join or support unions (closed shops are outlawed), and unions can't charge non-members dues (no agency shops either). Lots of people (both company-owners and ordinary citizens) have problems with them anyway. Somebody in my industry recently left the union angrily and publicly, then subsequently criticised the union for not representing their interests after they'd gone. There's no accounting for folk.
Yes, the UK has never been a place with strong freedom of speech and contract protections, so it makes sense they would outlaw business owners from voluntarily entering into security clause agreements with their employees.
It's almost impossible for me to work for a corporation whose values align with mine.
It's really really easy to work in a non unionized workplace if thats what you want.
? This seems like a perfectly symmetric arrangement to me.
> People voluntarily don't work for corporations whose mission or behavior is incompatible with their values
And so if that corporation has signed a security clause agreement with a union, they are free to not work with that corporation.
Unions do not force workers to join a union shop, just as those people are free to not work for corporations whose mission is incompatible with their values, they are also free to not work for corporations subject to a union security clause that their owners voluntarily signed.
>> For some reason we hold unions to an incredibly high standard of "no problems, ever"
Because they are democratic institutions. They can be held to a no-problems standard because every time a problem occurs then those involved can be sacked and replaced. The level of acceptable corruption is set by the membership. Rules should therefore focus on openness and member participation in leadership selection. Everyone who hates unions because of X or Y, to them I say join the leadership and run the union the way you think it should be run. Tearing down the system doesn't fix anything.
> I say join the leadership and run the union the way you think it should be run
This is like saying if you don't like the gangs in your area you should join them and try to reform them to do social work instead.
Why isn't it valid to say you don't like unions and so don't want anything to do with them?
If you don't want anything to do with them you absolutely have the right to go somewhere the union doesn't exist. You do not have the right to ask the union to make your life easier. That's not their job.
> Why isn't it valid to say you don't like unions and so don't want anything to do with them?
Because you can't possibly have personally experienced every union, and the media isn't good at covering unions generally, so whatever bias you're (or anyone else making this statement is) presenting here feels unearned.
This is similar to the bias of racism or homophobia, right? Like, "I saw a Black person steal something, so now I think that all Black people are untrustworthy." Or, "I saw a gay man hit on a straight guy and now I think all gay men are sex pests." These are declarative statements about all people in those groups based on a small amount of information and on societal bias.
And these biases rarely go the other way – do you also end up saying, "I don't like corporations and don't want anything to do with them?" Corporations are, by far, have a vastly worse record on theft, corruption, anti-environmental practices, etc.
Subtly juxtaposing not wanting to be a union to being racist or homophobic there - very low blow choosing the most incendiary things possible to suggest it's similar to.
And nobody has to earn the right to decline to be pulled into a political organisation they don't want anything to do with. If someone doesn't want to join your club the right response is to think about how to attract them, not to ask them to justify why they don't want to join. Otherwise do you join every single political party? They all claim to represent your interests!
I'm not realistically able to live my life without working with a corporation. I am demonstrably able to live my life without a union. So the bar for the union entering my life, adding that extra complexity, taking some of my money and borrowing the little power I have, is of course far higher.
It's right to be extremely skeptical of anyone who claims to want to represent your interests. Because usually they really want to use your power to represent their own interests.
I was just using an example of bias to make my point clearer. It wasn't my intention to make any connection beyond that.
Your comment assumes a baseline belief of "obviously corporations are reprehensibly undemocratic" that I don't believe most people who hold unions to high standards would agree.
I think that the difference here is a matter of principles.
A lot of people view corporations in a justifiably negative light (very few people say that corporations are an unalloyed good, and I have never heard anyone wish that they could work for an LLC). But a corporation is chartered to make money - we expect it to act accordingly and for the most part companies do make money (when they fail to make money, they cease existing and the general consensus is 'good riddance').
A union on the other hand is chartered to advocate for the rights and needs of workers. The standards and expectations for a union are fundamentally different than for a corporation. It depends on the union, but a lot unions don't really carry out their core function and there are no consequences for this failure. Given that Unions claim a democratic mandate to advocate for labor, people are justifiably upset when they see their union doing nothing to represent their interests.
>But a corporation is chartered to make money - we expect it to act accordingly and for the most part companies do make money (when they fail to make money, they cease existing
They are supposed to serve a higher purpose than just make money.
If you were being equivalently fair to unions you would say that their sole purpose is to take dues.
>a lot unions don't really carry out their core function and there are no consequences for this failure
Yes, they do, they lose members.
> Yes, they do, they lose members.
And they often use violence or threat of violence to try to stop this - see their reaction to 'scabbing'.
If I say I don't want to work for my company any more they'd either say 'farewell' or even offer me money to stay.
If you don't want to be part of a union or a strike, you better be prepared to be harassed and intimidated.
>And they often use violence or threat of violence to try to stop this - see their reaction to 'scabbing'.
If it's a competition for who has managed the most extreme violence in relation to an industrial dispute in America the prize would go to the manager of a coal mine in west virginia who brought in a private air force to bomb strikers (battle of blair mountain).
I somehow doubt youll find a union that has managed that level of unbridled violence.
The most extreme violence isnt in defence of livelihoods, it's in the service of profit.
That was in the 1920s - that's not something I'm legitimately worried about.
But it is a routine occurrence to have picket lines in industrial disputes today, and to deliberately harass people who choose to go into work.
In the coal mining strikes in the UK in the 80s it got to the point where union members literally killed a taxi driver for taking a worker past a picket line.
Google aren't going to kill an Uber driver for taking me to work at Facebook instead.
Google would absolutely employ violence to defend its profits if it felt that its profits were seriously under threat and it thought violence was a viable tactic. It isnt. It's very far away from that. These things are a nuisance to them no more.
The united fruit company paid for paramilitaries to assassinate strikers in Central America.
This is a world away from dropping a brick on a taxi because your livelihood is under threat.
> Yes, they do, they lose members.
But membership is mandatory if there is a union at that corp. A union is like a service they can't ever unsubscribe from without changing jobs.
For government work especially, unions can start to take over management functions. So employees end up wanting a second union to protect them from abuses by their main union.
> But membership is mandatory if there is a union at that corp
This is untrue in every state. In some states you have to pay dues even if your aren't a member, but closed shops aren't legal.
Technically untrue, but if you are required to pay union dues then membership is effectively mandatory. It depends on State Law here. Some states are "right to work" so people can opt out, but this effectively destroys the Union. The Wagner act does not allow multiple unions or compete/cooperate so the issue in the US is framed in pretty all/nothing terms.
a corporation is chartered to make money - we expect it to act accordingly
We don't expect a corporation to abuse workers, even if it makes them money.
when they fail to make money, they cease existing and the general consensus is 'good riddance'
The history of bailouts would suggest otherwise.
Well bailouts were called out a million times. And to think of it bailouts were about "oh what about these thousands of employees and community they lived instead of think of executives and their million dollar bonuses."
> But could you imagine if we spoke about corporations in this manner? "I've worked for corporations and they are a mixed bag. In practice, they often abuse their employees...
One Slight Difference - Corporations are supposed to serve their owners' financial interests. Unions are supposed to serve their members. How 'bout we speak just as harshly of mission-failure unions as we do of mission-failure corporations?
OTOH, I certainly agree with your 4th para - "...Like democratic nations, they can contain abusers, they can be inefficient, and they can fail...".
Surely intending and designing for a negative outcome just makes it even worse?
There are things I do not want to be democratically controlled.
My ability to negotiate salaries with my boss is one of them.
The scope of my job (some unions get to decide what you are allowed to do).
Who should get fired (teachers unions make it impossible for bad teachers to be fired, so students are forced to put up with them)
If you should be allowed to work. Some unions forbid you to work during strikes. Often by force and by threat. Some unions manage to lobby for regulations that make it harder to get into a job. Then you need certifications and/or degrees to even consider a job.
Unfortunately many use the "democratic union" argument to control your ability to make personal decisions. Unions that get to channel power from the government (commonly through regulations) can easily abuse their power. When unions are not voluntary they easily become HOAs for jobs
> There are things I do not want to be democratically controlled. > My ability to negotiate salaries with my boss is one of them. > The scope of my job (some unions get to decide what you are allowed to do).
If you are an at-will employee in the US, your ability to do any of that is entirely at the discretion of your employer. You have no rights to do any of the above. You might have more leverage or better treatment in specific scenarios, but again, the hard truth is that all of this is entirely at the whim of management.
The screen actors guild doesn't limit it's members ability to make money.
Um...it does.
If you are in SAG you are not allowed to work on non-union productions.
Is there any reasoning that you'd like to share about why those things shouldn't be democratically controlled, or did you just make a list of the things that unions do?
Those are things I care about and do not want to give away for a union to decide for me or to have power over me. And some things just piss me off. In NY you are forced to pay unions dues just to be a teacher. It does not matter of you do want to participate or not. They have government like powers to charge you for something you do not want.
In addition, it's quite possible that in the future someone like me could not get my current job due to regulation. I know people in the same line of work as me that is forced to pay union dues because of his degree. The unions associated with the undergrad course he took forced him to pay union dues unless he can prove his current job does not relate to his degree. This is just absurd but still happens. I'd rather not have other people have even more control over me, no matter how much the word "democratic" is added to the argument
Why do you prefer these things to be controlled by management and HR?
To be clear - I absolutely agree that these are all important and these powers need to be exercised wisely. But without democratically controlling them, every single one of them is controlled by management/HR. Why do you feel that management/HR is going to do a better job of controlling those things?
> For some reason we hold unions to an incredibly high standard of "no problems, ever" but this is never used to discourage all participation in the labor force because employers are often shitty.
That's not the standard. The standard is "are unions worth the trouble they cause?". I've worked in industries, as a union employee doing manual labor, where I would say yes. I don't think unions are worth the trouble for tech workers.
> But like democratic nations, they provide a powerful resistance to authoritarian abuse and on balance improve the quality of life for their people.
The fact that I can easily switch employers is a more effective protection against an abuse than a union ever could be.
>but this is never used to discourage all participation in the labor force because employers are often shitty.
Because not working is not a viable option for any significant number of people. But you can certainly work without union representation.
> but this is never used to discourage all participation in the labor force because employers are often shitty.
There are approximately 93 million adults (civilian noninstitutional population) that don't work[0]. I'm sure it's not all because of the employers themselves, but surely a lot don't want to deal with the politics and culture imposed on them by managerial talent [maybe some study on this portion of the population's reason for not working would be useful].
0: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t01.htm (Men, 20 years and over->Not in labor force + Women, 20 years and over->Not in labor force)
> There are approximately 93 million adults (civilian noninstitutional population) that don't work
Which includes retired people, people with disabilities who can't work, stay at home spouses (who arguably are working, but not for an employer), students. Those reasons have nothing to do with avoiding "politics and culture imposed on them by managerial talent"
> maybe some study on this portion of the population's reason for not working would be useful
See above
If unions could, they would regulate the working hours of robots and would represent robots in any discussion regarding work and would want a monetary cut of their productivity —if they could.
Businesses create value. That's not universal -- there's regulatory capture, monopolies, tragedy of the commons, etc. -- but it is fundamentally why capitalist economies have raised billions of people out of poverty.
Unions fundamentally redistribute the value that's been captured. That's not universal -- there's unions that make workers happier and result in more productivity, unions that are not adversarial and take on an HR function that's more in tune with employees -- but it is fundamentally why there can be successful companies with no unions, but of course no successful unions with no companies. Arguably, U.S. unions are more adversarial than European unions, and in many manufacturing, automobile, shipping industries have prevented their parent companies from adopting new technology, rolling out new practices, etc. to the extent that said parent companies were no longer competitive.
> Businesses create value
Workers labor mixed with capital creates value. Businesses are just a way of organizing that interaction that, if it succeeds, makes the interaction more efficient.
The businesses through the ownership of capital are the ones doing the redistributing of value, they are the ones writing the checks. Unions just negotiate that the redistribution allocates more of the pie to labor rather than the owners
I think we're roughly in agreement. Businesses are composed of the capital providers, the organizers (who decide how to deploy the capital), and the workers.
Capital providers colluding to set a loan rate is illegal. We shouldn't allow them to collude legally; they are a small number of experienced actors operating with information asymmetry already.
Organizers (i.e. senior management) colluding is--I don't know the legality--just unnecessary. They often are paid based on value add (equity, bonuses, etc.), so they are already reasonably aligned and need no further protection.
Workers can exist and do exist with or without collusion (i.e. unions). As a society, we've reasonably decided that colluding is legal, because workers often add a lot of value but have individual low value-over-replacement (hard to organize because of numbers, often inexperienced, etc.). Unions exist to help raise individual value-over-replacement closer to value-add.
What's being discussed here is the pluses and minuses of unionization. What I disagree with is people in this thread--not specifically you--comparing the collusion of workers to the existence of capital or organization (i.e. corporations are sometimes bad! why doesn't anyone discuss that!).
First, obviously people complain about corporations all the time. But second, private companies (capital and organization and workers) add value, and no society has done well without a large component of this.
There are many pluses to unions. But, especially as currently implemented, the minuses exist too, including that many of them focus on raising VOR but wholly ignore value-add, in a way that forces the business into slower and poorer decisions; or shielding some workers from the consequences of adding little to no value.
The capital tied up in any given business is colluding by definition because it moves in lock step. You don’t have multiple managers in a single org making conflicting business deals or bids with workers(for the most part, I’ve heard of a few companies organized this way). Hell even having multiple investors in a single company is collusion of capital owners when the company makes any sort of business deal.
Unions are just the workers colluding in the same fashion to increase their negotiating power
Strongly disagree.
Whether you give me capital at a 1% interest rate of a 50% interest rate; whether you buy 1% of my company for $1,000 or 1% of my company for $100,000,000; are independently determined by each provider of capital. Collusion would be all banks working together to only provide me a loan for 30% interest even if it's obvious I can pay it back.
The use of capital is irrelevant to the question of collusion for providing capital. That's like saying all the workers on a factory line are inherently already colluding because they work towards producing the same car.
The amount invested in the company is provided by each separate investor, but those investors do not then negotiate separate deals with each worker. The investors “collude” together to creat the business and have greater negotiating power than they would on their own.
A union is merely the labor version of joining together to increase leverage and is not any special level of collusion greater than the investors is what I am getting at
And yes saying the workers are colluding because they are working on the same car is what’s happening if you are going to call banding together to negotiate rates is colluding. There is non union labor and other unions
> For some reason we hold unions to an incredibly high standard of "no problems, ever" but this is never used to discourage all participation in the labor force because employers are often shitty.
No, most people are holding them to reasonable standards. Just like people hold medical doctors to not kill people by their negligence. Some might say it is incredibly high standard as well but I do not think so. I am afraid employers are shitty so union can be shitty is not a great advertisement for unions.
> Unions are democratically controlled worker organizations...
It would interesting to understand why these shining democratic organization don't directly provide work to people. Overall wouldn't it be much better than working for grubby capitalists. May be not in USA but other countries can eliminate the concept of corporations/companies and just simply have unions.
'Never' used to discourage all participation? Have you visited /r/antiwork? Also, I think some of the backlash to unions is that they are often described as an unmitigated force for good, but for some it just feels like being squeezed between two beurocracies.
Our unions are in need of reform. They need to serve a modern economy. They continue to act like it’s 1940.
If unions had the same internal checks against abuse: Financial compliance, ability and desire to fire corrupt officials, ability to fire abusive members as well as management, were active in progress (rather than protect against progress), and acted as an arbiter for the best interest for all parties (worker, employer, self (union), and economy at large) I think I’d have a better experience with them. As they are they are parasitic to a significant degree.
That’s in no way turning a blind eye to the reforms they enabled in the first half of the XX century.
They are now like the non-profit whose original reason to be ceased to exist but now want to continue existing for the sake of the management structure who find themselves with an evaporated mission.
People _can_ be awful. I've seen founders, managers and execs bleed people dry - squeezing the life out of critical contributors whole stringing them along with promised of "getting their piece of the pie" that they had no intention of ever sharing. Telling anecdotes about "that one lazy guy who got paid for doing nothing" is tired. We've done that for the last 40 years. Time to try unions again, please.
Once a union is in place, it's hard to remove it, especially if you end up with a lot of union employees that act like the above. It's important for the workforce starting a union to choose, but they surely need to know both the pros and cons, right?
Do we really think not knowing the cons is an issue? Companies can literally force employees to go to anti-union training.
It can be hard to remove but usually not so hard to influence elections if and when the abuses are serious. If the union is protecting some do-nothing guy, you probably won't win an election on that, but effective theft of funds you absolutely would.
Simply existing in a capitalist society is enough to have the cons explained at you.
If not in the almost exclusively investor owned media then in the attendance-mandatory antiunion propaganda meetings you will be forced to attend if managment start to fret.
There's no danger of not hearing the cons.
You’re welcome to your union. Please keep me out of it. Especially in states where union participation is compulsory once formed (e.g. non-right-to-work), I’d leave for a new job before working in a union. Full stop.
Don’t forget to buy your bosses a gift for management appreciation day
You say let's try again, I think before doing that it would be wise to look at why we got rid of them. I'm the UK, I know people who are doctors and teachers, they all have stories of how their unions are hurting the public.
The thing with teachers unions and doctors unions you have to remember is that they represent the interests of the teachers or the doctors. They don't represent the interests of pupils, patients, or the public. In fact they have to work directly against those groups for the interests of their members.
Sometimes, but not necessarily always. I'm in UCU, the UK academics' union. We're quite often on the same side as the students, and not on the same side as the government. We get substantial support from students' unions on the basis that 'your working conditions are our learning conditions'. Casualisation, for example, is seen as substantially damaging good quality teaching for pretty small financial gains - but teaching is not in practice seen as a major priority by government or senior university managers.
We don't represent the public. Whether we're working on behalf of the public depends on whether you think the government's position represents 'the public', and which part of the public you're most interested in. (The interests of childless taxpayers who don't believe in the importance of university education are not well represented by lecturers and their unions, surprisingly enough...)
I think what I'm saying is that some of the conflicts between unions and management are zero-sum, but others are not. And while public sector unions can narrowly represent a producer interest, that certainly isn't true of all situations.
>it would be wise to look at why we got rid of them. I'm the UK
It would be wise to question why the military was brought in to get rid of them - both in the UK or the US.
Not saying I disagree with the idea of "trying unions again" but by your own admission, isn't 'telling anecdotes about "that one lazy guy who got paid for doing nothing"' something that you call tired?
What's to say that founders, managers and execs bleeding people dry isn't also something equally "tired" given that in today's labor market, any such leadership will bleed out talent that will vote with their feet for greener pastures?
As a sibling comment said, unions have their pros and cons.
For most people in lower wage jobs, the ability to switch job and vote with their feet is a lot more complicated than it is for tech workers. The balance of power is firmly on the employer side, yes even today with labor shortages. I'm sure you read about those amazon workers being blown up by tornados being denied the ability to go home. "They could have switched jobs!" shouldn't be the default answer.
So yes, pros and cons with unions, but let's not forget where the balance of power is right now.
> union employees who contributed nothing for year
Me and my co-workers create wealth, a portion of which is sent off in dividends, the majority of which is going to heirs who have never worked a day in their life. I am more concerned about that than that the guy working next to me isn't killing himself more to fill that heir's pockets.
Organized labor is made up of the people working and creating wealth. Of course you don't mention the indolence of the idle class expropriators who the people doing the work are organizing to combat.
So I guess unions do suck, thanks for clarifying. Hopefully people will be smart enough to not interfere with a firm's epic struggle for efficiency and polishing out the friction of overbearing worker compensation and benefits. Sounds like unions are too corrupt and will just interfere with the purity of corporate practices.
I love how people have an easier time imagining colonies on mars than giving labor a platform to express their interests.
US unions are like US healthcare, regulatory capture makes them suck. Unions working well in other countries doesn't mean it works well in USA. And neither party wants to improve the state of unions, democrats are on the side of union leadership while republicans are just anti unions in general, none wants to support workers on this.
No, I work in a US union that I'm very happy with. I have personally seen action on the ground preventing unfair discipline by management, passing people up for raises over personal vendettas, baseline quality of life stuff. I suspect that most people in a union in the US are quite happy with it.
Right, lots of people are also happy with US healthcare, it is tied to their job (just like unions) and they didn't have any problems with it so to them it seems to work fine. For now. In most other countries unions aren't tied to your job, just like healthcare.
I'm not sure what you mean by unions being tied to your job. I certainly don't know the intricacies of every union out there, but the ones I'm aware of take care of their members when laid off. The union members in my family receive their healthcare and their pensions from the union, not the employer.
Things like the 5 day, 40 hour work week, and not having our 8 year olds injured in factory accidents are only here because unions in the USA fought, bled, and died for them.
Think about that while you’re bashing them.
Let's not bother then and just hope we're managed by some swell fellas
As opposed to what? Unbridled profit seeking? Too many people seem to believe their individual success is exclusively the outgrowth of corporate interests. Is it possible that employee compensation and corporate performance are opposed and maybe individual employees have limited capacities to affect the decisions of large corporations in their favor?
I've personally witnessed union employees who contributed nothing for years, get perpetually shifted from team to team to team and even promoted because it was too complex and costly to fire them.
Employees like that exist everywhere.
I've seen union stewards padding their own pockets with members dues through lavish "retreats" to five-star resorts.
Managers like that exist everywhere.
None of your complaints/experiences are about unions specifically, but rather they're about dishonest people who use unions for their own gain. Unions are certainly a mechanism that people can abuse to get away with being lazy or greedy, but let's not pretend that people who aren't unionized don't do that as well. If you include business owners who exploit workers then it's likely that it happens far more outside of unions than inside.
> In practice, they often lead to abuse, stagnation and corruption.
In practice, that's what power often does in any situation. So the question often boils down to "who do you want to benefit from the 'abuse, stagnation and corruption'?" because someone will.
> I've personally witnessed union employees who contributed nothing for years, get perpetually shifted from team to team to team and even promoted because it was too complex and costly to fire them.
And there are tons of examples of hardworking non-union employees getting shafted, so the do-nothing shareholders can collect more profits.
In almost all settings, shareholders are the group that contributes the absolute least to an organization (e.g. most didn't really even invest anything, they just bought a share that's long circulated in the stock market), yet their interests are the ones that are prioritized. A lot of people who are strongly against the mythically-large do-nothing union employee seem to have no problem with do-nothing shareholders.
Agree and this depends on the union also. The RMT in the UK is famously militant. When a new General Secretary was voted in a few years ago (before the current one I think), he didn't promise to "represent his members" but instead promised "that the RMT would remain militant", which doesn't sound great.
Another railway union, the TSSA had a generally "no strike" policy but would still provide support for any disagreements with management.
I guess, as always, be careful for what you wish for, you might not be able to afford to go on strike for something you don't feel very strongly about because the union says so and if you don't strike, well, good luck continuing to work there.
Everyone could get a better comp and work conditions but noo, that one lazy guy won't be fired, we can't have that!
There are quite a few reasons why I don't want unions:
1. I don't want pay banding based on job title, I am capable of negotiating this myself. This is especially true because I can remain at senior Dev level but based on contribution I can be compensated, not by title .
2. Historically there's evidence of damage to industry caused by unions.
3. The unionised work places I have heard about second hand, do not sound like places I want to work. For example unproductive employees not fired, promotions and internal job moves being extremely bureaucratic and check box oriented.
4. I do not want to be forced to pay union dues.
5. I do not want people telling me I must strike.
If the company's in a competitive market, it's unlikely that there's a huge pot of gold somewhere to hand to employees in operations. The whole value-add for unions lately has been pitched as better employee representation in decision making. I'm all for that - if that stops management from colluding with some hedge fund to engineer an awful reverse-buyback-privitazation scheme to load the company with unservicable debt or something like that, I think unions have a lot to add.
But I can tell you from experience - it's definitely not "one lazy guy" - it becomes endemic because the process for dismissal becomes so costly. It's extremely demoralizing working alongside people who are "working the system" and are lazy as fcuk. It's better to just leave.
>If the company's in a competitive market, it's unlikely that there's a huge pot of gold somewhere to hand to employees in operations.
Here in the US, corporations all over are making record profits! Buying back shares like never before! Unless you want to play definition games about what a "competitive market" is, plenty of companies in competitive markets have big pots of gold to hand to employees.
The average operating margin for companies on the S&P 500, the "best of the best" of US corporations, is 9.35% - and that's a figure that is inflated by all of the pharma companies that have crazy 20% margins and sell into a dysfunctional drug market in the US and don't have to compete with generic drugs. Remove them and the operating margin is even lower.
There's no pot of gold in most cases. But I still think there's a good case for unionization.
I will point out 9.35% when talking about companies that size is a lot of money.
Also worth noting; companies pay taxes on their profits, so while there's a lot of incentive to report high profits when a company is looking for investors, there's also plenty of incentive to hide profits (and thus lower operating margins) or shift them to subsidiaries in countries with lower taxes when companies that don't need to inflate their value. I am curious wether the stats you found take this into account.
> If the company's in a competitive market
This typically translates to "the company's successfully lobbied for trade agreements that allow us to force our domestic labor to compete against impoverished foreign workers in a developing nation with nonexistent environmental and safety standards," which is a race to the bottom for everyone but aristocrats.
I think the problem in the US is that the country is deeply right-wing when it comes to labor policy. The union/management relationship in the US is designed to be adversarial. In Germany, it's legally mandated for unions to be represented at the board level, and that kind of cooperative relationship's results speak for themselves. Here, that idea would be considered tantamount to bolshevism.
I wonder what most labour activists in the US would think of German worker councils, though? Works councils are basically company unions (which are loathed in US labour for some good reasons), but they are strengthened and protected through legislation. It doesn't stop at representation at the board level either - union busting is illegal and worker council reps enjoy job protection. But the flip side of this is that the union can't engineer a labour monopoly the way the UAW did in the 60's - the union and its employees are incentivized to keep the company healthy and competitive rather than just screwing over consumers by raising prices across the industry and lobbying for trade barriers.
So what you're saying is you think everyone should have a worse standard of living to prevent that one lazy guy from not pulling his weight?
"so what you are day is" that's a good way to be accused of putting word in someone's mouth.
Not everyone, the lazy guy will be worse off and a couple of rich people will be much richer.
Nobody is saying that.
> I've seen union stewards padding their own pockets with members dues through lavish "retreats" to five-star resorts.
This is anecdotal, but it reminds me on one of the main ISPs here, one of the union heads even gets a free house from the company and doesn't like even work. They just try to keep him happy to avoid causing trouble.
Unions can make sense for certain industries, namely factory work. Where it's hard to own the means of production, and workers are largely uniform in output, low pay and don't have much leverage.
Unions don't make sense in tech because everyone owns the means of production (a computer) and have widely different levels of output. 10x engineers are a thing. Plus tech workers have high leverage, high pay (top 5%? 1%?), can easily get a new job, or can start their own tech company by themselves with their laptop.
Trying to enforce a union structure in tech is counterproductive, extractive and entirely unnecessary.
In tech all that extra power individual workers have just means that multiple companies need to band together to suppress wages.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/google-apple-wage-suppression...
This may be true for some crappier unions but also think about this: If a small percentage of the union members are exploiting the system and some employees of the union are benefiting more than they should who is actually losing money over this? Is it the others in the union? Or is it the employer?
I would rather have a system where a small percentage of the workers can be shitheads and lose their giant mega corporation employer money than a system where the company can just exploit ALL of its workers in any way it wants to.
Regardless of the negatives unions bring, they still can be more beneficial to workers than to not have them. Unions can be corrupt, but is the other side of the table not corrupt as well?
My father, who did not finish high school, was able to earn a living as a construction worker that afforded us a computer in the 90’s. That is how I started programming which paved the way for to make $500k the last year I choose to work. This is absolutely survival-ship bias, but it’s my only experience with unions.
Whether they are a mixed bag or not, it is extremely inappropriate, unethical, and should be illegal for an employer to discourage or manipulate employees into not unionizing or joining a union. This is in my opinion the moral equivalent of your employer giving you unsolicited accounting or medical advice (but actually worse than that, since they have bias on the matter as well) and I hope someday the law reflects that.
Curious: why do we assume that having an anti-union stance is automatically bad? Can't someone simply think that union is indeed bad for both workers and companies?
Disclaimer: My personal view is that union can work for private organizations, but unions of government employees are absolutely evil. The reason is that a private company can die, so the power of its unions is naturally limited. On the other hand, government won't die (or die slowly), so its unions can issue all kinds of unreasonable demand.
P.S., If we assume that an employer is "bad" because it opposes union, isn't it the typical case of attacking one's motive? Scott Adam calls it mind reading. To me, it's one of the most dangerous fallacy in mankind. Read the history of self-claimed do-gooders such as Chinese/French/Cambodian committing genocide, and we can see the progressives in those countries all started with attacking their political opponents' motive.
I'd rather have a union negotiate for me, because then I don't have to worry about dealing with HR scum myself. It's just like having a lawyer handle legal stuff for you. If the companies are discontent with lazy workers they should hire lawyers to deal withe the union and the firing process.
With regard to the lazy worker, honestly, who cares? You still get paid. The company isn't going under. No doubt like most situations of abuse, this is a minority case because in general people like being productive.
Isn't it a fairly common thing to not appreciate it when other people get the same reward for no contribution?
It's like when you're a kid and you win some sweets, and your parents decide you have to share them with your little brother. There may be a desire to do so, but does he get half your sweets?
Yes, I would describe that as a pretty common human failing. Human societies are collaborative by nature, and you are likely blind to the situations in which you are "carried" by others, despite being hyper-attuned to situations in which you feel you are "carrying" disproportionate weight. People's lives not being ruined every time they're not useful is a feature, not a bug, of membership in most functioning human groups, and balking at this desirable property when it benefits others is indeed something I associate with children
It sounds like your problem is with the person giving out the sweets, not with the person who also got rewarded.
Isn't the point of the argument that unions make the person give out the sweets that way?
I've never been a union member, but I've certainly worked with several people I would call "dead weight." Sometimes they've even earned more than me whether through better negotiation or better at office politics. I don't see this as something that only arises when unions are introduced.
The issue many have is the union dues. If the union doesn't help me, but still take 5% (or whatever) of my paycheck, I'd be pretty peeved off. It's the same issue many people have with raising taxes: politicians tout all the benefits it'll allow, but then costs go up and no visible product results.
5% does seem excessive. I worked at a unionized tech company, and I paid 0.5% as union due.
that's b/c the figure of 5% is made up bullshit.
It's not. I worked at a grocery store years ago, and my $300-$350 weekly paychecks had a $15-$20 union due line (I don't remember the exact amount). Sure, some unions can have lower amounts, but single digit dues do exist.
Don't get me wrong. I'm for unions, but when people don't see an improvement, it'll leave a sour taste in their mouths.
that's a different thing than a less-productive worker not being fired
I'd care if I were an investor in such a company.
unions are about workers, not investors
In tech almost all workers are heavily invested in their companies.
Which is an anti-labor-power strategy.
If you consider the case of publicly-traded employers (there's a different argument for pre-exit startups that comes out to a similar conclusion): they could give you your compensation entirely in cash, because shares are pretty liquid. And you could buy stock in your own employer. But very few people think that's a good idea, because now you have correlated risk across your own actual job (both continued employment and things like the ability of the company to give large bonuses/raises) and your investments. So the company effectively forces you to buy some of their stock and not sell it for some period of time. You know exactly how much you're forced to buy because, again, the company is publicly traded and you know what that's worth; you just get it in illiquid form.
So, by giving you part of your compensation in this funny form instead of in normal cash, they get you to feel internally conflicted about policies that improve your cash compensation (and other intangible benefits) at the expense of a theoretical drop in your funny-cash compensation. That doesn't benefit you (even if you were the sort of person who wanted to invest in your own employer, you're still free to do that on your own if you want, so forcing you to do it is at best equivalent to giving you the option), but it does massively benefit the people who own way more shares in the company than you ever will.
This is one of the best summaries I've seen of the power dynamics at play with employee share schemes. Kudos.
What has always bothered me is that whenever I've been paid partly in shares, it has been non-voting shares or options (or both). Still no representation either way. If government was done with no representation we'd be within our rights to revolt - it gas always struck me as odd that even employee shareholders are denied that same representation.
Which is precisely why unions represent the interests of workers when they are opposed to the interests of owners.
Then Google should just hire 100,000 devs this year, why not? They're not going to go under, who cares that they won't be able to contribute to the success of the company?
> Then Google should just hire 100,000 devs this year, why not?
Hold up that's actually a good idea. It would help a lot of entry level devs bulk up their resume and learn hands on skills. This would lead to an influx of sorely needed new talent to the entire tech industry and enable a lot more innovation than was possible before, if only due to HR red tape.
That'd be a sort of corporate keynesianism. It is both neat and scary to think that a few companies could meaningfully stimulate their entire sector over a period of years through their hiring policies.
Sure, what do I care? I care about people not corporations. There are competitors salivating to scoop up any devs who are out of a job if Google goes under.
They often do the things you say, but not always. It's up to the members.
Look at the unions for professional athletes or for Hollywood writers for examples where unions are mostly doing very good work on behalf of their members.
This feels... Unlikely to be a thing of unions. Seems just as likely, if you saw promotions that were unwarranted, that there was incentive for management to get more promotions. Indeed, it is often to grade managers on how many promotions they have overseen. Not shocking that measuring that would cause them to happen unwarranted sometime.
Which is just too say that a healthy organization is hard. There are no panaceas.
I'm mixed on unions, all told. I don't like the dichotomy they enforce between management and workers. This often exists anyway, so I can't blame unions. And it is also true that individuals don't have the leverage for negotiation that groups do, such that it makes sense on why they can get better conditions when just between company and group.
If you don't fire bad employees and just shift them around, it's more likely they will find a manager that promotes them, is it not?
Unions sound to me like just another layer of bureaucracy, with its own mind and interests. Any extra bureaucracy increases corruption and inefficiencies.
I mean. Maybe? Seems I could just as easily blame management for not better training and removing bad managers.
Bad or under-performing managers will always be there, unless you work in a utopia. If you add un-fireable employees to the mix, you only compound the problem. Un-fireable employees also amplify the dead-sea effect: where good people will leave anyway after a while, but bad employees never do...what do you end up with?
>This feels... Unlikely to be a thing of unions.
Why? I likewise have mixed feelings about unions, but I have repeatedly noticed this pattern in countries with strong (typically: constitutionally-protected) unions.
I've seen in it many non unionized shops. And there are plenty of examples you can find of promotions that seem unwarranted. Nepotism is a common reason. As is just general networking. Seems common for folks to get good at networking and generally pleasing management as much as doing a great jobs.
I'd be delighted to see data on this. My prior is that it is rather evenly mixed with no obvious cause.
City company my dad's working at has SIX unions. Whose leaders sit so deep in the city council pockets it is not even funny.
Sounds like something a union buster contractor would say!
[I'm obviously right, so] everyone who disagrees with me must be a paid propaganda artist!
A bit tangential but check this video out
It talks about other forms of worker representations in an company. I think it's provides a couple of decent alternatives to just having unions and their pros and cons
Is this the argument against unions? They are made up of people and people can be awful?
It’s clearly not an argument against unions, only a reminder that they’re corruptible just like any other organization.
I wouldn't say "just like any other organization." Most organizations are authoritarian and workers have literally zero say in the operations at the top. Unions are democratically controlled. This introduces a meaningful difference in corruptibility.
Yes, I don’t mean to say it’s organized just like any other organization, but that it is still susceptible to corruption. Which, again, is not an argument against unions, only something to recognize when organizing and being a member of one.
In my experience, partially. Although I am willing to acknowledge that conditions will certainly vary from union to union and even between locals. In my experience, they add an additional layer of bureaucracy and significant cost to an organisation. They /may/ improve /some/ conditions for some workers. But they will also likely introduce other problems that affect all workers and disproportionately impact the top-performing workers to the benefit of the least performing. As has been noted, this isn't necessarily a problem with unions as a concept, but rather a problem with human nature and adding an additional layer of bureaucracy on top of another bureaucracy with conflicting interests. It will at the very least slow things down and add cost. Whether that is worthwhile probably needs a case by case analysis.
Unions are made up of people, and thus can be terrible.
Corporations are (according to M.Friedman) Sociopaths guided by attorneys who define what's strictly legal, who's sole goal is to maximize profits.
I guess that means there are people in corporations too? Does the transitive property apply?
American Unions: fat cats (presidents), dues, fancy dinners with the execs, mafia ties, corruption, pay offs, forced politics, exclusion of work based on joining, lowering of salary, years of law suites, subcontractors (non union) to actually do the work, brain drains, unmotivated work forces, forced protesting, layoffs, forced clicks, voting, forced discrimination. "We can't use her she is non-union". "Sure he touched her, but he is union, we need to consult the union first!" Yuck. My wife dealt with the Macys mafia (union) - what a gross group of fat cats in fancy cars. She couldn't even pay her bills - but needed to pay that union due (post tax of course). All her dues were made in person - they only accepted cash. She was laid off along with a few hundred others - after the union and execs had a fancy dinner - no severance obviously. The union pigs are still doing well getting those dues! Enjoy google!
PS! If you work at google, don't pay the dues: ever. Give the money to domestic violence shelters instead. Put that receipt into your union due. Fuck unions.
As opposed to CEOs and upper management, who are all lovely people and want nothing but the best for their employees, and are definitely not motivated by short-term gains.
Depends on whether you get a good union structure or not. As an observer, it doesn't seem like employees get a choice besides when voting whether or not to instate a union at all.
You also don't get a choice in upper management, but at least the union is nominally on your side.
Go figure the top comments on this thread echo how companies talk about unions.
“Oh unions can be good but those Americans don’t know their downsides…”
Or
“Unions are great but it’s awful people can be forced to join them!”
I’m just saying Google’s money was well spent.
This conversation makes me crazy. I was at Google when its employee union, a.k.a. "AWU", was trying to get off the ground. I formed my opinion of it completely independent of company propaganda. AWU is a political advocacy organization, not a traditional union. AWU's mission statement is explicitly and emphatically not to further my or other full-time employee's interests. Rather, it is organized primarily as a vehicle for achieving a broader political end ("social justice", as that term is construed by AWU's organizers), potentially at employees' expense. Almost none of AWU's projects have focused on Googlers' work conditions or pay. Instead, they focus nearly exclusively on modifying Google's products and policing its contracts, often in ways I find extremely objectionable. For example, they have lobbied heavily for Google to increase censorship of YouTube and Search, and to demonetize "problematic" content creators. They advocate increasing institutional support for DEI efforts, and it was their efforts which led to the creation of Alphabet's Chief Diversity Officer position. They agitated on behalf of ex-employee Timnit Gebru against Google's ML work, which is obviously a threat to the hundreds of Google workers whose jobs depend on the models that Gebru's research criticized. Why should I support such a "union"?
I want to add that I agree with some of AWU political stands. For example, they opposed Project Dragonfly, a censored version of Google Search intended for the Chinese market. They opposed Google contracts with the DoD and CPB. I think these are all worthy causes and I hope that employees continue to agitate against them! But I am under no illusions that AWU would represent my interests as an employee. Primarily, they are a political action committee set up by and for an extremely vocal minority of Google's employees.
> Almost none of AWU's projects have focused on Googlers' work conditions or pay.
I'd assume this is why they've been allowed to exist.
In fact, unfortunately, this sounds like it could be working well for Google. If this organization is calling itself a "union" without doing actual union work or representing employees, it can help create an apathetic environment towards unions at the company. It also sounds like this organization is doing product work, and with the right maneuvering this sort of momentum can be used to allow controversial changes you'd be willing to try, but would rather not take the blame for.
They are the perfect union busters, not a sensible union. At least that is what it looks like from outside.
Yeah when I clicked into the comments I was hoping for a discussion on the ethics of hiring a firm to trash talk unions (for or against). Instead it’s like the Google 50c party arguing the merits of unions.
I’m uncomfortable with companies constantly trying to influence their employees opinions. It’s marketing turned inwards. I’m not so naïve to be surprised, but I would never work at a business who employed tactics like this.
> It’s marketing turned inwards.
I believe the word for this is propaganda:
prŏp″ə-găn′də noun 1. The systematic propagation of a doctrine or cause or of information reflecting the views and interests of those advocating such a doctrine or cause.TBF marketing turned outwards is technically propaganda as well.
You are technically correct—the best kind of correct.
I think the big distinction here is that external marketing is trying to change public opinion in pursuit of profit to the detriment of competitors (presumably).
Internal marketing as discussed in the OP is trying to change employee opinion in pursuit of profit to the detriment of the employee.
I'm really not sure why you were hoping for that on a forum attached to a venture capitalist firm site.
Not just Google there's been decades of trash talking by businesses and politicians for their own purposes really works. The whole Cold War period really messed up the US discourse of any kind of collectivism.
So what exactly did Google spend their money on? What exactly did these "union-busting" consultants do? Like the other article posted yesterday, this one is remarkably lacking of details. If the pro-union side is pulling out their pitchforks despite a lack of substantive allegations, then why wouldn't the anti-union side do the same?
> So what exactly did Google spend their money on? What exactly did these "union-busting" consultants do?
I think the sentiment here is that hiring "union-busting" consultants clearly implies strong anti-union sentiment by management and an equally strong desire to quell rising union sentiment within the company.
Companies, especially big tech companies, like to seem friendly to employees and make them feel like they're in charge, and the company is "run by them". They like to keep a facade of being "benevolent" dictators ultimately motivated by being the best they can for users.
In reality, they're corporations, and they'll do what's best for their bottom-line, wether that aligns with their employees' and users' interests interests or not.
In this case, that involved retaliating against employees involved with the Google Walkout, which on top of challenging this benevolent image, is illegal. Of course, Google won't admit it was retaliation. They want to seem unbothered by the fact there's union sentiment within its ranks, and will tolerate the Alphabet Workers Union's existence. Hiring a union-busting consultancy clearly conveys this is not the case.
There's a lot of reason to criticize union-busting in general too; it usually employs misinformation and scare tactics; this has happened at Amazon, for example [1]. Regardless of wether this has been the case at Google, it's clear they're not as indifferent to the organization of their workers as they claim they are.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gk8dUXRpoy8&feature=emb_titl...
I was a member of a union where i.t. was involved in that union and I was a software developer. We shared an emergency iPhone that we swapped every 2 weeks. When it rang and DevOps called, we were paid time and a half and recorded each hour worked 'on call'. Double time on holidays. No one was significantly lazier than my experience working in non union shops. People sometimes complain others "only do the status quo". I guess those people never saw someone work on a refactor project before that goes on 2 years and is eventually thrown away (negative contributors). Just an acecdote for you all to say I think unions _can_ work in i.t. and I had a positive experience.
This conversation makes me crazy. People talk about the merits of unions in the abstract, with no reference to the actual, very specific union at hand: the Alphabet Workers' Union, or "AWU".
AWU is not a traditional workers' union. It is a political advocacy organization. AWU's mission statement is explicitly and emphatically not to further full-time employee's interests. Rather, it is organized primarily as a vehicle for achieving a broader political end ("social justice", as that term is construed by AWU's organizers), potentially at employees' expense. Almost none of AWU's projects have focused on Googlers' work conditions or pay. Instead, they have focused nearly exclusively on modifying Google's products and policing its contracts, often in ways I find extremely objectionable. For example, they have lobbied heavily for Google to increase censorship of YouTube and Search, and to demonetize "problematic" content creators. They consistently advocate increasing institutional support for DEI efforts, and it was their efforts which led to the creation of Alphabet's Chief Diversity Officer position. They agitated on behalf of ex-employee Timnit Gebru against Google's ML work, which is obviously a threat to the hundreds of Google workers whose jobs depend on the models that Gebru's research criticized. Why should ordinary Google workers support such a "union"?
I want to add that I agree with some of AWU political stands. For example, they opposed Project Dragonfly, a censored version of Google Search intended for the Chinese market. They opposed Google contracts with the DoD and CPB. I think these are all worthy causes and I hope that employees continue to agitate against them! But as a former employee of Google, I am under no illusions that AWU would have represented my interests as an employee. Primarily, they are a political action committee set up by an extremely vocal minority of Google's employees to further those employees' political goals.
Amazon hired Pinkerton to try and prevent unions.[1] There was an article about some of the people who organized the Google Android dev/DoD project walk out being targeted/fired from Google.[2] Maybe it'll take employees leaving these companies/not going to work there to get them to change. On teamblind people talk about bad it is to work at Amazon and so folks have been declining offers to work there etc.
1. https://www.npr.org/2020/11/30/940196997/amazon-reportedly-h...
2. https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/25/20983053/google-fires-fo...
The US once had a rich history of unions for 100's of years since the 17th century, and plenty of wars over them where the US government literally attacked union workers in wars like Battle of Blair Mountain.
The US seems to have almost wiped out this history and few people know who died for these movements and few people realize we have had bloody battles, I never really learned it in school but it's pretty darn American to have unions and die for your rights.
Sure there is corruption but literally every system does, that doesn't make people stop using it. If we had better union power we would not see the poor treatment of Amazon workers, or game testers, or retail works. Heck, one day we may make a requirement to have a vacation day, imagine how crazy that would be if vacation time was written into a work law! Almost imagine that Russia, South Africa and many other countries have literally better labor laws then America not to mention the EU. I was quite shocked how bad our labor laws were when I looked into it further because I assumed a lot, makes it hard to be human in the US. At will employee with literally no time off is perfectly legal here, but I hope one day paid vacations (even just a few days) are requirement for all full time employees at least.
This whole debacle is sort of humorous. I fully support the rights of workers to unionize. The problem is in "Non Right to Work States" the unionized can clobber people that choose not to unionize and coerce them into participation. This is incredibly unethical, immoral, and unconstitutional and violates a person's right to self-determination and other human rights.
So a mine exists and a bunch of heirs have a corporation. Through the corporation, a portion of the wealth miners create by mining from that mine goes to the heirs. The workers doing all the work and creating all the wealth organize and strike a deal that the company hires only union members.
So the thing which is "unethical, immoral, and unconstitutional and violates a person's right to self-determination and other human rights" is not what the heirs did, but what the workers doing all the work and creating all the wealth did. No questions about the province of the heirs. You're dealing with both these groups but questioning the paternity of only one of them, the ones actually doing all the work and creating all the wealth.
> doing all the work and creating all the wealth
Miners extract resources from someone's else land, using someone's else tools to be sold by someone else via someone's else logistical chains. And that high valuation of a natural resource that keeps mine operational? Miners had nothing to do with it. What miners do here is spend their time to add value to existing resource. In most cases this is done voluntarily and with a fair compensation.
Which other human rights are violated by representation dues?
I can name dozens of corporations who have used their profits not to increase worker compensation, but instead to lobby directly against their workers. And the workers have no vote or voice in the matter. Google in the article, for instance. But think of all the other dubious lobbying corporations engage in. It's never discussed in this context because your pay check doesn't include a line item for "lobbying fees".
The right to your own wages
Doesn't corporate lobbying also lessen your wages?
I'm no legal expert, but I'm pretty sure being forced to pay union dues is not a violation of any human rights.
Forcing a person to pay something against their will is definitively a human rights violation. That's forced labor.
Again, I'm no legal expert, but I'm pretty sure forced labour is forcing someone to work against their will, not charging a commission to work.
People pay commissions to work all the time, they might agree with taxes, they might disagree with union dues, but regardless, I'm pretty sure it's not a human rights violation.
Against their will? Didn't these employees choose to work at a closed shop? Don't they choose to continue their work there each new day?
>The problem is in "Non Right to Work States" the unionized can clobber people that choose not to unionize and coerce them into participation.
You are badly misinformed about what "right to work" is. In a union shop, the unionized "coerce" all employees in their bargaining units to participate, even in "right to work" states! Everyone is covered by the same contract! That's the whole point! Even in "right to work" states, everyone in the unit is coerced into participation by your understanding.
The only thing "right to work" offers is that people covered by the contract may choose not to pay dues (or choose to forgo some portion of the dues).
In all cases, all relevant employees are "coerced" into the union contract.
"It's only unethical if I have to pay for it!" - GP, probably.
If anything, right to work is more unethical because it allows people to receive the benefits of union coverage without the input. Of course, that's the point: starve out the unions by making it so no one has an incentive to pay into the union.
> In all cases, all relevant employees are "coerced" into the union contract.
It's funny because usually the libertarian response to a lot of problems is "put it in a contract". But not that kind of contract!
That's because that's not a contract. Real contracts can only bind people who sign them, but in places that don't recognize right to work, you can be forced to join a union just because 51% of your co-workers signed.
You are making the same mistake as the post I replied to. You are "forced to join a union just because 51% of your co-workers signed" effectively everywhere in the US, not just in "right to work" states. If 51% of your co-workers agree, they will form a union, and that union will negotiate a contract on your behalf. You're in, baby.
"Right to work" only covers whether you can be made to pay union dues as part of this arrangement.
Sure, I'll admit that right to work isn't perfect, but it's definitely a big step in the right direction.
Partnership contracts bind non-signers from receiving benefits of a partnership. And with good reason: you wouldn't want any ole schmoe laying claim to the fruits of your labor.
Contracts deprive non-signers of things all the time. That's kind of the point.
Do you have a problem with corporations signing "exclusive" deals with other corporations?
Yes, for party A to penalize party B for doing business with party C is an attack on free market competition which should be banned.
Penalize? So it’s ok for a group of people to enter a contract to form a corporation (“penalizing” non-signatories by preventing them from benefiting from the profits of the corporation)… but it’s not ok for a group of people to enter a contract to collectively bargain with a corporation (“penalizing” non-signatories by preventing them from benefiting from the contract).
This is absurd.
You’re saying a corporation cannot enter into a contract to be the exclusive supplier of a widget to another corporation?
“I won’t work for less than $x” is fine.
“You can’t hire anyone else willing to work for less than $x” is extortionate. Competition is necessary for a market.
No; the libertarian perspective would be "everyone should negotiate their own contract".
I'm as far from a libertarian as I could be, but why should a libertarian think this? If you don't want to work for a company who has signed a contract with a labor union for a closed shop, you can go to a different company and negotiate your own. Surely I have the right as an individual to choose to join a closed shop, right?
Entering into a contract with multiple people to form a corporation = fine
Entering into a contract with multiple people to collectively bargain with a corporation = deprivation of human rights (according to some posts in this thread)
At least the GP admitted that their problem really is just "that kind of contract".
Everyone can benefit from a union IMO. The Googlers that most need one are probably contractors (ie, not actually Googlers).
Unions aren't just for compensation - it's about having a say in your work.
This is the bigger part that bugs me, I don't my job description enforced by committee.
> This is the bigger part that bugs me, I don't my job description enforced by committee.
Huh? If you choose to work for a company with any size, your job description is enforced by a committee. It's just a committee of managers.
If you don't believe me, try to stop working on your assignments and instead work on the cool new project that really interests you.
> This is the bigger part that bugs me, I don't my job description enforced by committee.
unless you're self-employed, I have bad news
It's not necessarily about your job description. It tends to be about whatever there's the most discontent among coworkers about. Like the mandatory all-nighters with no overtime, or whatever.
But you, the worker, will not have more say in your work than you do now, probably less. Union will have. It's great if your views will align with union's views, but that's far from guaranteed.
You don't get exactly what you want no, but you have a vote — which is a lot more than you have now.
I don't know much about Google but one of the (many) things that always made me uncomfortable while I was at Facebook was the cynicism with which they ignored contractor's issues.
It often came up in the company Q&A, and it was often ignored or glossed over with an answer by Sheryl detailing how contractors "actually had it pretty good". That is, unless there was recent public press coverage how they in fact did not "have it pretty good" in which case the answer was your usual "we're working with our outsourcing partners to make sure every contractor has what they need to do their best work", etc.
I am an engineer. I might've been more difficult to hire, but I wasn't doing work that was nearly as important or taxing as content moderation contractors, for example. Revert my work and some obscure internal metric somewhere is a little worse. Revert a content moderation contractor's work, and thousands get exposed to suicide, CSAM, graphic violence, etc.
I know the value of an employee at companies like this is determined by how difficult they are to replace and how their work affects company profits; "anyone" can respond to content reports but not "anyone" has the technical knowledge I do. I just think it's wrong that people working on something so vital to Facebook have it so much worse than the rest do. Facebook could and should do a better job rewarding and protecting the people doing the hard, dirty work— it definitely has the means to.
If you're top of your field you benefit more by being judged as an individual not a part of a union.
Unions are only a major benefit for work where you can't excel and talent and skill are less of a differentiator.
There's problems with this argument. Here are three:
1. It disproportionally affects those who have no other option. There's hero stories of pregnant woman outperforming up until the day they deliver, but this is hard to achieve and there's even a factor of "luck" involved.
Some pregnancies are more tranquil, others are riddled with visits to the doctor, morning sickness, aches, pains, allergies, sleep problems, emotional swings, rashes, etc. It's hard to be "top of your field" when there's another human growing inside you.
2. This argument assumes skills are perfectly measured and employee benefits are based solely on skills. Even in the most objective companies there's subjectivity and politics. Not everyone has the skills or time to bargain. Not everyone shares hobbies or values with the boss, and wants to create a close relationship with them.
3. If the base compensation for all employees in a field rises, the compensation for out-performers will likely rise too. One can't assume "only" benefits those who "can't excel" at their job.
Except contractors know the deal when they become contractors. They deliberately want to represent themselves and take the risks and tax benefits that come along with that.
If a contractor isn't happy with the work or conditions then they should move on to the next job.
“If a contractor isn't happy with the work or conditions then they should move on to the next job.”
Maybe that’s the only decent job they could find? I know tech employees live in a bubble where jobs are plentiful and well laid but that’s not the world most people live in. And having lived through the aftermath of the .COM crash things can change for tech people very quickly too.
I think by contractors they meant all non-employees. Temps, vendors, etc. Google has over 100,000 of these and they do not all "know the deal" about how much worse their compensation / conditions will be compared to full time employees.
Seeing comments from previous posts on this forum, I'd say they kind of succeeded.
Yup, I truly don't understand why people in tech are so against this. It will likely be a net positive for all tech folks.
In Hollywood they have SAG (Screen Actors Guild) so a large union for high paying jobs isn't unheard of in America.
Most members of SAG are not highly paid. The median income for an actor is $43,760, and even the 75th percentile is only $60,760. The numbers for SAG represented actors is similar to these numbers. The thing is that not all tech employees are paid the same, nor should they be. Google and other similar companies often times pay multiple times the median tech salary.
NFLPA, NBPA, and MLBPA all exist as well. Those are definitely highly-paid members (minimum salaries of ~$600k/year for baseball and football, and just shy of $1million for basketball).
I think you just refuted your own point? Some actors are paid millions a year while half earn less than $43,760. This demonstrates that there are unions that represent workers who are paid multiple times the median salary.
Resistance to Unions in America is pretty deep. This is a 150 year old issue that previously involved hiring consultants with guns to shoot at anyone who dared to ask for an 80 hour work week. I doubt that a crew of modern consultants did much more than run up some bills on a corporate expense account.
*Note that support/opposition to Unions is often form from petty core experiences (first hand and family relations). For me it is a contest between a 2 minute promotional video, three years of my professional life, and 25 years of my uncle's work experience. Given these forces, you would be pretty hard pressed to change my thoughts on the matter in the abstract (particulars are what matter here).
And _currently_ involves hiring consultants to force employees to sit through hours of anti-union fear mongering the second management smells a whiff of pro-union organizing sentiment.
The 'American Factory' documentary has a great example of what this looks like in real life. Hearing that Amazon or Google or whoever else worked to convince employees to vote against unionizing is one thing, seeing what that effort is like on the ground is altogether more eye-opening.
Keep in mind they wanted to bring back a union similiar to the one that helped take down the old GM plant.
Yup, money wins, people will fight against their own interest, etc etc
It’s incredibly presumptuous to assume you know someone else’s best interest better than them. If someone makes a different decision than you, maybe it’s because they value things differently than you and not that you’re sooooo much smarter than them,
Ah, the old reductio ad puerilem.
I can't think of a single talking point in the union conversation that I haven't heard for 30+ years. I see the same old characters in this very thread, the bitter individualist vs the pious collectivist, both polishing the same ol' turds and lobbing them at each other from deep within their trenches, patting their colleagues and comrades heartily on the back, declaring victory when the volleys stop.
Learn from South Korea: all top tech companies are unionized. #1 search engine (Naver), #1 messenger (Kakao), #1 game company (Nexon), etc.
Not sure what the lesson is? South Korea is a very different country. Their laws and constitution were written by New Deal Democrats at a time when there was almost no existing industry and no opposition from the likes of Robert Taft and Henry Ford. The situation is very different in 21st century America. Unions can be a productive part of an industrial system, but just throwing up a union is not really going to solve things that simply.
Their constitution has been completely rewritten several times, most recently in 1987.
The original 1948 constitution stands with a series of amendments. The June Democracy movement of 1987 did not rewrite the constitution, they merely passed an amendment limiting the powers of the executive branch and strengthening democratic process. Collective bargaining rights have always been a feature in the South Korean economy and it would be exceedingly difficult for anyone to change this.
Amendments not like the US Constitution amendments, but including ones that rewrite the whole of the constitution. That's how they've gone back and forth between a presidential system and a parliamentary system, and frankly between a semi functioning democracy and an outright dictatorship.
The point is, they're not simply keeping the collective bargaining rights because they're too difficult to change since the 1940s. The ROK have no qualms making massive changes to the very core of their constitution, including rewriting what got in the way of a corporatist dictatorship under Park.
Is that why their software is so good? Is that why they have better work life balance and higher pay?
Honestly yes? Higher pay, less overtime.
Enjoy https://github.com/line/armeria from a unionized tech company of South Korea!
Higher pay? You can't be serious. SWEs can make 200-300 without a college degree working from home?
I thought Samsung was the top tech company.
Samsung union situation is in a bit of chaos, but it is in progress: https://samsunglabor.co.kr/
Edit: if you want to learn more, here is a news article titled "Samsung Electronics concludes its first collective bargaining" (Maeil Business, 2021-08-12) https://news.v.daum.net/v/20210812160601200
I saw a picket line in Korea while I was there on business. It gave the impression that unionization is pretty robust there. It wasn't at a tech company, as far as I could tell. But I would not try to cross that picket line.
What do we learn from that?
That unions work in tech companies. Naver/Kakao/Nexon almost simultaneously unionized in 2018, and now some time has passed it is possible to evaluate. It worked great so far.
By what metrics has this worked great? Genuinely curious as I hadn’t heard this before.
But you're not telling us how it's great. You're just repeating that it's great.
Compensation increased rapidly and more importantly compensation became more transparent. Unions collect compensation data and share analysis and anonymized statistics. All unions succeeded at the initial goal of striking down no overtime pay clause in contract. In pandemic, unions represented workers' concern about safety well. Etc.
I do find it interesting that those aren't exactly global brands. South Korea also has the whole Chaebol thing going on, so it might not be the best example of business ethics.
> #1 game company (Nexon)
Aren't Startcraft and League of Legends more popular? Being the #1 game company in South Korea doesn't imply you make the #1 games there.
I think Germany is a pretty good model. The big companies are unionized and also very competitive on the world market.
A related topic would be collective bargaining - which is often (but not always) associated with a unionized workplace. If you're a sub-standard employee, you win big through collective bargaining because pay bands will move toward the mean. If however, you are a high-performer, you will likely be under-compensated in a collective bargaining environment because your excess effort will be used to compensate those who contribute less. In a non-collective workplace, you will be evaluated and compensated on your personal contribution and negotiation skills.
Being a "high-performer" by definition suggests you are operating at a higher level than the average, suggesting you are a minority. The idea that labor policy should exclusively cater to a minority to get better compensated due to their superior contribution and negotiation skills is perplexing. Society requires a stable labor policy. The culture of the narcissistic self which powered the second half of the twentieth century isn't going to work in the low growth environment we're currently living in.
The idea that people who do more and create more value should be compensated more is perplexing?
What?
This sentence is perplexing, not sure what drew you to that conclusion. What's also perplexing is that all compensation should be based on an individuals capacity to negotiate.
I don't think that rhetoric is going to convince many people who think they deserve an above average pay rise to accept the average instead :)
Personally I don't think "stable labour policy" is more important than allowing people to ask for higher wages and receive or leave, but if I did I'd be more hostile to wage bargaining via collective threats to withdraw labour than individual ones...
If you work in a high margin, less capital intensive industry with more specialized labor categories, a union is likely less necessary. Unfortunately only a minority of American workers operate in such an environment. This minority of higher paid individuals aren't enough to power a massive economy centered on consumerism. Without a stable labor policy, you risk social instability, low growth rates and rising inequality.
But we all think we're the high performers.
Individuals, even stellar performing ones, also have significantly less bargaining power than the collective bargaining power of either a union or the employer.
There are plenty of companies that know this, and it is the primary source of their antagonism towards unions.
This depends heavily on the industry.
If you're a stellar technician specialised in fixing stuff in the only employer in the only industry in town, sure, the company knows you need that job even more than they need you and so you're poorly paid just like all the other technicians. If you're a stellar software developer and your bosses know it, not so much. You can, individually, take your 10x-more-productive skillset to loads of other high paying companies, and that gives you a much better individual negotiating position than "everyone deserves a raise", especially since your colleagues won't go on strike to help you get a new top salary band at a large multiple of what they're earning even if you really deserve it.
This is true whether not not the company you work at is unionized. Ultimately what you appear to be saying that the union is valuable since you'll get paid more until you leave.
No, I'm saying that if you are an above average employee in $role an industry where there is already competitive pressure to offer good wages, a union fixing your wage at the level it is able to negotiate for the average employee in $role will mean you earn less. Until you leave, obviously.
Companies, generally speaking, already have guidelines around what wages they will pay.
So to get significantly better pay you need to leave anyway (how often do you get counteroffers that meet or exceed the competitors offer). Blaming a union for the thing the company already does seems odd.
Companies have guidelines. Wage bargaining arrangements negotiated between companies and unions have binding guarantees. One is obviously easier for a company to ignore if it's in their interests to incentivise a staff member than another.
Also, company wage setting guidelines are more likely to prioritise "retain and reward the staff we think are best" in the first place. (Obviously unions prioritising things like reducing wage inequality or rewarding the union leaders' core constituency are good for other people's wages instead.) Seems far odder to insist that as companies have some sort of guidelines, unions can take credit for but accept no blame for any of the changes they negotiate whilst formalising them.
> unions can take credit for but accept no blame for any of the changes they negotiate whilst formalising them.
Good thing no one said that then!
> One is obviously easier for a company to ignore if it's in their interests to incentivise a staff member than another.
But in this situation, the offer you're getting is going to be no better than what the other company offers, so if your current company can't match, you don't lose anything.
> But in this situation, the offer you're getting is going to be no better than what the other company offers, so if your current company can't match, you don't lose anything
What a strange comment?! Perceived high achievers and high potential talents receive well above company average salaries or salary rises all the time in competitive industries like software, without waiting to see whether that person starts interviewing at other companies and what that offer is! They can't receive well above company average pay offers if the company's collective bargaining arrangement doesn't allow them to offer anything other than the standard union-agreed pay rate even the below average workers get. So they earn less.
If a company is willing to pay a person more than they're willing to pay their average and below average staff, but a union rule forces them to pay everyone with that job description the same, that person is obviously earning less money, not more money. I'm genuinely amazed a concept so simple can generate so many objections
> but a union rule forces them to pay everyone with that job description the same
Why would we advocate for this though? You keep making the claim that unions would advocate for more and more restrictive policies.
First it was guidelines, now it's strictly regimented salaries with no room for performance based pay at all.
You're generating objections because you keep changing your argument. Yes, paying everyone exactly the same is probably not a good idea. But no one is advocating for this, so who cares?
I mean, literally the entire point of collective bargaining arrangements is that instead of negotiating salaries individually, the firm agrees to pay everyone a wage schedule agreed with the union. Hence the whole subthread starting with another poster talking about collectively negotiated pay bands for all staff having less scope for large pay rises than a firm's discretionary policy, as the union also has to look after the interests of lower performing workers who want to be paid the same or nearly the same as their colleagues. A collective bargaining agreement is by definition a more restrictive wage policy than an individually negotiated one.
It is not me "changing my argument" that you have spent several posts sniping at my arguments without apparently having the slightest idea what collective bargaining is.
There are plenty of unions (some examples up thread) that do variable pay. If you're arguing against a specific kind of collective bargaining agreement, then just say that, and be aware that it's a far more oblique criticism of unions, especially in this specific context of Google.
Also, a salary agreement between a single individual employee and a huge corporation has by definition a huge power imbalance. Unions reduce that power imbalance. You can argue which is best (full negotiation freedom with massive power imbalance vs. collective bargaining with or without variable/performance pay and a much smaller but still non-trivial power imbalance), but there's no point in just arguing for one skew and ignoring the legitimate arguments for the other.
As I said in my original post, the power imbalance depends hugely on how marketable a person's skills are. A company being much bigger and richer than an individual isn't a weakness of that individual's negotiating position if the company really needs that developer and that developer doesn't need that job and both parties know it, it's a strength. There are people that Google would find incredibly difficult to replace, and few of them would find it more difficult to find other well paid jobs. A third party which is less interested than both original parties in prioritising the interests of the highest performers over workers 1/10 as productive is almost certain not to negotiate as effectively on the highest performers' behalf, whether the agreement involves a range or a fixed wage. Collective bargaining makes workers considered individually dispensable by the company indispensable by threatening to collectively withdraw labour. That doesn't help those who are already indispensable and know about it, and typical collective bargaining goals (reduce pay inequality, increase transparency, reduce or eliminate scope for individual wage negotiation, increase the amount the company spends on less productive employees) actively hinder them in getting the pay rises they could ask for.
As I pointed out a very obvious situation in which power imbalances ensure even the best performers would benefit from collective wage bargaining from the very beginning, I'm pretty confident I am not the person in this subthread arguing for just one skew. But I am equally adamant that there are people Google considers [near] indispensable, and most of them are plenty employable enough for wage bargaining to be skewed in their favour, an imbalance not improved by people who want others to see pay rises first taking over negotiations.
A wage schedule that increases minimum salary by x% is more restrictive, but benefits everyone and hurts no one.
Your "by definition" is incorrect. There's no law that requires a collective bargaining agreement to enforce pay maximums (or in fact anything about pay at all!). So please don't tell me that I don't know what I'm talking about.
This line of thought might be something that makes employees think that “union sucks”. At a place like Google I assume that everybody thinks they are high-performers and in most cases they are since they got into google. So the majority will always think that they will be “under compensated” and never attempt to unionize. What I want to know is, is it really just another way to convince employees against unions ?
"Everyone is a high performer or thinks they are at....", but not everyone can be with in a given cohort. But who really knows? The employer might know based on their internal metrics, but is that info worth sharing accurately to the employee? Wouldn't you want your high-performers to think they just might be just good enough to keep "performing up" and costs down?
I agree, there is an incentive for employers to create an environment where employees are being gaslighted by the employer but that might turn into a toxic work culture (IMO).
I think creating an uncertain environment where the majority lives in a myth of being a high performer and salary discussion is frowned upon benefits companies the most.
This is non-sense. There's no rule that says collectively bargained contracts can't include rewards or incentives for higher-performance. In fact, many do.
Look at any professional sports contract. Players usually get bonuses for hitting predetermined stat goals on the field. Look at any teacher contract. Teachers get bonuses for attaining higher education and certifications, or simply taking on leadership roles.
How much do you think Lebron James would be paid in a free market without collective bargaining?
In this hypothetical are you also removing the salary cap? If anything he'd probably get more because I suspect that replacement-level players would be willing to play for less than the mandated minimum salary of about 1 million dollars.
Probably the same, maybe less. Professional sports players get paid on merit. What they do on the court directly translates into what a team is will to pay them.
Actually he would get paid much more. The NBA CBA has a "max contract" capped at 25% of the salary cap[1]. There are numerous players playing on essentially the same deal, even though there is clearly a big gap in talent. If you look at the list of salaries for the 21-22 season[2], Steph Curry is the highest paid player at $45.6M, which is only about 15% higher than the 10th highest paid player despite being significantly better.
[1] there are some other contract terms that allow for up to 35%, but those require a bunch of other non performance conditions to be met. [2] http://www.espn.com/nba/salaries
I don't know, how much would he make if the NBA wasn't a monopoly?
Thats a good point, and I think in general I think using professional sports as an example either for or against unions is a bad faith argument because of the unique dynamics present.
> unique dynamics present
Maybe that's what makes it a great example. It shows labor unions are extremely flexible tools that should be configured for the work force they're representing.
Maybe its all these specific arguments against unions, like "seniority based promotions make for incompetent leaders" and "high performance workers are disincentivized", that are actually the examples given in bad faith.
If the parent comment to mine wanted to make a point, perhaps look toward movie stars. Although then I personally think the point falls apart.
First of all, collective bargaining doesn't just have to be about monetary compensation. It could be about working conditions - e.g. regulations about being on "pager duty", ridiculous overtime during "death marches" (think game industry), employee training, etc. Remember that the vast majority of software developers actually do not work at extremely high-paying FAANG jobs.
Furthermore, on the topic of compensation, Hollywood has unions and yet top actors still manage to make 10s of millions of dollars per movie.
Mostly agree, but why should negotiating skills be compensated? Should we all be taught poker?
I only mention that in acknowledgement that it is, fairly or not, a contributing factor in the equation.
> If however, you are a high-performer, you will likely be under-compensated in a collective bargaining environment because your excess effort will be used to compensate those who contribute less.
And of course, we all assume we're far above average high-performers.
Standard joke: "all our employees are above average". In the context of collective bargaining, it is not only possible but common: any halfway decent IT firm has highly qualified workers paid and ranked well above a "normal" worker sharing the same national contract.
Everybody earns much more than minimum wage, and someone (hopefully the high performers, but don't count on it) even more than that. Pushing low compensations against minimum wage limits is simply not plausible, and paying high performers less than market value is a recipe for talent drain.
Collective bargaining is important for working hours, safety, vacation, healthcare, and other important worker rights.
It's somewhat interesting that you're talking about low and high performers, and then and with "...and negotiation skills". Those don't seem to necessarily be related to job performance, and don't even seem to be purely a matter of skill: there's also a pretty big disparity in access to information between employee and employer.
I'm an above average performer. I'm happy to be paid based on my contributions, but I don't really want my negotiation to come into it. They means people who aren't as competent as me get paid more. So I should support the union.
Yes, and the high achiever will be further blunted by seniority-based promotion practices.
If FAANG-type companies unionize, one can see a possible positive outcome for the smaller competitors, as the quality talent will leave $BIGCO for better opportunities in the smaller companies.
> by seniority-based promotion practices
Seniority-based promotion isn't the standard. I'm unionized and any job opening in my workplace must be advertised publicly. Anyone who wants it must apply, qualify, and interview for the position.
> If FAANG-type companies unionize, one can see a possible positive outcome for the smaller competitors
Accurate or not, this really sounds like a win all around!
Unions don't suck, Google sucks.
If Google does indeed suck, wouldn’t employees leave for a company that doesn’t? I wonder what the attrition looks like
Money.
As soon as a lot of people leave a team or location in Google, Google responds by giving everyone bonuses. When a bunch of people started quitting from the Boulder office a few (5?) years back, they offered to send everyone on a trip to Hawaii.
Google's Do No Evil has been gone for a long while, but people stick around because they are making so much goddamn money.
That's exactly how it should work...? What's the issue, Google is evil because it increased the incentive for employees to stay?
I don't know where you got that from my reply. I was simply answering the question of why people stay at Google if they are evil. I was answering the retention question only.
Yes big tech employees are equivalent to the wall street bankers in the 80s. Sell their souls for money. They have no room to cry about morals, they know the deal.
In my experience google pays a bit undermarket and relies on both it's reputation for being a bit cushy (as far as private employers go) and having higher prestige than others.
I think that trip to Hawaii was a reward trip for one team which had a large presence in Boulder.
That sort of thing seems to be pretty clearly in the rear-view mirror.
Ok, so unions aren't designed to make companies not be evil. They're designed to increase comp. So since you have stated that Google pays lots of money, what's the point of a union.
The manifesto for the one union which attempted (is attempting?) to organize at GOOG is explicitly trying to reducing what they perceive to be evil, and aren't trying to increase comp.
Unions are also used to make working conditions safer, fairer and less exploitative. While money is definitely a key part of unions, it isn't the be all and end all.
The grass isn't really greener anywhere else, and since so many benefits are tied to employment in the US, leaving a job is often a lot of trouble. Corporations like Google know & lobby for this.
If other companies aren’t better then does Google suck?
Yes.
Why?
Not if they are unaware of how things might be elsewhere. If they have only ever worked at Google out of college they could have no idea that things suck.
It's hard to believe that people working in one of the most seek-ed/desired jobs in the Valley / tech world, are unaware of how things might be elsewhere.
People still work for Amazon, so we can be sure it is nevertheless true that some people don't know how good things could be for them.
what does attrition look like for Amazon vs Google?
Well, for a while they colluded with other tech giants to prevent this.
https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2015/01/16/37...
This is a common response across hn for any post related to Google, it's great how you boiled it down to such few words. I just think it's interesting that if anyone posted the equivalent of this on any other topic it would be downvoted. Is this a thoughtful comment? Does it follow the guidelines of this community? I think not. Are you a grown adult or a 2 year old child? We will never know
Police unions have made it very difficult to fire bad cops.
From my European perspective it looks In the US the only unions left are the most hardcore, extremist unions.
All the "finding a common middleground", reasonable unions have been eradicated by anti-union policies. And yes, there are lots of unions like that in the countries that I can speak for (Denmark, Germany).
It is sad to see e.g. police unions being used as an argument against unions in general now.
Unions serve their members, not the public good. Teacher unions do not exist to advance the education of children--they exist to get better hours, pay, and benefits for their members.
That’s a problem with the implementation of US unions, not with unions in general. In other countries things work better.
Police unions aren’t labour unions.
Police break labour strikes, not join them.
Lawyers unionize the moment they reach the required headcount. That tells you all you need to know about this particular facet of the game.
The American idea of a union seems worlds apart from what I know in western Europe.
Over here, jobs are not favorably handed out to union members just for being a union member. It's completely irrelevant if you're a union member. Not only does it not directly favor you in getting in, you also don't get any individual protection.
What a union over here does instead:
- Collective bargaining of salary increases, yearly. Mostly based on the macro trend of the economy. It's not even the goal to maximize the increase, above all the goal is maintain purchase power. So it aims to compensate inflation, and will leave the rest to markets and individuals.
- Protection is only collectively, for example when a mass firing of workers is pending. Or when terms are suddenly dramatically worsened for all workers at once. Here a union may step in. And it will engage in a large number of steps before going to the absolute last resort: a large strike. Which are rare. Even strikes are regulated and bound to federal terms.
The American version sounds like a bad movie.
It's a testament to how fraudulent this "trickle down" argument is. The contractors in security, the kitchen, cleaning - they get peanuts, while working in one of the most decadent centers of wealth on the planet.
"Union hired consultants to convince employees that union rock" - would that even be news?
Yeah; I saw that headline and saw it as non-news. Of course that the the specialty of the consultants.
Amazon has also done the same [1].
[1] https://theintercept.com/2021/02/10/amazon-alabama-union-bus...
There are a lot of comments here debating the merits of unions in general. I am interested in hearing peoples opinions on this particular situation at hand.
In the case of Google specifically, what problems or grievances would be addressed by unionizing?
All major corporations have been doing this since the 1970's - you can see it reflected in popular culture today. Tons of people will parrot stories about some lazy union employee not doing any work (and then if you dig deeper you often find it was not a first hand story - just something "they heard"). I always find it funny when someone identifies as progressive and then talks about how mega corporations are screwing all of us and then seconds later is talking shit about unions.
The propaganda has been very successful it seems with certain segments of the population.
Reminder that Alphabet, the parent company of Google, already has a union. AWU-CWA Local 1400
Today's unions DO suck. In that they're becoming scarce and have grown largely ineffective at shielding workers from employer abuse. (Thanks in no small part to red tape introduced at the behest of corporate lobbyists.) And now that the corporations have beaten worker advocates into a useless bloody pulp they want them removed altogether so that they may exploit their workers with fewer constraints. Google, Amazon et al can fuck ALL THE WAY off.
If I were to join a union it would have to have the following:
1. No protection for incompetent people
2. No seniority based pay or privileges
3. Narrow focus on comp and quality of life
Any of these would be a deal breaker for me. And I just don't see it happening. The people who seem to be into unions are the type of people that can't STFU about politics at the office. And if I hear one word about pronouns instead of a raise, I'm out.
Who decides who is "incompetent"? What do pronouns have to do with anything?
I don't really see how this is related to the post.
> What do pronouns have to do with anything?
Unfortunately way too much, some of the people who advocate for them the loudest are very political people of a particular polarization that makes a big deal about pronouns. Take this Google union I found from another comment here: https://alphabetworkersunion.org/. Take a look at what they have at the top of their homepage. The forth word is "BIPOC," towards the middle it says "believe in social justice." Those are polarizing political shibboleths.
Frankly, unions will not get off the ground without solidarity across worker political factions, and injecting polarizing ideology not strictly necessary for unionization does the same union-busting job as Google's consultants.
That's a rotating list of groups, "BIPOC" is one example in a list that settles on "Alphabet Workers". It should not be polarizing to emphasize that all workers, regardless of full time or contractor status, or race/ethnicity, etc. are intended to be included in the union.
I think Google has been in the news many times now for having an incredibly low number of Black employees - Google's diversity efforts have not done really anything to change that, even though publicly they pretend to be doing a lot. I think it's quite reasonable for a union to question why those efforts have failed so miserably, since historically these same marginalized groups are paid less, given fewer opportunities for advancement, etc.
The fact that in the US, treating minorities (BIPOC or otherwise) fairly is polarizing is sad.
> The fact that in the US, treating minorities (BIPOC or otherwise) fairly is polarizing is sad.
It is, however "fairly" is a pretty loaded word that leaves too much unspecified. It's important to emphasize that "BIPOC" is a shibboleth, and you can be for "treating minorities fairly" without being aligned with the ideological faction the use of "BIPOC" indicates.
And just to be clear, a union effort will almost certain fail if it goes down political rabbit holes that are not strictly necessary for its function, even if those rabbit holes are righteous issues.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/12/17/22841166/google-californ...
> According to a diversity report Google released earlier this year, Black women make up around 1.8 percent of its workforce and departed the company at a higher than normal rate. In the report, the company said it had “room for improvement” when it came to keeping underrepresented talent.
How much evidence are you going to demand before considering that perhaps they actually aren't treated fairly, by any reasonable definition of the word? You're largely refusing to engage with the actual topic at hand and instead squabbling over "shibboleths". Do you have an preferred way to discuss this, because I do think there's a legitimate concern here.
> How much evidence are you going to demand before considering that perhaps they actually aren't treated fairly, by any reasonable definition of the word? You're largely refusing to engage with the actual topic at hand and instead squabbling over "shibboleths". Do you have an preferred way to discuss this, because I do think there's a legitimate concern here.
What are you talking about? The "actual topic at hand" is unionization, not the digression you're trying to pull it to. You also appear to be exhibiting a pretty polarized way of thinking, by assuming (falsely, I add) I take some "other side" position because I'm not hitting all your myside notes.
The point is that if you use polarized shibboleths [1] in your unionization drive, you're doing the union-busting consultants' work for them (specifically, enabling a divide and conquer strategy). If you want to succeed with unionization, broadly, you have to be very, very careful not to do that, since the playing field is already tilted against you.
[1] https://www.dictionary.com/browse/shibboleth, if you're unaware of the meaning, which your scare-quotes lead me to suspect.
I'm aware the topic at hand is unionization. You turned it into something about shibboleths and polarization - while BIPOC is regularly used in mass media - and implied I'm using scare quotes because I don't know what it means.
I don't think you're having this discussion with anything near a neutral viewpoint, and I don't really want to engage further. You've said in the past you're not a Trumper, but you definitely appear to lean quite far right.
> I'm aware the topic at hand is unionization. You turned it into something about shibboleths and polarization
Which is highly relevant to the topic of unionization. To get a union, you have to win a vote, and your chances are much better if you don't turn off voters unnecessarily. Why use a term like BIPOC in your unionization drive, which is a neologism strongly associated with progressives, when it's likely to turn off a lot of people you may be able to convince to join your side? It's stupid marketing.
I mean, literally this thread started with someone who's an example of that (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29908024), which you had trouble understanding and I've been patiently trying to explain to you. There are many other examples in this post.
That's not to say that a union can't address issues that Black women have, but it's going to fail as a union if it can't accommodate a wider variety of people. Someone in another thread said something along the lines of "The underlying mistake is thinking about this like a game where you can make up rules for the government to follow." You're making a similar mistake, except you seem to think you can make up rules for voters to follow. Or maybe you don't think about voters at all because you're too busy sorting people into a reject bin. It's hard to say exactly.
> while BIPOC is regularly used in mass media
So? You know, a lot of people reject mass media culture to various degrees. You're kind of proving my point for me.
> I don't think you're having this discussion with anything near a neutral viewpoint, and I don't really want to engage further.
I feel the same about you.
> You've said in the past you're not a Trumper, but you definitely appear to lean quite far right.
Nope, wrong again. I'm just not so polarized that I'm repulsed by people who disagree with me and utterly reject them, so I can still think about how they think and believe some things can get done with their cooperation.
It won't happen because those criteria are antithetical to the purpose of a union. Unions are about solidarity as a working class against corporations. It doesn't work unless members see eachother as on the same side regardless of perceived competence
I'm not on the side of the dead weight I have to pull at work. Not ever. I'm not on the side of the useless union official who makes a multiple of my salary (taken out of my paycheck) for preaching "solidarity" to me. Results or GTFO. Union people talk like you, which is why Google doesn't need to convince me that unions are bad. Unions have already done the work for them.
It might be interesting to have a union that functions sort of like a cooperative consulting/contracting company with an exclusive contract: the employer pays the union, but the union itself performs hiring, firing, performance evaluations, etc. such that it's beneficial to the union itself to drop freeloaders.
Obviously there'd be a lot of complicated details to work out so the employer can't actually treat the union like it would a regular contracting company (e.g. a tool to keep its responsibilities to labor at even greater length, and fire with even less care).
Are you fine being left high and dry if you get hurt and cannot perform as well anymore?
I've been doing some thinking and I think union lifetime limits might adequately cover your concerns.
If a union is incompetent (e.g. protecting lazy workers, is corrupt, is more focused on political ambitions rather than the workers), then the workers can simply vote to kill the union. A five-year lifespan on unions would put pressure on unions to meet their lofty claims rather than the current state of things where it is universally known that unions are a permanent haven for the lazy.
If people in the US mention „Unions“ it remembers me of the scene in Monty Python Life of Brian when people say „Jehovah“.
It is called blasphemy and made into an absolute scandal and people get stoned/fired for simply saying the word immediately.
This is how Sergey Brin and Larry Page have raised 30% their fortune the last years. They already did enough to their workers but even more and worse tactics I am expecting to see from them the next years.
And I'm just here like "Yes, and?"
Any non-unionized company would like to remain that way. It is in their best interest to do so. I would expect them to act like it. Way back in the day when I worked retail, there were training videos and at least one or two of them were pretty much "unions suck".
And this isn't to say that unions are good or bad overall. But I would expect any large corporation to do at least something to resist unions or other sort of collective bargaining units. Because whether or not unions are good for employees, they're always a negative for employers. Because at the very least, unions take some of the power away from the employer.
As a matter of principle, in a big company, if my boss tells me that something is not good for me, I want that thing !
I keep recalling, Microsoft once seen a unionisation action back in 200X. What has come out of that?
What's wrong with letting employees to hear both sides of the argument, from professionals? Both unions and "consultants" are resourceful organizations. Perhaps they can keep the good and take out the bad practices in their unionization, if they ever choose to.
I don't think
> Two employees who helped organize the 2018 walkout later left the company, saying they were facing retaliation
is the same as
> letting employees to hear both sides of the argument
I've worked in a place that had a unionization effort underway and, let me tell you, the company certainly did not let people hear the union side of things. They'd make sure to schedule our lunches async so the employees couldn't talk to each other; they banned chatting about non-work stuff during work time; etc
Shame. Shame. Shame.
Is changing someone's mind wrong?
Is it wrong to belief that unions aren't all ponies and rainbows?
If the answer to both of those questions is "no" then I don't see a problem here.
A union at google would be sufficient for the unions to operate a single party state. It's not a workers rights issue, it's a national security one, imo.
Oh so you are worried about what a union could do at google, but what google does is not a problem?
This is a weird analogy: Google is not a state, and a union's labor positions don't reflect the individual political positions of its members (this is famously a point of frustration among liberals).
If you're actually worried about national security: consider the fact that many of the police forces in the US are in "unions" that menace your local elected representatives and openly subvert the justice system they belong to when it attempts to prosecute cops[1].
[1]: https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-trou...
Unions are helpful when you have a homogeneous workforce all doing similar work with similar outputs.
We have studies showing how different software engineering is, where some workers vastly outperform others, some workers are interchangeable, some are specialists, and some underperform.
This is exactly the wrong type of work that benefits from collective bargaining and gatekeeping.
Unions help subpar workers. They do not help anyone else (other than their power structure that they themselves carve out using other workers wages).
> We have studies showing how different software engineering is, where some workers vastly outperform others, some workers are interchangeable, some are specialists, and some underperform.
Do we? Please, show these studies. Obviously, we can only accept peer-reviewed replicated studies. Not some study which was never replicated (there are a few) or even worse some blog post by someone stating they personally know 10x engineers or whatever.
That's your bar to prove that some engineers are better than others? Seriously? What are you claiming here? That some engineers aren't better than others?>. Obviously, we can only accept peer-reviewed replicated studies
Here is my copy/paste response to another extremely similar comment:
> This is non-sense. There's no rule that says collectively bargained contracts can't include rewards or incentives for higher-performance. In fact, many do.
> Look at any professional sports contract. Players usually get bonuses for hitting predetermined stat goals on the field. Look at any teacher contract. Teachers get bonuses for attaining higher education and certifications, or simply taking on leadership roles.
Teachers unions actively fight against performance metrics and instead focus on seniority as the main way to get pay increases. People who have worked and doing the same job for 30 years are payed more than twice as much as newcomers to the field. The existence of a teacher's union is actively harmful to new teachers.
> Teachers unions actively fight against performance metrics and instead focus on seniority as the main way to get pay increases.
Unions may have fought against it, but many have not succeeded. Those teachers now get paid on performance metrics. Those metrics punish teachers at schools in low income neighborhoods; leaving those schools devoid of good teachers. Those metrics punish teachers working with at-risk kids. Leaving those kids without access to good teachers. But I digress, that's a different conversation. My actual point is, these teachers, even though they get paid on metrics, are still unionized because there are more benefits to unionization than salary. Ask any charter school teacher.
> People who have worked and doing the same job for 30 years are payed more than twice as much as newcomers to the field. The existence of a teacher's union is actively harmful to new teachers.
These were called "steps". And it was a way to encourage teachers to stay teachers. When new teachers signed on, they were given their step salary schedule and they knew exactly how much money they would be making at any point in their teaching career. To suggest this is punishing new teachers is ridiculous. If you don't like the salary schedule, you shouldn't have taken the job. Aside from that, many school districts have already moved away from stepped salary schedules to a flat salary with COLA increases negotiated by...you guessed it...the union.
A unionized labor force can bargain for any kind of contract it wants. Paid by seniority? Do it. Everyone paid the same? Go for it. Merit based pay? Not a problem. But without a union, "Here's what I'll pay you. Don't discuss it with your co-workers. Or else."
Err, you have this backwards. If I don't like my company's stock vesting schedule, I can choose to go get a new job down the street with a completely different comp structure.>To suggest this is punishing new teachers is ridiculous. If you don't like the salary schedule, you shouldn't have taken the jobIf a young teacher in LA County is frustrated that their school is rewarding low performers with double their salary simply because of time, your suggestion is they "shouldn't have taken the job"? Despite the fact that the Union has negotiated with the entire school district, and they have no choice but to leave the county at the very least if they want something different?
You see how the Union is actively harming the younger teachers by taking away their choices, right?
That's why US tech salaries are so low these days right?>But without a union, "Here's what I'll pay you.> If a young teacher in LA County is frustrated that their school is rewarding low performers with double their salary simply because of time
This is not a valid argument. The so-called "low performers" (good luck fairly defining that!) are not getting rewarded. They did their job and got paid exactly as expected. That's not a reward.
If a young teacher with no kids decides to work an extra 4 hours a week to do some bullshit laptop inventory project for administration...that's on them. She should get compensated as hourly, but schools just don't have budgets for these kinds of endless tasks. When it comes time for evaluations though, this young teacher will be evaluated as "high performer" and the older teacher who has 3 kids waiting at home and has to leave on time everyday will be evaluated as a "low performer".
> your suggestion is they "shouldn't have taken the job"? Despite the fact that the Union has negotiated with the entire school district, and they have no choice but to leave the county at the very least if they want something different?
I'm sorry, but no one goes into teaching without knowing what the meager pay structure is like. In my 23 years of working for a top 5 largest school district I've never heard a teacher complain about another teacher's base salary. Teachers go into teaching for the long haul.
> That's why US tech salaries are so low these days right?
This has nothing to do with salary height. It has to do with employees' ability to bargain for fair wages AND fair working conditions. Right now there are exploited workers in the tech industry (looking at you, game dev) that are in dire need of exactly the kind of help labor unions can offer.
At one place I worked, I discovered that an employee had intentionally broken a machine that resulted in more than $8m in losses, but because of union negotiations, no one would do anything about it.
At a different company, a union worker actually aimed a forklift at me, apparently because I was in IT.
Unions historically served an important role, but they're an anachronism in the U.S. -- especially for coders at Google who are literally in the 1% of top earners.
Google SWE's complaining they're not making enough is just breathtaking hubris. There's so much money sloshing around that they could, and should, go work for another startup or start their own, especially as an ex-Googler.
I’m willing to be convinced here but how does 2 shitty people convince you that unions are an anachronism, especially when we are in the middle of an effective nationwide labor revolt over how shitty workers have been paid and treated for years?
Thanks! these are not the only stories I could tell, but just two picked at random.
Willing to be convinced == I am willing to here your logic here. This is still just anecdotes with no connection other than that some people can suck
You're right, it's just anecdata, but literally I have a dozen stories like that and almost (not quite) zero countervailing stories.
My experience with unions is that they start out with noble intentions, and then within a generation or two of union leaders devolve into just serving themselves; meanwhile, management suffers with worse and worse employees, because they can't do anything to get rid of the bad apples. Over time, the bad apples bring in more bad apples and things get progressively worse. That can happen in a non-union company, too, but then it'll get punished by the market.
It's really a question of misaligned incentives; the union reps have no incentive to do anything to help the company, and often have incentives to do the exact opposite, like initiate a strike at the worst possible time.
The unions have just as much an incentive to help the company as the company has to help the workers. Both will have nothing without the other so they can’t extract 100% of the value, but they do want to maximize their take.
What I don’t get from your comments is why you think unions are bad because they can have bad actors, but are ignoring that the company’s bad behavior doesn’t go away if the union does. And this happens even for well compensated roles. Look at examples like when Apple, google, and a few other companies entered into a cartel agreement to suppress engineer wages.
> Look at examples like when Apple, google, and a few other companies entered into a cartel agreement to suppress engineer wages.
Wasn't that already illegal? Did unions help?
The unions didn’t exist so how could they have helped?
That's kinda the point.
How did it get resolved?
Through a class-action lawsuit from 60,000 employees across all of the involved companies.
No union was needed.
I am not sure that anything in that long winded diatribe says anything about the usefulness of unions.
Unions protect people who should have long since been fired, even when they literally cost the company millions.
That (huge) company actually completely moved overseas. The second (also huge) company moved 100% of their manufacturing to Mexico.
In another place that I worked at fresh out of college, they actually covered their signage on trucks because the truckers were being beat up in truck stops and getting their tires slashed. One of the truckers told me that he made top of the industry wages and he was happy with management and didn't see any need to join a union, but that he was worried about getting beat up if he didn't vote to join.
There are plenty of stories of executives and boards of directors who mess up big time, cost the company big money and get rewarded with multi million dollar severance packages. Is management and board of directors an anachronism too?
Unions do suck, so that shouldn't be too hard of a job.
Would you please stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamewar comments to HN? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. We ban that sort of account.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
They do, and they're still better than no union. It's all relative.
Leadership structure and bureaucracy are the basic problems of all organizations. Empowered executive and operational roles with non-sticky seats subject to collective input would work. But the problem remains the human element and dynamics of group pyschology.
Considering everything they've done (40 hour work week, weekends, safety standards and countless others) I fail to see how
Found the consultant
Please don't cross into personal attack, and please don't reply to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. It just makes everything worse.
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
I searched that page and didn't see a rule about jokes not being allowed
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
I think you responded to the wrong comment
Should we tell them that they can get a job doing this?
I'd like to open a thread to discuss the optics (?) of unions as an organization, and see what you all think.
A bit of context, I come from a region in which unions are looked at fondly from the lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder, as they can help avoid the meat grinder and can make shaky jobs stick for longer and have better pay/benefits. However, as you educate yourself and can land better jobs, unions start being more redundant as the jobs are the ones trying to get you to stay for longer and compete with better pay and benefits. Our labor laws are very strong so ideally you don't even need unions, just knowing what your rights are.
All that being said, unions have this undercurrent of mafia going on where politically connected unions have the power to shut down an entire sector of the economy and their leaders use this power to wring money out of big companies, you can call it union donations or extortion but its quite common around here. There's allegations of being affiliated to narco guys, ties to Venezuela and Cuba (their leaders travel there frequently, and all have been photographed with Maduro and Diaz-Canel), and some other stuff related to hiding millions of dollars in their leader's homes (why does a union have this kind of capital? 1M USD is a ridiculous amount of cash here). Some of them follow up this questionable life by straight up becoming senators, on the lists of bigger, more popular left-leaning politicians.
This worries me, it doesn't help that they all seem to look like Richard Stallman after climbing a flight of stairs and have a terrible attitude to boot.
So, you've heard me, now I want to hear you. How are unions seen in your country? Are they worth it, in your opinion?