Google Urged the U.S. to Limit Protection for Activist Workers • Hacker News Board

Re: Google Urged the U.S. to Limit Protection for Activist Workers

#271

Post by AnthonyMouse » Thu, Jan 24, 2019, 7:12 PM UTC

stale2002 wrote: post #266

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To use an equally contrived example of my own — there's plenty of jurisdictions where arguing something along the lines of "look at how she was dressed, she was asking for it" will get you off the hook on rape charges. Rape is an unusually problematic situation because consensual sex and unconsensual sex produce a lot of the same physical evidence, and it's possible for someone to consent but after the fact have re…

It is not about "making a proposal to make sure these tradoffs don't exist". Instead it is about morally judging someone for making a morally reprehensible argument. If there is some country in the world where black people don't have equal rights, and a company uses this as a legal defense for it's behavior, then I am going to judge the company as being full of horrible horrible human beings. One does not get a free…

Someone is a horrible person if they are falsely accused of something and use the argument that most effectively allows them to avoid being falsely convicted of it?

It seems to me if you have a country where some people don't have equal rights, the problem is the law, not any individual defendant. That's the easy one to fix, in the sense of knowing what should be done. Much easier than trading false positives against false negatives when there is no way to actually know what happened.

Re: Google Urged the U.S. to Limit Protection for Activist Workers

#272

Post by stale2002 » Thu, Jan 24, 2019, 7:12 PM UTC

austincheney wrote: post #60

blub wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that their employer made special deals with people accused of sexual harrassment or wanted to work on military projects are employment related matters.

As a corporate leader what is more important: allowing employees to use employer resources for personal politics or solving for toxic/hostile behavior?

What is important is that the corporate leader shouldn't break the law by preventing people from discussing working conditions.

Discussing working conditions is a legal right, and it is illegal to prevent this.

Re: Google Urged the U.S. to Limit Protection for Activist Workers

#273

Post by rchaud » Thu, Jan 24, 2019, 7:13 PM UTC

stale2002 wrote: post #254

simion314 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mentioned this in other comments, actors have unions but they still have different salary(superstarts will earn much more then a new unknown actor) and they seem very eager to join the union(or guild or how it is named I am not from US). So it seems that programmers were scared by some bad stories that everyone will have same salary.

Unions also often times throw up massive barriers to entry in order to keep out new comers. I absolutely do not want everyone to be forced to get a degree, and a certification just to be allow to make a freaking web app. Right now there is nothing preventing companies from hiring someone who just went to an 8 week bootcampers, and this is a good thing. I know many people who have done this route.

Nobody is talking about unionizing at a sub-10 person shop, aka the type of place where bootcamp grads learn the ropes.

The companies unionization would affect are behemoths (FAANG but also HP, IBM, Oracle etc) that hire enormous numbers of people, few to none of whom would be a fresh bootcamp grad.

Re: Google Urged the U.S. to Limit Protection for Activist Workers

#274

Post by rconti » Thu, Jan 24, 2019, 7:13 PM UTC

TAForObvReasons wrote: post #161

rconti wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. And due to the high demand of our skills, we're able to effectively negotiate salaries and comp in a way that at least lets us think we're doing better than average (see: salary transparency, or lack thereof). Plus, we're not a group generally known to like more layers of bureaucracy.

It's more "temporarily embarrassed billionaires" imho. Many HN denizens are angling to either work at google or launch a startup that is acquired by google or grow to the scale of google. Why offend the future employer / acquirer now over proletarian issues? In case you aren't familiar with the Steinbeck quote: > Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but…

Seems like a massive projection, but okay.

I'm not sure the pro-union crowd are doing themselves any favor by constantly telling people they don't know what they want, insisting things could only be better, inventing straw-man arguments, and so on.

Re: Google Urged the U.S. to Limit Protection for Activist Workers

#275

Post by stale2002 » Thu, Jan 24, 2019, 7:14 PM UTC

barnesto wrote: post #80

bendoernberg wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The answer is that being a human with moral and ethical obligations to the rest of humanity should take precedence over being a corporate leader. If you don't sell censorship and weapons tech or cut backroom deals to silence victims of sexual harassment, there's no need to try to stop your employees from talking about it.

And there’s nothing preventing employees from finding a new place to work if they don’t agree with how their company handles things. It’s a multinational corporation not college or even a democracy.

It is illegal for an employer to prevent workers from discussing working conditions.

There are laws that cover this stuff. A company is not a "democracy", but it does have to follow the law.

Re: Google Urged the U.S. to Limit Protection for Activist Workers

#276

Post by hoaw » Thu, Jan 24, 2019, 7:15 PM UTC

Apocryphon wrote: post #257

chrisseaton wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unions explicitly fight to support all of these people. Unions fight to support newcomers? Common union tactics such as closed shops and seniority-based pay agreements are deliberately and severely hostile to newcomers. > overperforming workers Only a union supporter could argue that a worker can 'overperform'! Tell them to stop doing so well they're making everyone else look bad!

Why couldn’t a union created by presumably innovative, disruptive tech workers, invent a better mechanism than seniority-based pay? All of this anti-union rhetoric imagines that unions are inherently stuck in the 19th century and lack imagination.

Most white collar unions don't negotiate pay, other than maybe initial and minimum salary.

Edit: I must say I don't think most people here get it. Unions negotiate with employers. The idea that a tech union would agree with tech companies to set salaries is ridiculous. If that is what tech companies wanted they could have already done it. What white collar unions do is to negotiate for the things most people don't consider. They don't negotiate salaries, they negotiate that you should have salary review every e.g. year and some framework for that. That doesn't make a difference for those who already have that, but it does for everyone else. And that is how it is for every area. I don't know if there is a white collar collective agreement available in English online, but if there is one could just read that to get an idea.

Edit2: I found one: "Collective Agreement between The Employers’ Association of the Swedish Banking Institutions and ~Swedish Confederation of Professional Associations" https://www.jusek.se/globalassets/pdf/avtal-privata/collecti...

Re: Google Urged the U.S. to Limit Protection for Activist Workers

#277

Post by themoonbus » Thu, Jan 24, 2019, 7:15 PM UTC

yters wrote: post #267

Apocryphon wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why couldn’t a union created by presumably innovative, disruptive tech workers, invent a better mechanism than seniority-based pay? All of this anti-union rhetoric imagines that unions are inherently stuck in the 19th century and lack imagination.

There's always human nature to wreck a good idea.

The system as it currently stands is also being wrecked by human nature, though...

Re: Google Urged the U.S. to Limit Protection for Activist Workers

#278

Post by typon » Thu, Jan 24, 2019, 7:16 PM UTC

Tiktaalik wrote: post #253

wasdfff wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In every context besides economic journals it refers to social liberalism: the progressive left. No one is calling reagan or bush liberals even if they are by the economics definition of the word.

You can be "socially liberal" and not be terribly progressive at all, and in fact that's what I usually see in the tech industry. Eg. Support gay rights and environmental causes, but don't really give a shit about poor people.

That has been my experience as well

Re: Google Urged the U.S. to Limit Protection for Activist Workers

#279

Post by uuwp » Thu, Jan 24, 2019, 7:16 PM UTC

pc86 wrote: post #121

typon wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Programmers, maybe ones on HN especially, are super conservative and anti-labour for some reason. I don't know the history of Silicon Valley enough to figure out exactly why

Almost every programmer I've met in real life, and certainly most of the folks on HN, are very liberal yet are largely anti-organized labor. Don't conflate a general disdain for one policy with an entire political ideology.

That's because a decent programmer (especially one working at Google) has many companies fighting for him trying to offer more than others. It's usually easy to leave and that often comes with a hefty raise and it will be your former boss' problem that his direct reports are leaving. Unions are seen from this perspective as bureaucratic organizations run by not very smart people who want to get their piece of the pie by regulating what they don't understand. Unions are good for the opposite market situation when there are too many workers and they have to fight for the limit number of jobs.

Re: Google Urged the U.S. to Limit Protection for Activist Workers

#280

Post by dekhn » Thu, Jan 24, 2019, 7:18 PM UTC

908087 wrote: post #209

dekhn wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the person you are arguing with has real credentials in this matter (lawyer) and works for the company we are discussing. Even if you don't agree with him, he's knowledgeable and honest about the situation.

Given the subject, the fact that he works for Google should make you question his motivations, not lend him more credibility and assume he's being honest.

I'm not assuming he's honest; he's a person I worked with for many years and developed a respect for his honesty and technical precision when it comes to legal matters.

If you don't want to believe me, that's fine. I understand that you believe he could be motivated to be inaccurate to defend his employer. I am giving a third-party account supporting his statement.