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What are you talking about? It comes out like often in my world?
What is "your world" - no one here has even heard of it, or cares. If you take the time to think about it - swapping one incredibly high-paid job for another does not make you a martyr.
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I'm not familiar with Google's employee stock plan, but since -- I presume -- most employees are shareholders, don't they already have a say at the board level?
An important distinction is that companies like Google and Facebook have dual class structures for shares: The founders still hold all the power in any shareholder vote. Case in point, 68% of Facebook shareholders voted to remove Mark Zuckerberg, but since Zuckerberg's shares are a lot more powerful, it's completely irrelevant: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/why-68-percent-of-facebook-in...
These companies are so huge and such an integral part of society that they need to be made more accountable to the public, and forcing them to be more accountable to their workers is part of that. I think the recent proposal to require employee representation on the board of directors of $1B+ companies is a good start.
I'm not familiar with Google's employee stock plan, but since -- I presume -- most employees are shareholders, don't they already have a say at the board level?
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The point of having employee representation in the board isn’t putting a janitor in the board room, it’s putting someone on the board who represents the interests of employees first. She doesn’t have to be a regular employee. I think it’s the kind of idea that sounds good on paper, but it’s trivially easy to corrupt someone once they’re in that sort of position of power.
Make it so the representative is paid directly by the workers via a mandatory fee (whatever sum is necessary to pay their salary), and then make it illegal for the company to pay or reward that board member in any way. If the latter is breached, put the company's CEO in jail. No weaseling out with "fines" or "settlements" -- straight to jail. Maybe my version is slightly too extreme, but I think we can be creative en…
Sounds like Unionizing is what people are looking for, but not calling it that.
I don't see a distinguished difference between any ideas of employee representation like this and a professional/labor union.
You can read Claire's reasons for leaving Google in her own words here: https://medium.com/@GoogleWalkout/why-a-googlewalkout-organi...
> Fast forward a few years and I’d moved to New York, cycled through Creative Lab and landed at YouTube. As I neared the ten-year mark, my first boss, Sally Cole, who’d left Google many years before, joked that I was surely due for an existential crisis. But when I got back to work after having my son Malcolm in 2017, it wasn’t me who was having an existential crisis. It was Google itself.
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An important distinction is that companies like Google and Facebook have dual class structures for shares: The founders still hold all the power in any shareholder vote. Case in point, 68% of Facebook shareholders voted to remove Mark Zuckerberg, but since Zuckerberg's shares are a lot more powerful, it's completely irrelevant: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/why-68-percent-of-facebook-in...
Dual class shares seem like a perversion of what the stock market and stocks were initially intended to do. If you can’t vote on important decisions made by the company, do you actually own the company, or is a stock just a fancy piece of paper to gamble on? (I call it gambling because any return is based purely on stock price; there are no dividends paid out for FB and GOOG).
Or put another way, it's a possible bonus if you and others like you do well.
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On Day One, the entire workforce of every company becomes "contractors". Labor does not have the leverage in most industries as it does in large tech. Even in tech it is cyclical. Younger readers here, who missed out on the 2001 and 2008 crashes, are going to have an eye-opening experience when the next recession gets here.
There are laws that determine who is and who isn't a contractor. The entire workforce of every company will not be reclassified. Under the proposal, the employees will thus get board representation and thus a big piece of leverage that you correctly say they currently do not have. On a broader note, your comment falls into one of the very annoying category of constructing a hip-shot theoretical model to explain why s…
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5 years? I think it already has mostly been forgotten
What are you talking about? It comes out like often in my world?
I work in tech and have friends in the Bay area that work in tech and it never comes up. I honestly had forgotten Google had a walkout until this Hacker News post today. Your online search bubble / real life bubble might be heavily biasing you.
These companies are so huge and such an integral part of society that they need to be made more accountable to the public, and forcing them to be more accountable to their workers is part of that. I think the recent proposal to require employee representation on the board of directors of $1B+ companies is a good start.
Sundar Pichai is an employee and board member. He's not a "regular" employee, but I don't think a regular employee gets enough perspective to make effective decisions across the company. They would have to take their board position more seriously than their full time job, which would make them not a regular employee anymore.