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Google attempted to shut down a unionization meeting in Zurich

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Re: Google attempted to shut down a unionization meeting in Zurich

#211

Post by Porthos9K »

perl4ever wrote: post #177
Porthos9K wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’m simply stating it’s foolish to expect Google to actively work against their best interests. I think you're indulging in reification here. Google has no best interests because Google is just a legal fiction with no real-world existence apart from its constituent individuals. The investors have their interests. Management has their interests. The workers have their interests. But Google itself has no interests, a…

"the workers whose work makes Google's billions in revenue possible while getting pennies on every dollar of value they provide." Well, you assume that revenue represents value. How do you even know that? Maybe they are making the world worse on net. In which case, should the workers or investors be liable? I generally feel like it's a nice and fundamental feature of society that they aren't.

> Well, you assume that revenue represents value.

That's the standard capitalist assumption. Gotta make a billion dollars no matter who dies.

> Maybe they are making the world worse on net.

Maybe? Have you been paying attention at all?

> In which case, should the workers or investors be liable?

The investors and the management should be liable, under the "command responsibility" doctrine. If you give orders whose implementation makes the world suck more than it already does, then you should indeed be held liable for your orders.

Criminally liable.

> I generally feel like it's a nice and fundamental feature of society that they aren't.

I think that one of the reasons our society is broken is that the people in charge can get away with leaving working-class schmucks like me to hold the bag and take the fall whenever shit goes wrong.

Re: Google attempted to shut down a unionization meeting in Zurich

#212

Post by geggam »

free652 wrote: post #191
geggam wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not in blue collar :) I make 6 figures a year in IT and cant keep up with what he made fixing washers

How can you be one medical emergency away? My max out of pocket is 7k, that covers pretty much any emergency. I already met this year and all procedures are free. My wife had a brain surgery few years ago and our insurance company paid around 150k and we paid max OOP and not a cent more.

Example : My brother recently fell off a roof and broke his back. Paralyzed now from the waist down. Can't work. Insurance is now gone because he cant work to pay premiums. That first year was great... insurance covered everything. Now... his long term care will end up being medicare disability which means he loses everything he owns.

Re: Google attempted to shut down a unionization meeting in Zurich

#213

Post by nolok »

mrep wrote: post #130
H8crilA wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd vote for everyone who has a reasonable plan of more scrutiny towards 40 hour work weeks. This may reduce salaries but oh God most of us make too much money anyhow. Let's have a life now! When are you going to enjoy life, after retirement? Would you wait with sex till after retirement, too, if that offered a salary increase?

Is that a startup thing, because i've only worked for the big 5 (GAFAM) and I've always worked 40 hours a week. Add in the way higher comp, and I don't know why anyone outside of founders work at startups.

"We're a team", "we're in this together", that kind of things. People buy into it.

Re: Google attempted to shut down a unionization meeting in Zurich

#214

Post by SomeOldThrow »

cameronbrown wrote: post #79
SomeOldThrow wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we already get better benefits than you can get anywhere else in the states. Wait until you hear how well the rich assholes that profit off your work live.

This just smacks of jealousy. Maybe get some perspective and appreciate what you have, not what others have that you don't.

Hell yea I am jealous, have you met rich people? Do you realize how they live and how little they work and the absolutely shitty society that we have to live in to keep them rich? Of course I am jealous. How are you not? I see you also work for Google. Do you realize how much money Eric Schmidt makes off your labor while fucking women in some mansion? Do you realize how shitty the internet is for the sole purpose of selling ads? How shitty our phones are for the purpose of selling apps? Fuck appreciating that. Rich people ruin it for everyone.

Re: Google attempted to shut down a unionization meeting in Zurich

#215

Post by SomeOldThrow »

stvswn wrote: post #97
claudeganon wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s amazing to me how much Americans have swallowed this kind of “they deserve it,” management line. People seem to immediately imagine themselves as executives in the boardroom, quashing the rebellion before it begins. As others have pointed out, protections for organizing at workplace sites are common through out Europe. Google employees built Google into what it is, not their senior management (especially given w…

It's amazing to me how much Europeans do not identify with management, as if management is a class separate from them and not just people who were like them before getting promoted. Do Europeans see themselves as confined in their careers to a "class," and not invested in the competitiveness and profitability of the company they've voluntarily joined? I'm sure these sorts of things are more common in Europe, and it's…

Management is a separate class, it’s called the petite bourgeois. It’s basically the same class as small business owners. Maybe you’re thinking of castes which implicitly preclude social mobility?

Re: Google attempted to shut down a unionization meeting in Zurich

#216

Post by SomeOldThrow »

xckfs wrote: post #196
mscasts wrote: post #77

Google has become such a garbage company to be honest. Is anything they do nowadays good and honest? I think Google heavily needs to be split up.

Having worked at many large companies, I can honestly say that Google was the best behaved company of all of them, by far. I think the difference is that Google has a relatively large contingent of "activist" type employees, and they're given a lot of latitude to speak their mind. When something bad happens, everybody hears about it because the employees are the ones shouting it loudest from the rooftops. Their track…

Well they’re also strangling the internet with their ads, so I’m not sure they aren’t also structurally evil.

I have worked there myself in the past and it was very pleasant.

Re: Google attempted to shut down a unionization meeting in Zurich

#217

Post by SomeOldThrow »

ansidyskop wrote: post #194
mav3rick wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes they do. Many good experienced engineers.

I wonder how you define old and many . If you're 36, you look around one day and realize you're the "old" dev. That's kind of the reality of the software industry, though. I moved into FAANG from a different engineering discipline, where engineers increase in value as they get older. In software, sadly, age isn't much of an asset. Most of what you spend your time learning today will be irrelevant in a few years.

> In software, sadly, age isn't much of an asset. Most of what you spend your time learning today will be irrelevant in a few years.

Kind of—but everything old is new again. I was surprised to find I actually have a pretty good understanding of Babel/typescript/webpack because they’re just reimplementing the c compiler and linker in JavaScript, albeit with very little solid documentation. Most of the interesting language ideas are pretty old—smalltalk still looks futuristic to me. Thinking about systemic failure is really hard and that takes time to develop.

Re: Google attempted to shut down a unionization meeting in Zurich

#218

Post by defen »

barry-cotter wrote: post #200
defen wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Professional sports, Hollywood writers, and Hollywood actors all have unions without seniority-based pay or restricted entry.

Professional sports don’t restrict entry for the same reason Idaho doesn’t have a military, someone else does that for them. SAG-AFTRA absolutely does restrict entry, you need $3,000 to pay the joining fee on top of having a year of qualifying membership in another union. The WGA does not appear to restrict entry but if they don’t have seniority based pay the structure of television writer’s rooms makes no sense. In…

> SAG-AFTRA absolutely does restrict entry, you need $3,000 to pay the joining fee on top of having a year of qualifying membership in another union.

A year of qualifying membership in another union, or 1-3 days of work in a movie. The $3,000 initiation fee is mostly to make sure that people are serious about joining and is not inherently required - the union makes almost all of its money from dues. That would also not be a high bar for most Google employees to clear.

> In normal industries you don’t see a bunch of twenty and thirty year olds, many fewer forty and fifty year olds and very, very few people in their sixties.

Isn't that how the tech industry works?

Re: Google attempted to shut down a unionization meeting in Zurich

#219

Post by esoterica »

barry-cotter wrote: post #199
esoterica wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Professional sports absolutely have seniority based pay. Ever heard of rookie vs veteran contracts in the NFL?

Much like the Writer’s Guild off America that’s not seniority based pay, that’s up or out. You wouldn’t describe the pay structure at McKinsey as seniority based pay, it’s get better or be fired, forever.

Veterans get paid more than rookies. You have to work for X years to be a veteran. That’s the definition of seniority based pay.

Re: Google attempted to shut down a unionization meeting in Zurich

#220

Post by carapace »

YokoZar wrote: post #190
carapace wrote: post #188

Remember when Google, Apple, and "dozens more" stole billions of dollars in wage theft from their own devs? https://pando.com/2014/01/23/the-techtopus-how-silicon-valle... https://pando.com/2014/03/22/revealed-apple-and-googles-wage...

The illegal conspiracy here was real, but "wage theft" has a specific, different meaning.

You're right, sorry.
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