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Thousands of Google’s cafeteria workers have unionized

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Re: Thousands of Google’s cafeteria workers have unionized

#131

Expect google to start "optimizing" the cafeteria soon enough.

Employees will go apeshit. Food is such a huge deal for the culture.

Yeah, and there will be some noisy exits while people say "man Google has really lost its way" and they will open up the hiring spigot a bit and replace all of those exits with new employees for whom Google has always had a pay per meal policy (or no cafes in the satellite offices) or what ever method Google used to prevent the hit to their profitability.

After a few years nearly everyone will think this is the 'regular' Google and won't know anything about the 'old' Google way.

When I was working there, there was a tool called 'percent' that would tell you what percent of the employees were newer than you were. What astonished me was how rapidly one became an 'old timer' in the sense that > 50% of the employees had arrived after you had[1]. I watched this process in real time as people got fed up and left because they felt that the company had "let them down" or "failed to meet their commitments." It was a lot like university where every 4 or 5 years its an entirely different set of undergraduates. You tell them "how it was" and they believe you because, you are there and they just arrived.

[1] That particular astonishment, combined with the reported employee numbers, led to another investigation which was how Google could replace 50% of the staff without anyone noticing, and discovered that churn was a pretty big thing.

Re: Thousands of Google’s cafeteria workers have unionized

#132
post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm much more concerned about executive accountability than I am about individual employee accountability at a company with as much political power as, say, Google. Unions are a way of balancing executive power. (I don't think they're a panacea though! All I hope for in this case is that it is able to improve the lives and working conditions of Google's cafeteria workers)

There are at least 10x the number of employees to executives who have access to your email contents and browsing history. Using the worst %3 of individuals as a baseline, the executives are the people you have the very least to worry about.

Access to individual personal data is only one small point of power. Billions of dollars for lobbying and the ability to set policy and make sweeping changes is a much larger power.

Re: Thousands of Google’s cafeteria workers have unionized

#133
post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> fines would be imposed on strikers .. which won't be paid, and you have to deal with the picket line. State fines for non-attendance at work? State fines for calling in sick? Seriously, this is how you get Chile. Or Venezuela.

A striking union would be fined, they can figure out the allocation amongst themselves.

.. or not pay it.

Re: Thousands of Google’s cafeteria workers have unionized

#134
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you work in a tech company, you'll quickly realize that the food is something everyone focuses on to a disproportionate degree. This guy knows what he is talking about.

I asked a millennial why she cared so much about the free coffee, and she told me that it symbolizes the employer's 'caring' about the staff.. Personally, I'd rather earn an extra $25k and buy a few cups of coffee with it than get "free coffee".

> Personally, I'd rather earn an extra $25k and buy a few cups of coffee with it than get "free coffee".

I don't think there are any companies that spend $25k per employee per year on coffee???

Re: Thousands of Google’s cafeteria workers have unionized

#135
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you work in a tech company, you'll quickly realize that the food is something everyone focuses on to a disproportionate degree. This guy knows what he is talking about.

I asked a millennial why she cared so much about the free coffee, and she told me that it symbolizes the employer's 'caring' about the staff.. Personally, I'd rather earn an extra $25k and buy a few cups of coffee with it than get "free coffee".

That is a dilemma that not a single worker in the history of this species has ever had to grapple with.

Re: Thousands of Google’s cafeteria workers have unionized

#136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Communist manifesto?

People will think you're joking but this is essentially what that world historic text is about and it makes its argumentation clearly: https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~lebelp/MarxEngelsTheCommunistM... Start on page 14.

lolll I did think that they were joking

Re: Thousands of Google’s cafeteria workers have unionized

#137

This was a really great Twitter thread about how capitalism isn't really about meritocracy but about bargaining power and by implication how necessary unions are for workers to be treated humanely and paid more than the bare minimum for survival: https://twitter.com/ArashKolahi/status/1210332075787608065

I agree that unions were important, at one time.

However technology is at a point where large enough companies can simply engineer around the human resources problem if they want to.

So bringing a company like Google's feet to the fire will only make them want to cut you out of their supply chain. Your "bargaining power" is short term. Merely until Google can find another way to subvert you with technology.

In the industrial revolution Unions had bargaining power because they offered a valuable service that you couldn't live without. Today there is no problem that technology can't solve with the right amount of funding.

Re: Thousands of Google’s cafeteria workers have unionized

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A union is just the free market at work. Much as a business is a collection of individuals working toward the common goal of supplying a product, a union is a collection of individuals working toward the common goal of supplying a product (labor). If you believe a union is a cartel that squeezes money from consumers, you must necessarily believe that a company is the same thing.

> A union is just the free market at work. That's not the case. A union is an organization for extracting rents above those the market would ordinarily bear. Rent-seeking activity --- no matter who does it --- makes society as a whole worse off. Bastiat showed that a long time ago. When corporations organize to extract rents, we call them cartels and apply strict penalties under the law. Why should employees have a r…

Corporations are capitalists performing collective action. Our governments not only allow this, but provide special provisions in the law to support and encourage it.

We can get rid of collective action for workers when we get rid of it for capital. Until then, if anything we need a shift away from enthusiastically encouraging collective capital while barely tolerating collective labor, to something more equitable and beneficial to the individuals whose government suffers those corporations to exist in the first place, whose interests lie overwhelmingly on the side of labor.

Re: Thousands of Google’s cafeteria workers have unionized

#139
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are at least 10x the number of employees to executives who have access to your email contents and browsing history. Using the worst %3 of individuals as a baseline, the executives are the people you have the very least to worry about.

Access to individual personal data is only one small point of power. Billions of dollars for lobbying and the ability to set policy and make sweeping changes is a much larger power.

Elections at all levels are won and lost on candidate email dumps and internet activity. Blackmail always works better than lobbying, and this is what protecting the worst actors will enable.

Re: Thousands of Google’s cafeteria workers have unionized

#140
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you work in a tech company, you'll quickly realize that the food is something everyone focuses on to a disproportionate degree. This guy knows what he is talking about.

I asked a millennial why she cared so much about the free coffee, and she told me that it symbolizes the employer's 'caring' about the staff.. Personally, I'd rather earn an extra $25k and buy a few cups of coffee with it than get "free coffee".

Coffee is so bargain basement cheap when bought and prepared in bulk too.
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