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New Facebook tool allows employers to suppress “unionize” in workplace chat

theintercept.com

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Re: New Facebook tool allows employers to suppress “unionize” in workplace chat

#121

Post by Mirioron »

ghj wrote: post #23

I guess we're past the point where codewords like "winnie the pooh" work but is NLP so advanced it can parse all the other ways human hint and indirectly communicate with each other? Like can't I just send something like "hey coworker, lets do the thing that's opposite of ionized!". Or will the AI block my message (or more scarily, subtly rewrite it) and inform my manager? This seems like tech with huge unintended co…

I find it incredibly unlikely that this tech has been perfected to such a degree. People have tried for a very long time to fix spam. It still gets through. I think that this is unfixable on a technical level, because people can simply change the meaning of words.

Re: New Facebook tool allows employers to suppress “unionize” in workplace chat

#122

Post by koheripbal »

mcv wrote: post #99
cool_dude85 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Often, things that seem to not make sense are the result of historical practices at that workplace or others. In a situation like the comment describes, usually it's at a partially unionized workplace. If you don't have these kinds of things in the contract, what can sometimes happen is a situation where all the "monitor movers" are unionized, but then management hires a new "screen transporter" for $10 an hour who i…

In Netherland, unions negotiate with employers, generally with the government also at the table, to agree on workplace conditions and pay scales that apply to the whole industry, and not just the union members. The employer gains nothing by hiring a non-union member, and besides, a non-union member can always join the union if they want to.

oh good... a THIRD organization of bureaucracy. What could go wrong?

Re: New Facebook tool allows employers to suppress “unionize” in workplace chat

#123

Post by tosers4 »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #81
ShamelessC wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rocket League's approach to this is very good. The D-pad is bound to several predefined words and phrases that are useful such as "Nice shot!" or "Great pass!". Because of the fast paced nature of the game it's pretty tough to try to abuse this system (maybe by spelling words with the first letters of allowed phrases?) but no one does that. To appease the folks who wanted to express that they were using a curse word,…

> That reminds me of Rocket League's approach. The D-pad is bound to several predefined words and phrases that are useful such as "Nice shot!" or "Great pass!". Because of the fast paced nature of the game it's pretty tough to try to abuse this system (maybe by spelling words with the first letters of allowed phrases?) but no one does that. Dota has that, and it didn't work. People just used the nice phrases sarcasti…

well, it's different games, in dota (relatively to RL) your teammates have all the time in the world to harass you.

Re: New Facebook tool allows employers to suppress “unionize” in workplace chat

#124

Post by koheripbal »

mcv wrote: post #105
kdtsh wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is definitely not unique to unions, nor are all (or many) unions like this. Of course the examples you list are ridiculous and shouldn’t happen, but the more boring instances of bureaucracy are just part of the mundane process of work in a large company (e.g. raising a ticket on a third party vendor to grant access to some service and the whole process descending into farce as no one knows how to/wants to do it…

> "most of the time a union has some degree of member democracy" Most of the time ? Some degree ? Any union that does not represent its members to the best of its ability is not a good union. That's also why it's vital that no single union has a monopoly on a certain type of work; if union members are unhappy with their union, they need to be able to leave and join or start a new one.

> Any union that does not represent its members to the best of its ability is not a good union.

This is as naive as saying that "any good country does not represent it's population" and then therefore expecting good governments.

> That's also why it's vital that no single union has a monopoly on a certain type of work; if union members are unhappy with their union, they need to be able to leave and join or start a new one.

Again, the reality on the ground is one of union monopolies. Union power derives from its collective bargaining power - so separate unions always end up merging and union bosses always end up as major power brokers, accountable to no one.

Re: New Facebook tool allows employers to suppress “unionize” in workplace chat

#126

Post by 0xy »

hef19898 wrote: post #91
0xy wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I mean if we take facebook as an example, you can't negotiate pay Stocks basically are pay, because anyone who doesn't immediately sell them as they vest is fiscally irresponsible. >Which is the same as what it would be if it was unionised Firstly, no. The scale is wide and you are placed somewhere between the low and high points of the scale for your level. Not every L5 engineer earns the same thing. Secondly, tota…

Regarding stock units, if I had sold my AMZN RSUs as soon as they vested, I would have missed out by a lot of pay.

History is full of rock solid tech giants who have faltered. Amazon isn't invincible and cannot climb forever. In fact, they're under more competition than ever before.

Just because this worked for you doesn't mean it's a good strategy at every company every time.

Re: New Facebook tool allows employers to suppress “unionize” in workplace chat

#127

Post by Mirioron »

rwmj wrote: post #116
Mirioron wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How long will it stay politically unaligned though? It seems like it would be quite easy to end up using the Union to push certain politics.

If that happens then members would leave.

Would they though? From what I understood Google has a workplace that heavily leans towards one political side in the US. It seems to even have been used to shame people to stay in line. What's the chance that something similar wouldn't happen with this Union?

Re: New Facebook tool allows employers to suppress “unionize” in workplace chat

#128

Post by koheripbal »

guerrilla wrote: post #107
koheripbal wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unions will slow us down, and we'll become more bureaucratic Anyone who's actually had to deal with a union can agree with this point. At our company, a number of job functions are union-only work, meaning it is a violation of the union contract for any non-union employee to perform that work. In principle, you might think that makes sense, until you need to get something very simple done - that you are willing to…

That's absurd, laughable and not how a single union works in Sweden and essentially the enrire country is unionized.

This is how unions work in America - and why we hate them.

People throw the word "union" around a lot with their support, not knowing that it's not the same everywhere.

Re: New Facebook tool allows employers to suppress “unionize” in workplace chat

#129

Post by mcv »

koheripbal wrote: post #122
mcv wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Netherland, unions negotiate with employers, generally with the government also at the table, to agree on workplace conditions and pay scales that apply to the whole industry, and not just the union members. The employer gains nothing by hiring a non-union member, and besides, a non-union member can always join the union if they want to.

oh good... a THIRD organization of bureaucracy. What could go wrong?

It works surprisingly well. A decade or two ago this was widely praised as the "polder" system: instead of going on strike and firing people all the time, you talk it out and find a solution that works for everybody. Everybody involved has an interest in a good solution.

Re: New Facebook tool allows employers to suppress “unionize” in workplace chat

#130

Post by creaghpatr »

triceratops wrote: post #82
pjc50 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hollywood unions are a slightly special case: while the studios hold a huge amount of power, the staff are pretty much all contractors per-project, and the entity they're contracting with will be a special purpose corporate vehicle for that film. Most software doesn't look like that - except game development, which is notoriously abusive and can get away with it because of a fresh supply of enthusiastic young people.

> game development...is notoriously abusive and can get away with it because of a fresh supply of enthusiastic young people. Hollywood also has an endless supply of enthusiastic young people. To me this sounds like an argument in favor of unionizing the game dev industry.

You don’t get into the Hollywood unions until you put in hundreds of hours of set time, most ADs I know don’t get the corresponding benefits until they are about 30.
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