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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

#361

Post by wpietri »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #297
dsjoerg wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an American I strongly agree with your insight, and independently arrived at it. It is an underlying cultural issue -- a lack of community spirit that is relatively widespread. It is a universal human tendency that is strongly in effect here at the current time and place.

> a lack of community spirit that is relatively widespread. How did this happen?

For homeowners associations in particular, I think a lot of the history is rooted in American race and class bias. A lot of American suburbs were created due to white flight [1]. And although they're mostly no longer explicitly racist, they're very stratified by income, which can be read as class bias and/or quiet racism.

That desire for exclusion and enforced superiority appeals to some more than others. So it's unsurprising to me that HOA boards frequently turn out awful.

Happily, as older, first-ring suburbs turn into cities in their own right, we're seeing some reversal of that. E.g., as kids and grandkids stay in the area, we're seeing demographic and income diversification. Some places are realizing that things they've previously excluded, like drug treatment and publicly supported housing, are now necessary.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight

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

#362

Post by RobertKerans »

capdeck wrote: post #347
jimmaswell wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll never forget the union at a convention center that forced vendors to pay them to move anything from their own car they couldn't carry. Nothing but extortionist bullies squeezing every cent of protection money they could out of the people there who actually make things and add value to the world. In contrast, these union employees were nothing but parasites. They did nothing the vendors couldn't do themselves, wh…

This is an excellent example why unions are wrong solution to a bigger problem - lack of universal healthcare, free education and guaranteed pension. If we had the three above - there won't be a need for unions because you are not loosing _everything_ when you are loosing a job. Until this bigger problem is fixed unions will remain one of the very few things workers can do to improve their odds in life. So you can't…

Those three things absolutely do not obviate unions. The aim is protection at work at a granular level that [ideally] is sensitive to specific workplaces. I would kinda agree with the last paragraph though: despite the potential for moral hazard and for corruption there isn't a lot else that can counterbalance the immense power over workers that companies have, regulation alone is too broad-brush

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

#363

Post by distances »

missedthecue wrote: post #330
distances wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why's that? In the Nordics you can already join an union when you're a student without a job yet, and many people do.

Nordic union != US union

Fair enough.

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

#364

Post by nielsbot »

ttwinder wrote: post #353
pietrovismara wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That kinda shows you what privilege is and how it conditions the political discussion. If you never had to face a problem (never needed someone to protect you against greedy employers), it is so hard to understand why that it's relevant.

It's offensive to see this valid point of view dismissed with such shallow accusations of privilege. The point in bringing up trivial issues like moving monitors is to emphasize the greed and absurdity that ensure that even simple, quick tasks become cash sinks and long term blockers, directly because of common union practices. This is the inefficiency that unions tend to breed, and it is a direct consequence of thei…

Who exactly is the "rest of the corporate collective"? Also saying "ubiquitous policies in sum" seems like a stretch from extortionist monitor moving. There can be a balance.

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

#365

Post by Nasrudith »

x86_64Ubuntu wrote: post #338
jimmaswell wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll never forget the union at a convention center that forced vendors to pay them to move anything from their own car they couldn't carry. Nothing but extortionist bullies squeezing every cent of protection money they could out of the people there who actually make things and add value to the world. In contrast, these union employees were nothing but parasites. They did nothing the vendors couldn't do themselves, wh…

So because you can't move a piece of furniture, you believe it cancels the amount of protections and good from unionization?!

"Why do people treat me like an asshole when I bully them for my own gain to lock down my fiefdom? It is so unfair!"

The union wounds here are entirely self-inflicted by proving in practice that they make a bad system. That is terrible evangelism and no ammount of wagon circling will change that. Can you blame them for thinking a 401k would be preferrable to a pension from people who would embezzle it anyway?

They are harming the protection and good through their own short-sighted rent seeking actions. Which makes it all the more frustrating as there is actual good that could be done instead.

It is in no way limited to unions and may be found across all walks of life and individual to megaconglomerate scale but I have noticed an antipattern of "insistent loserdom", in blaming everyone else and refusing an iota of self change in a certain downward trajectory.

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

#366

Post by zentiggr »

nashashmi wrote: post #343
jimmaswell wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll never forget the union at a convention center that forced vendors to pay them to move anything from their own car they couldn't carry. Nothing but extortionist bullies squeezing every cent of protection money they could out of the people there who actually make things and add value to the world. In contrast, these union employees were nothing but parasites. They did nothing the vendors couldn't do themselves, wh…

Union rules are about making sure a management team does not subject employees to random jobs. It is a about adding a control over management. In other words, in my office an employee is not allowed to hang a whiteboard on to a wall. Because building mandates only union employees can make such hardware modifications. Fine you are protecting the job of the union but what you are really doing is prevent job creep or sc…

> Fine you are protecting the job of the union but what you are really doing is prevent job creep or scope creep.

I think that should really read "Fine you are trying to prevent scope creep but what you are really doing is protecting the union jobs."

I've had my own experience of being forced to wait for a union worker to report onsite to accomplish a basic thing, only to be told when he showed up an hour after requested "If I didn't use the time in the job order, they'd just reduce the time alloted for the next one, and we'd get docked for running over."

Pick a metric and it will restructure the entire working environment to meet that metric, no matter how illogical or inefficient things become.

Keep adding more rules to close the loopholes in the process and you get the craziness in some jobs where things can't get done because there's no way through the red tape anymore.

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

#367

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o »

jimmaswell wrote: post #324
objclxt wrote: post #25

I used to work at Facebook, and it was always interesting to me to see just how many engineers were actively against - aghast, even - at the idea of unions. Whenever it would come up on the internal boards the arguments were usually along the lines of: * "People who don't deserve to be paid more will get more money under a union" * "I'll be paid less under a union" * "Unions will slow us down, and we'll become more b…

I'll never forget the union at a convention center that forced vendors to pay them to move anything from their own car they couldn't carry. Nothing but extortionist bullies squeezing every cent of protection money they could out of the people there who actually make things and add value to the world. In contrast, these union employees were nothing but parasites. They did nothing the vendors couldn't do themselves, wh…

It's a monopoly problem.

Imagine a consulting firm that had a monopoly on all the architects in California. The only architects in CA are ones that you might bring in from this firm, and to prevent change, it's in the contract that you can't hire outside architects. It's a straight up anticompetitive monopoly. But that doesn't mean consulting firms are bad, it's just that monopolies are bad.

The biggest difference between this kind of consulting firm and a union is the accounting and the taxes, so I think the same logic applies. Unions can be good, but monopolistic unions are bad. When there's only one police union for your city, they have extreme bargaining power because it's a monopoly.

There needs to be a middle ground between completely independent bargaining and monopolistic collective bargaining. If we figured out a reasonable way to have multiple coexisting unions for a given profession and location, I'd bet unions would be much much more widely accepted as good.

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

#368

Post by kevingadd »

C1sc0cat wrote: post #303
hedora wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unions would be much more attractive if US were an open shop country. Instead, we’re closed shop, which means that, once a union is in place, you can’t choose to join a different union. This routinely leads to situations where corrupt unions abuse their own members. For an example of how this works in practice, look at the UAW’s conduct with UC’s grad students. Years ago, they negotiated salary caps for grad students…

I did not think all union contracts where closed shop in the USA. And this case why on earth where professional roles being represented by an Auto workers union.

If you look at modern unionization efforts, new unions tend to align with existing larger unions to leverage their legal representation, experience with unionization efforts, and general resources

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

#370

Post by squarefoot »

koheripbal wrote: post #244
squarefoot wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is really strange. Unions should be there to protect workers rights when they are abused from above, ie they give more strength to workers when necessary. In normal working conditions, unions should be invisible. Case in point: my girlfriend's workplace has been recently purchased by a multinational. Everything fine and well, until they had to pay her. Her monthly salary was cut by about €400 because they refuse…

The US is setup differently. The local/state labor departments usually handle pay issues, and almost always force the company to pay/backpay employees. I've dealt with them on occasion, and they do an amazing job in the US. When dealing with the State labor board, the company needs to prove their innocence (which is right because they are expected to have better record keeping). Unions, unlike in Europe, function to…

Thanks for the explanation, I was not aware of how unions work in the US.
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