Google Contractors Say Their Work Is Being Shipped to Poland After Unionizing • Hacker News Board

Re: Google Contractors Say Their Work Is Being Shipped to Poland After Unionizing

#71

Post by deanCommie » Fri, Oct 09, 2020, 10:15 PM UTC

newbie789 wrote: post #52

deanCommie wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is going to be controversial and slightly classist, but... There is work that is utility work and there is work that isn't. I don't mean skilled or unskilled. A common dunk on the distinction between the two is something like "I'd love to see the CEO of try a day on the line of and see if they still want to call it unskilled labour." No, where I differentiate is jobs where ANYONE can learn the skills, and others…

I've seen this discussion play out multiple times on this site and it's always informative! Full disclosure: I've said on here before that I don't particularly have any issue with the ability to unionize, and I'm not in a position to tell anyone what's right or wrong one way or another. If people unionize and it has a positive outcome, great! If not, that sucks! It, like many professional moves, boils down to choice…

The classist aspect of my own opinion is the implication that there are inherently classes of people: Those that can be good at software engineering and those that can't.

There is a more egalitarian school of thought is that people are people, and if given the same opportunities, advantages, educational, financial, etc, the distinction between them is much MUCH MUCH smaller than what our current wealth gap in society seems to suggest.

And that if we DID achieve such a society, then unions would be a net good because otherwise all work becomes essentially commodotized, and without the protection of Unions "high skilled" workers will not be paid well anymore.

Re: Google Contractors Say Their Work Is Being Shipped to Poland After Unionizing

#72

Post by newbie789 » Sat, Oct 10, 2020, 12:13 AM UTC

deanCommie wrote: post #71

newbie789 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen this discussion play out multiple times on this site and it's always informative! Full disclosure: I've said on here before that I don't particularly have any issue with the ability to unionize, and I'm not in a position to tell anyone what's right or wrong one way or another. If people unionize and it has a positive outcome, great! If not, that sucks! It, like many professional moves, boils down to choice…

The classist aspect of my own opinion is the implication that there are inherently classes of people: Those that can be good at software engineering and those that can't. There is a more egalitarian school of thought is that people are people, and if given the same opportunities, advantages, educational, financial, etc, the distinction between them is much MUCH MUCH smaller than what our current wealth gap in society…

I readily agree that there are often skill gaps in many professions or endeavors. I am an absolutely terrible when it comes to skateboarding and ice skating, and they're also not big aspirations of mine. I've opted to pursue other things that I enjoy, like problem solving, system administration and cost analysis!

That being said, when I was a kid I didn't have a skateboard. I had an old DOS box to play on. Then Windows 95, then 98, ME/2000, XP etc. I'm fully aware of how good I am at what I do, but I genuinely have no objective/provable reason to believe that I'm of a "class" of person that's good with computer touching. I'd assume that I would need a machine that displays alternate realities in order to establish what "class" of person I should be assigned to, objectively.

The idea of "classism" inherently (to most) relies heavily on stratification. There are (for a made-up example) The Indispensable, The Useful and The Expendable. In your definition of classism as applied to software engineering, are people born into these classes? If not, what process creates objective classification? How is it standardized and applied?

And further, how does a group of software engineers, that doesn't include you, choosing to unionize hurt your prospects or experience?

Re: Google Contractors Say Their Work Is Being Shipped to Poland After Unionizing

#73

Post by jodrellblank » Sat, Oct 10, 2020, 4:03 AM UTC

stale2002 wrote: post #27

tclancy wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t want what, a leg to stand on? A seat at the table to bargain with your betters? How is some random data point about your wife’s experience evidence against collective bargaining? What do you see as the downside? “Gee, sure we have a say in our benefits and my salary is way higher, but there’s this one coworker who doesn’t pull their weight.” As opposed to life in a non-union shop, where it’s a workers paradise…

> What do you see as the downside? The downside is being forced into a collective bargain agreement, if I wanted to work at whatever company was a union shop. I would much rather negotiate for my own contract. Which is something that I currently do, right now, regarding my tech job employment contract. It has worked out pretty work for me. I've received significant pay raises, that I do not think I would get if I wer…

"If I joined a more powerful group, I'd vote myself a pay cut, so more powerful groups are bad"

I'm not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a comment. Unions don't mean you have to vote yourselves a pay limit anymore than Democracy voting in a minimum wage means everyone in the country must earn the minimum wage. Unions don't mean that poor workers cannot be 'punished' with unemployment anymore than Democracy means criminals cannot be punished. A union is employees pooling forces for the benefit of employees, what else even makes sense? How can you on the one hand say your current coworkers are so awful that you don't want to co-negotiate with them, and the reason you don't want to do that is because then you'd have to work with them? If they are awful and not being fired right now, anti-unioning isn't getting them fired, is it?

> The numbers I am throwing around are pretty standard, for people working at top tech companies, and I know this because this is what many of my personal friends, with the same level of experience as me are making. None of them work at "union shops" though.

Dan Luu estimates on his blog that one piece of work he did saved his employer millions, yet he got no extra money for it. How do you know that 300k is as much as you could possibly get if all of you 1% exceptional people worked together? What makes you think that a union of top tier tech workers would get the same results as a union from a steel works? Why do so many people from the "United" States, living under the benefit of a massive combined armed-forces strong-arming the planet, think that combining forces is a dumb idea for dumb people which can't work ... when the people who get paid most (CEOs, board members) act together against lower level employees to keep that being the case?

That's getting into Michael O'Church territory, but you're talking about your salary when you could be inverting the structure of the company putting tech people right on top, or something.

Re: Google Contractors Say Their Work Is Being Shipped to Poland After Unionizing

#74

Post by idrios » Sat, Oct 10, 2020, 4:49 AM UTC

s3r3nity wrote: post #66

idrios wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but doctors are a unique entity. There's little need for doctors to do collective bargaining because there's barely anybody who could take their job, so they already have a lot of bargaining power. If doctors didn't require a medical license, alleviating the need for 4 years of medical school + residency, suddenly there would be a glut of competition and doctors would surely need to unionize. Conversely, if soft…

>...because there's barely anybody who could take their job That's the point: relative pay matters, and an important + scarce job _deserves_ higher pay than others. >If doctors didn't require a medical license, alleviating the need for 4 years of medical school + residency... These aren't arbitrary boundaries - this is difficult work with significant downside risk if you fuck up. Not anyone can be a doctor, and we ne…

Personally, I really do think medical licenses are too restrictive. I think a lot of very talented people who could have made great doctors end up pursuing other careers, because they weren't willing to commit to a pre-med undergrad + 4 years med school + residency while they were 18, which the typical age that people have to make that decision.

I also think the medical field suffers because the only people who become doctors were people who have been on the track for becoming a doctor their whole life. An engineering firm might have artists and philosophers and tradesmen who are passionate about engineering and self-taught, bringing very unique perspectives to various problems. These same people have enough talent, motivation and humility that they probably would make great doctors too.

And I know for a fact that doctors would benefit from e.g. a systems engineering or fluid dynamics background to better understand the medicines they're prescribing and be more equipped to prescribe the right one in the right doses, or maybe a math/statistics background to understand unintuitive numerical data such as "X diagnostic test is 99% accurate.... [fine print] because it reports 100% of cases as negative and only 1% of cases are ever positive".

My imagination can only go so far with examples, and I know there are very good reasons for the tight restrictions, but I strongly believe the restrictions are too tight.

Re: Google Contractors Say Their Work Is Being Shipped to Poland After Unionizing

#75

Post by kehlenbrink6 » Sat, Oct 10, 2020, 4:50 AM UTC

s3r3nity wrote: post #66

idrios wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but doctors are a unique entity. There's little need for doctors to do collective bargaining because there's barely anybody who could take their job, so they already have a lot of bargaining power. If doctors didn't require a medical license, alleviating the need for 4 years of medical school + residency, suddenly there would be a glut of competition and doctors would surely need to unionize. Conversely, if soft…

>...because there's barely anybody who could take their job That's the point: relative pay matters, and an important + scarce job _deserves_ higher pay than others. >If doctors didn't require a medical license, alleviating the need for 4 years of medical school + residency... These aren't arbitrary boundaries - this is difficult work with significant downside risk if you fuck up. Not anyone can be a doctor, and we ne…

hey im new im a hacker i say we party for friday

Re: Google Contractors Say Their Work Is Being Shipped to Poland After Unionizing

#76

Post by danielrpa » Sat, Oct 10, 2020, 10:54 AM UTC

tclancy wrote: post #7

syspec wrote: post #3

> A year ago, 80 Google contractors employed by HCL America in Pittsburgh voted to unionize with US Steelworkers—a historic victory for white collar tech workers in the U.S. According to who? My wife is a nurse, in a union, and the stuff she tells me about some of her cohorts getting away with then leveraging the union to avoid being reprimanded/ let go is insane. Additionally there is no incentive to improve, your s…

Don’t want what, a leg to stand on? A seat at the table to bargain with your betters? How is some random data point about your wife’s experience evidence against collective bargaining? What do you see as the downside? “Gee, sure we have a say in our benefits and my salary is way higher, but there’s this one coworker who doesn’t pull their weight.” As opposed to life in a non-union shop, where it’s a workers paradise…

That's right, I don't want the same thing you want.

The point here being that if you want the union experience, you should create/join an union and try to negotiate collectively along other like-minded individuals. But please let me exercise my freedom of negotiating directly with an employer by myself.

The main problem of unions is when they want to force everybody else to play by their rules, often disproportionally benefitting union leaders and the "old guard".

Re: Google Contractors Say Their Work Is Being Shipped to Poland After Unionizing

#77

Post by thu2111 » Sat, Oct 10, 2020, 5:04 PM UTC

Brozilean wrote: post #6

syspec wrote: post #3

> A year ago, 80 Google contractors employed by HCL America in Pittsburgh voted to unionize with US Steelworkers—a historic victory for white collar tech workers in the U.S. According to who? My wife is a nurse, in a union, and the stuff she tells me about some of her cohorts getting away with then leveraging the union to avoid being reprimanded/ let go is insane. Additionally there is no incentive to improve, your s…

I too, form my entire world view on anecdotal evidence.

The concerns people have with unions are not particularly amenable to statistical analysis. However at some point a sufficiently large collection of anecdotes does become data. Pretending people can hear stories of union-related BS so many times or for so many years and not take that into account is silly.