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A group of Google workers have announced plans to unionize

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Re: A group of Google workers have announced plans to unionize

#841

Post by carbonguy »

esoterica wrote: post #682
thesuitonym wrote: post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>tell me what the terms of the contract will be and I'll decide for myself. Nobody can tell you what the contract will be because the contract won't be drawn up until the union exists and has enough members to bargain. What you DO know is the current contract you have. You DO know that you have virtually no say in what is in that contract, "accept it or leave," is not having a say in that contract. You DO know that a…

> You DO know that you have virtually no say in what is in that contract, "accept it or leave," is not having a say in that contract. Not only is "accept it or leave it" very much a form of "having a say" in your work parameters, it's a much more powerful way of exerting your preferences than voting. If 100,000 people are voting on a contract your 1/100,000th share of the influence functionally rounds to zero. The co…

> If 100,000 people are voting on a contract your 1/100,000th share of the influence functionally rounds to zero.

Assuming that you make no effort to influence any of the hypothetical 100,000 people voting on the contract in any way.

> The contract will reflect your coworkers aggregate preferences, which will in general be completely orthogonal to your own preferences.

This is a fairly surprising assertion for me - I can't recall a time I've personally found this to be the case professionally. May I ask how you encountered this in your own professional experience?

Re: A group of Google workers have announced plans to unionize

#842

Post by gredelston »

halflings wrote: post #697

On this group's homepage [1]: "We are BIPOC workers who fight against totalitarianism." I am not sure what this has to do with unionizing Google workers. Using obscure acronyms to arbitrarily focus on race and ethnicity (something frowned upon here in Europe at least) + the hyperbole of "fighting totalitarianism" doesn't give me great confidence that this is representing workers, as much as it is pushing the ideology…

To be clear, the "BIPOC workers" and "fight against totalitarianism" are elements of picklists, with other options like "We are technologists who want pay equity". The overall message of the picklist is that the union is an inclusive group which stands together for a variety of reasons.

And, the union doesn't claim to speak for all workers. It only claims to speak for its members, and to fight to protect all workers.

Re: A group of Google workers have announced plans to unionize

#843

Post by gtsop »

I see many valid concerns in this thread regarding the structure and purpose of unions.

What I can't unsee is the lack of will to make something that work. If "union" was a category of software we would be having a couple leading FOSS projects pioneering good practices and we would argue about which is better and do RFCs. Now all we do is complain how nothing works instead of trying to work this out.

Re: A group of Google workers have announced plans to unionize

#844

Post by esoterica »

carbonguy wrote: post #841
esoterica wrote: post #682

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You DO know that you have virtually no say in what is in that contract, "accept it or leave," is not having a say in that contract. Not only is "accept it or leave it" very much a form of "having a say" in your work parameters, it's a much more powerful way of exerting your preferences than voting. If 100,000 people are voting on a contract your 1/100,000th share of the influence functionally rounds to zero. The co…

> If 100,000 people are voting on a contract your 1/100,000th share of the influence functionally rounds to zero. Assuming that you make no effort to influence any of the hypothetical 100,000 people voting on the contract in any way. > The contract will reflect your coworkers aggregate preferences, which will in general be completely orthogonal to your own preferences. This is a fairly surprising assertion for me - I…

> Assuming that you make no effort to influence any of the hypothetical 100,000 people voting on the contract in any way.

And if all 100k people all try to influence each other to different ends that ends up a wash.

> This is a fairly surprising assertion for me

Some people prefer better work life balance, other people prefer higher compensation. Some people want job security, others want higher risk and higher upside. Labour market mobility allows people to sort into the jobs that match their preferences, which is impossible to achieve through collective bargaining because the parts of the collective want different things.

Re: A group of Google workers have announced plans to unionize

#845

Post by 8note »

antisoeu wrote: post #242
objclxt wrote: post #38

When I talk to colleagues in tech about unions I hear a lot of misconceptions, seemingly based in stereotypes about what unions are for and who they serve. People often seem to think of unions as being purely blue-collar operations, and this just isn't true. For example, I've had people tell me that they don't support unions in tech because they'll be "paid less", or less competent engineers will be promoted faster.…

Here in Germany unions (in tech) will for example make sure that older employees can't be fired, so the younger employees will be fired instead. So I don't think you can simply claim they are beneficial for everybody.

Do younger employees pay less in Union dues as a result?

Re: A group of Google workers have announced plans to unionize

#846

Post by throwaway894345 »

sitkack wrote: post #819
throwaway894345 wrote: post #765

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't know whether something like that would work in the software industry, but it seems at least plausible to me that it could benefit everyone who is currently employed in tech (at the expense of future potential tech employees). I doubt it, if only because actors are hired in large part due to their celebrity. There are no celebrity SREs (at best they have some cache in the software/SRE community, but not in t…

> There are no celebrity SRE Twitter is full of them.

>> There are no celebrity SREs (at best they have some cache in the software/SRE community, but not in the general public).

> Twitter is full of them.

Name one.

Re: A group of Google workers have announced plans to unionize

#847

Post by Dig1t »

I’m not at all against unions, I think the idea is good for some industries. I truly hate the idea of being FORCED to join one though. I’ve worked union jobs in the past in California, and the idea that I HAD to join an organization and pay them a portion of my minimum wage hourly pay drove me absolutely bonkers. This was on top of the fact that the union never gave me any benefits, the reps were impossible to get ahold of and didn’t care at all even if you did get ahold of them. To me, it was a giant useless bureaucracy that I was forced to pay into.

I hope software unions look and feel different than the experience that I had.

Re: A group of Google workers have announced plans to unionize

#848

Post by esoterica »

sidlls wrote: post #812
esoterica wrote: post #682

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You DO know that you have virtually no say in what is in that contract, "accept it or leave," is not having a say in that contract. Not only is "accept it or leave it" very much a form of "having a say" in your work parameters, it's a much more powerful way of exerting your preferences than voting. If 100,000 people are voting on a contract your 1/100,000th share of the influence functionally rounds to zero. The co…

"Accept it or leave it" is a post-facto event: one accepts or rejects the contents of the contract. What the OP is referring to is participation ("having a say") in the drafting of the contract itself. By definition "accept it or leave it" is not having a say in it.

Having a say in the contract you end up signing (which may be at a variety of different companies) is more personally useful to the individual than having a say in the specific contract of a specific company. So the claim that unions give you more say in the employment conditions of a specific company is irrelevant because it's an optimization towards the wrong objective.

Re: A group of Google workers have announced plans to unionize

#849

Post by yrimaxi »

da_big_ghey wrote: post #503
objclxt wrote: post #38

When I talk to colleagues in tech about unions I hear a lot of misconceptions, seemingly based in stereotypes about what unions are for and who they serve. People often seem to think of unions as being purely blue-collar operations, and this just isn't true. For example, I've had people tell me that they don't support unions in tech because they'll be "paid less", or less competent engineers will be promoted faster.…

> I've had people tell me that they don't support unions in tech because they'll be "paid less", or less competent engineers will be promoted faster. I am such a person. For most workers, you're right that a union will probably increase wages. But for me, it will do the opposite. In most jobs I have worked, I ended up paid significantly more than counterparts in the same job. I usually was better at my job and put in…

I think we can just end the whole thread with this comment (the parent’s). It’s perfect.

To summarize: unions might in general be good or bad, but any talk of tech unions on HN will be controversial because of how massively—and this cannot be overstated—, stupendously better the average HN reader is compared to the average tech worker. Thread over.

Re: A group of Google workers have announced plans to unionize

#850

Post by [deleted] »

kenhwang wrote: post #180
microtherion wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple used to have easter eggs in its software, crediting individual engineers. Steve Jobs banned them, saying it would be unfair to give credit to individuals instead of the whole company, would make it easier for competitors to poach key engineers, etc. At the time, Jobs was also running Pixar, which never seemed to have problems in its movies to credit everybody down to the hairstylist of the second unit's caterer…

Credit everyone by name or credit no one by name. It is inherently unfair to only credit key talent.

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