Will Alphabet’s Unionization Effort Spread to Other Big Tech Companies?
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Re: Will Alphabet’s Unionization Effort Spread to Other Big Tech Companies?
#2Not sure why this was dead within two minutes of submission. I vouched for it to hopefully allow for discussion on the article to take place. I'm still reading it myself.
Edit: The situation on the whole sounds pretty precarious. I'm particularly worried about the chilling effects mentioned if Alphabet decides to bring down the hammer on the leadership of AWU. These companies already have so much power, I don't think silencing internal dissent will the world any favors in the long run.
Re: Will Alphabet’s Unionization Effort Spread to Other Big Tech Companies?
#3Not sure why this was dead within two minutes of submission. I vouched for it to hopefully allow for discussion on the article to take place. I'm still reading it myself. Edit: The situation on the whole sounds pretty precarious. I'm particularly worried about the chilling effects mentioned if Alphabet decides to bring down the hammer on the leadership of AWU. These companies already have so much power, I don't think…
Dead? In what sense dead? I found it just fine.
Re: Will Alphabet’s Unionization Effort Spread to Other Big Tech Companies?
#4Not sure why this was dead within two minutes of submission. I vouched for it to hopefully allow for discussion on the article to take place. I'm still reading it myself. Edit: The situation on the whole sounds pretty precarious. I'm particularly worried about the chilling effects mentioned if Alphabet decides to bring down the hammer on the leadership of AWU. These companies already have so much power, I don't think…
Dead? In what sense dead? I found it just fine.
That's because I vouched for it. Before that it was labelled [dead], possibly due to downvoting.
Edit: Thanks for the clarification, dang!
Re: Will Alphabet’s Unionization Effort Spread to Other Big Tech Companies?
#5Union? Some Googlers formed a club. A "union" with no bargaining power, hardly any members, no recognition from management...
Its a political club. You join if you agree with their politics, thats it
Re: Will Alphabet’s Unionization Effort Spread to Other Big Tech Companies?
#6The way the headline is written immediately reminds me of Betteridge's law of headlines [0].
I'm just guessing, but perhaps that led to the initial downvoting.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
Re: Will Alphabet’s Unionization Effort Spread to Other Big Tech Companies?
#7I predict within 5-10 years, any tech company with an activist union will have moved most of their operations to countries where workers don't have rights.
They managed to do this in the manufacturing sector. And a car factory or a steel plant is a lot harder to move than a mere office building filled with developers and sysadmins who all work remotely already.
Re: Will Alphabet’s Unionization Effort Spread to Other Big Tech Companies?
#8My guess is that the “unionization effort” will spread to other companies but it won’t get anything more than a few percentage of the workforce to join.
Most workers at the big tech companies are fairly happy and comfortable and not nearly as politically vocal as the organizers of the union. I suspect that it will be limited to a small vocal minority.
Re: Will Alphabet’s Unionization Effort Spread to Other Big Tech Companies?
#9I definitely expect something like the Alphabet union will inevitably happen in other companies. There already are groups like Amazon Employees for Climate Justice; now that the precedent is set, why not rebrand as the Amazon Employees Union to pick up free press and CWA sponsorship? What I'm skeptical of is whether these non-exclusive unions will have more power than the preexisting employee activism groups.
Re: Will Alphabet’s Unionization Effort Spread to Other Big Tech Companies?
#10I will one day write a piece about how the tech industry accidentally invented the superior business model. Pay workers higher and they're less likely to unionise. They're more productive (lest they lose their jobs). They don't want to leave. This works for the tech industry because technically they're not paying workers higher to be generous, it's just a different way to invest the profits back into the business, like how a car company would invest into steel infrastructure. Software doesn't need to do that, their infrastructure is employee's brains.
As it turns out, the more ethical solution tends to work better for businesses, I think. If CEO's took a cut out of their salary and the profits and reinvested it into worker salaries I am willing to bet this would make any business more productive.
You might say software employees leave and unionise anyway, but they only leave to go to better companies and their unions aren't very popular. Time will tell on that second point though.