Is there an actual effort? I thought a few dozen people made announcement. That’s a start. But it’s far from traction.
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Will Alphabet’s Unionization Effort Spread to Other Big Tech Companies?
21–30 of 46 posts
Re: Will Alphabet’s Unionization Effort Spread to Other Big Tech Companies?
#22My 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.
Not on a long term scale. Tech's revenue is eventually going to dry up, regulations will become tighter and the low hanging fruit will be picked. They'll be less willing to pay engineers a senator's salary and there will be more engineers to go around too. With this comes discomfort if you're a software engineer. Your job begins to become less thinking and more maintenance. Your salary isn't what it was, or you get o…
People have been predicting tech is soon going to dry up for basically the entire industry's history. I'm not gonna say this is an impossible future, but I don't see much reason to expect it.
Re: Will Alphabet’s Unionization Effort Spread to Other Big Tech Companies?
#23I 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.
Do you realize that most locations where tech companies would seek talent have much better employee protection? No at-will employment, guaranteed annual and parental leave.
Re: Will Alphabet’s Unionization Effort Spread to Other Big Tech Companies?
#24I 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, li…
I don't think that is the case.
Tech companies engaged in illegal collusion to keep salaries down, as usual the penalty for doing so was far less than their benefit.
Re: Will Alphabet’s Unionization Effort Spread to Other Big Tech Companies?
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not on a long term scale. Tech's revenue is eventually going to dry up, regulations will become tighter and the low hanging fruit will be picked. They'll be less willing to pay engineers a senator's salary and there will be more engineers to go around too. With this comes discomfort if you're a software engineer. Your job begins to become less thinking and more maintenance. Your salary isn't what it was, or you get o…
People have been predicting tech is soon going to dry up for basically the entire industry's history. I'm not gonna say this is an impossible future, but I don't see much reason to expect it.
People wrongly predicted the end of the tech industry (and by tech industry i mostly mean ad-tech like google, since that is the subject of the thread) because they don't understand it, and there was even more reason to misunderstand it when it was in its infancy.
Now, we can see the amount of anti-trust cases against them, the amount of regulation popping up, the overabundance of young compsci students. There are reasons to expect it to burst one day, but I never said that day was soon.
Re: Will Alphabet’s Unionization Effort Spread to Other Big Tech Companies?
#26I 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, li…
I don't think that is the case. Tech companies engaged in illegal collusion to keep salaries down, as usual the penalty for doing so was far less than their benefit.
What don't you think is the case? I'm reading your sentence and it doesn't contradict anything I've said.
Re: Will Alphabet’s Unionization Effort Spread to Other Big Tech Companies?
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
You mean like how the actors union killed off Hollywood? After literally decades of outsourcing software development to other counties it isn’t much of a threat to the remaining US jobs at this point. There are various arguments about why this is or what might change over time, but unions aren’t going to change the landscape over a few years. Change like this takes decades.
Let's see in couple of years, I wouldn't be so optimistic. There might be a push back after covid is somehow managed and people start coming back to cities, but maybe not
People working from home due to covid are still operating in the same time zones and culture etc. If you want top talent in India or China they don’t want to work the night shift which means communication with the rest of the organization becomes difficult, even ignoring culture.
The real impact IMO is going to be the erosion of the SV salary premium to other US workers. This might actually raise minimum US salaries due to increased competition with major tech companies in places like Oklahoma without huge tech salaries. However, the real losers from that will be property owners in SV not programmers.
Re: Will Alphabet’s Unionization Effort Spread to Other Big Tech Companies?
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think that is the case. Tech companies engaged in illegal collusion to keep salaries down, as usual the penalty for doing so was far less than their benefit.
What don't you think is the case? I'm reading your sentence and it doesn't contradict anything I've said.
You seem to be saying paying workers more than they are worth is an innovation of tech. They are paying less than they would have without the wage fixing scandal and its ineffective settlement. The union is clearly a result of many abuses of workers by the tech industry.
Re: Will Alphabet’s Unionization Effort Spread to Other Big Tech Companies?
#29This is a really interesting experiment. It kind of seems more like an Employee Resource Group than a union, except that the members have to pay dues. ERG's are usually run by volunteers, and often get a nominal budget from the company itself to pay various costs (much less than 1% of each member's salary). Why couldn't this use that structure instead? And why do the dues need to be so high?
Is the idea to have more teeth, i.e. everyone in the union will strike or leave unless Google stops working with the military, or blocks rightwing Youtube videos, or whatever the current cause may be? Although again, I'm not sure that really requires a union, doesn't that already happen with the big walkouts and collective letters to management that go around?
It's also interesting how big of a difference the framing makes here... "Google allows employees to unionize" paints it in a positive light, as opposed to "Google refuses to support a social causes ERG for employees".
Overall I can't say I really get it, and wouldn't expect it to catch on so widely namely because I don't think most people want to pay 1% of their salary and not personally get anything tangible in return. But I'm interested to see how it evolves.
Re: Will Alphabet’s Unionization Effort Spread to Other Big Tech Companies?
#30I 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, li…
I see where you're heading, but I think this is an odd comment.
From a market perspective, the few big companies can afford to pay really high wages because of a monopoly-like situation that they are under investigation for, while still having profit margins that would be deemed absurd in more competitive businesses, like the car business. The lack of competition is hurting the rest of society.
The way you keep your employees is by making sure they're treated well. This includes, but is in no way limited to, salary. Unions are a solution to not being treated well.
Hiring someone is a bit like marrying them, IMHO. Maybe I'm an outlier.