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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?

#41
As an Intel Jones Farm campus employee: I hope so.

Every company has different problems that employees experience. Making CPUs is inherently less political than web search and ad tech, and so I suspect there's less interest in social justice type protests at Intel than at Google, and maybe more economic concerns or general work environment concerns.

I think there are also a lot of industry common practices that ought to changee but may require not just individual unions at different companies but unions in multiple companies working together.

Examples include: onerous intellectual property agreements, excessive executive compensation tied to short-term stock gains, anti-compete clauses, severance packages with anti-disparagement clauses, and whole-day uncompensated interviews.

There are also rights that I think should be commonplace in the tech industry: certain minimum working conditions, like a minimum cubicle size, high cube walls if you prefer them, and multiple monitors of a reasonable size and resolution, the right to refuse work if documentation required to do one's job correctly is unintelligible or nonexistent, the right to have any question raised by ten or more employees be addressed in a timely fashion by senior management (even if the legitimate answer sometimes is "that's a secret, we can't tell you for strategic or legal reasons"), the right to have your name and contributions to the company listed publicly if you want, the right to (in cases where it doesn't directly undermine the company's ability to collect revenue) publish one's work with an open source license, and so on.

Anyone working in the tech industry could come up with their own list that would be different, but maybe there's enough overlap to make collective action workable.

Re: Will Alphabet’s Unionization Effort Spread to Other Big Tech Companies?

#42

This really isn't a union though. I mean even the union expert they interviewed for this article calls it "groundbreaking" in that it looks nothing like a union, since it has no economic goals or worker protections in mind and it's all about social issues. So it's a charity that you donate 1% of your salary to, with the goal of impacting Google's policies. That's interesting in its own right, and it's not out of the…

A union that focuses on social issues would still be a union. What makes this less like a traditional union I think is that it doesn't have the collective bargaining abilities that a normal union does (which would require the employees to vote to form a union).

Re: Will Alphabet’s Unionization Effort Spread to Other Big Tech Companies?

#44
post #36

Earlier 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.

Now it will be easier to do that. With unions you only need to bribe several people who are already political by nature(who else would want to run the union?).

I'd say dealing with an employer through HR without a union is as stupid as representing yourself because "lawyers are crooks" and then getting advice from the opponent's council.

My comments refer to documented evidence that HR will participate in criminal acts against you and any incentive they were given can be indistinguishable from their legal bonuses.

Re: Will Alphabet’s Unionization Effort Spread to Other Big Tech Companies?

#45
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now it will be easier to do that. With unions you only need to bribe several people who are already political by nature(who else would want to run the union?).

I'd say dealing with an employer through HR without a union is as stupid as representing yourself because "lawyers are crooks" and then getting advice from the opponent's council. My comments refer to documented evidence that HR will participate in criminal acts against you and any incentive they were given can be indistinguishable from their legal bonuses.

Ok that’s fair. I take back my comment. I’ve had that happen to me. I was sent offer from one of the major social media companies. I signed the offer. Rejected other offers. We chose the starting date etc and 3 days later they rescinded the offer. HR lied to me etc. Would have been easier to deal if there was union.

Re: Will Alphabet’s Unionization Effort Spread to Other Big Tech Companies?

#46

I 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…

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.

Im highly skeptical. Sundar Pichai reportedly earned 280 million in 2019, while google has 100+K employees with a median salary of 260K.[1] IF you took the entire CEO pay and split it up, it would be about a 1% pay bump. I dont think that would make a significant change in your googler's productivity.

https://insights.dice.com/2020/08/28/google-ceo-sundar-picha...

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