Earlier quoted context omitted.
From my experience, I find this is true only in the very core of core tech hubs that you can count on one hand. And also with a bias towards finance, adtech, crypto, fintech and other industries that rely on extracting wealth than creating it. Core R&D, hardware, B2B services, networking companies, etc. and then also the factor of geographic places that aren't considered "sexy" in the HN crowd revert to the mean for…
Before FAANG was really a thing, I worked in/with/around blue collar folks. Ron Paul types were not that uncommon. Vocal pro-union folks who voted for Reagan and embraced Milton Friedman even after their jobs got shipped somewhere else. As their benefits and health collapsed as they aged, any change to healthcare became Hillarycare and the root of communism. At universities though, the libertarians had actually read…
Google Had Secret Project to ‘Convince’ Employees ‘That Unions Suck’
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Re: Google Had Secret Project to ‘Convince’ Employees ‘That Unions Suck’
#232Yet once time for the team to celebrate comes, the door gets shut on them, as they are contingent workers. Showing them the same rewards would possibly make them seem like real employees worthy of praise. Hence, they sit alone in their empty open office, sometimes crying, hearing the cheers of their team in the next office as they slice that cake or watching them leave the office building to go to a wonderful day in the golden gate park.
Don't even get me started on having to hear the people doing identical work to them talk about buying homes in SF etc.
If these people banned together, they might gain some power.
Re: Google Had Secret Project to ‘Convince’ Employees ‘That Unions Suck’
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google is a huge, public company. Any ideals that survived going public will slowly be ground out by repeated exposure to management consultants from McKinsey and the hordes of MBAs attracted to the smell of ibanker excitement. You can't go public, or become part of a public firm, and not become more like the rest of the big players.
The rampant cynicism regarding corporations is increasingly unhelpful. We’ve had forty years of hands off antitrust regulation and enforcement. We’ve had a bifurcating justice system that doesn’t hold white collar criminals accountable. It hasn’t always been this way and doesn’t have to stay this way. For those interested in the challenges we’re facing with monopolies and individuals trying to effect change, I recomm…
The third stage seems to be surprisingly rare, as most people either get stuck in stage 1, existing in a kind of shared delusion that all things are fine, despite the evidence that some aren't, or in stage 2, that all things are falling apart, despite evidence that some aren't.
Stage 3 reconciles the previous stages, first by zooming out and seeing how transient and precious life is, civilization is, and how in this perspective, power is itself rather silly. There have been great kingdoms, entire societies, that have arisen and died, even in our brief recorded history. Lowering the stakes like this lets us relax and remember: nothing is forever. No law lasts forever, almost everything we try is an experiment, and it may fail. Armed with a profound knowledge of the absurdity of our large-scale situation, now we can zoom in and do our judging, knowing properly how ignorant we are, how ignorant the actors are, the abuser and victim alike. And we can begin to see opportunities for change. Small scale stuff, firing that abusive person, or even lightweight activism where you change something about your behavior to change things, if only a little. You are not going to have the grand-slam insight that fixes everything, or anything. Such an insight doesn't exist - or maybe it can, but it cannot be transmitted without great care, which presupposes a society that supports transmitting delicate ideas, which is already a society that is functioning pretty well.
Essentially your comment is stage 3, because you remind the reader of the essential mutability of the system, and zoom out and show how its changed, and that there is every possibility of changing back to an earlier state where antitrust was actively enforced (read: successful antitrust enforcement gave political juice). If I could wish a thing into existence, it would be to engender a feeling of lightness to political discussion that comes from realizing this is all an experiment, nothing is written in stone, and we should feel free to try new things, knowing that they might not work, that real lives will be harmed when those experiments fail, but we also get good data about it for future decisions, so it comes out in the wash.
Re: Google Had Secret Project to ‘Convince’ Employees ‘That Unions Suck’
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
The counterbalancing forces google actively colludes with you mean?
Is Google colluding with every employer and entrepreneur in the country?
That is absolutely going to have a massive systematic effect on compensation.
Re: Google Had Secret Project to ‘Convince’ Employees ‘That Unions Suck’
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
Shh, every time those of us who have been in actual unions and actually had terrible experiences voice our opinions we get downvoted into oblivion. It's not worth it, m8.
So the current arrangement of service workers being paid slave wages and given disgusting conditions is working fine?
Example better solution: UBI, so that those workers can tell the boss where to stick it without starving to death, and the company then has to offer better working conditions in order to convince anyone to show up.
Re: Google Had Secret Project to ‘Convince’ Employees ‘That Unions Suck’
#236A lot of people seem confused why a lot of tech people aren't pushing for unions. For me it's simple: Tech has brought me from near poverty to pretty darn wealthy. Why mess with that? Could a union help increase wages even more? Maybe. Are we being paid too little compared to our output? Maybe. But at the same time I'm being paid more than I could have possibly imagined before I entered the field.
Indeed. Also everyone seems to forget that the history of unions in the US is inseparable from mafia racketeering. To the point that the federal government had to break some of the power of unions in order to break up the effectiveness of mafia racketeering.
This is disingenuous, because the sort of unions that were involved with racketeering were manufacturing unions, specifically the Teamsters, and overlapping a period during the late 19th century where corporations often employed actual violence (with paid armed security squads) against workers who attempted to organize.
Both were wrong to engage in criminal behavior, but the incentives to do so were pretty strong. Furthermore, because the workers for these industries were drawn from largely impoverished communities where low-level organized rackets were practically a necessity for survival, it's not at all surprising that the relationships and methods continued into the workplace.
There is, however, no history of mafia racketeering with teachers or nurses unions, and regardless of one's opinion about tech worker unions, there is no reason to think that they would have any affinity for organized crime outfits.
Re: Google Had Secret Project to ‘Convince’ Employees ‘That Unions Suck’
#237What really needs to happen is the unionization of the second class they employ. These people do literally the same jobs as the people they used to sit next to. Sit through the same "OMG aren't we so great at changing the world!" team meetings, put in the same insane hours (my partner was limited to 40 hours a week, yet they are all working over time to keep up appearances and hope they get actually hired full time).…
Does this refer to contractors?
Re: Google Had Secret Project to ‘Convince’ Employees ‘That Unions Suck’
#238Re: Google Had Secret Project to ‘Convince’ Employees ‘That Unions Suck’
#239What really needs to happen is the unionization of the second class they employ. These people do literally the same jobs as the people they used to sit next to. Sit through the same "OMG aren't we so great at changing the world!" team meetings, put in the same insane hours (my partner was limited to 40 hours a week, yet they are all working over time to keep up appearances and hope they get actually hired full time).…