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Google hired union-busting consultants to convince employees “unions suck”

arstechnica.com

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Re: Google hired union-busting consultants to convince employees “unions suck”

#271

Post by minhazm »

kilroy123 wrote: post #216
nerbert wrote: post #22

Seeing comments from previous posts on this forum, I'd say they kind of succeeded.

Yup, I truly don't understand why people in tech are so against this. It will likely be a net positive for all tech folks. In Hollywood they have SAG (Screen Actors Guild) so a large union for high paying jobs isn't unheard of in America.

Most members of SAG are not highly paid. The median income for an actor is $43,760, and even the 75th percentile is only $60,760. The numbers for SAG represented actors is similar to these numbers. The thing is that not all tech employees are paid the same, nor should they be. Google and other similar companies often times pay multiple times the median tech salary.

[1] https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/actor/salary

Re: Google hired union-busting consultants to convince employees “unions suck”

#273

Post by joshuamorton »

notahacker wrote: post #118
dundarious wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Individuals, even stellar performing ones, also have significantly less bargaining power than the collective bargaining power of either a union or the employer. There are plenty of companies that know this, and it is the primary source of their antagonism towards unions.

This depends heavily on the industry. If you're a stellar technician specialised in fixing stuff in the only employer in the only industry in town, sure, the company knows you need that job even more than they need you and so you're poorly paid just like all the other technicians. If you're a stellar software developer and your bosses know it, not so much. You can, individually, take your 10x-more-productive skillset…

This is true whether not not the company you work at is unionized. Ultimately what you appear to be saying that the union is valuable since you'll get paid more until you leave.

Re: Google hired union-busting consultants to convince employees “unions suck”

#274

Post by rapind »

marricks wrote: post #147

Go figure the top comments on this thread echo how companies talk about unions. “Oh unions can be good but those Americans don’t know their downsides…” Or “Unions are great but it’s awful people can be forced to join them!” I’m just saying Google’s money was well spent.

Yeah when I clicked into the comments I was hoping for a discussion on the ethics of hiring a firm to trash talk unions (for or against). Instead it’s like the Google 50c party arguing the merits of unions.

I’m uncomfortable with companies constantly trying to influence their employees opinions. It’s marketing turned inwards. I’m not so naïve to be surprised, but I would never work at a business who employed tactics like this.

Re: Google hired union-busting consultants to convince employees “unions suck”

#275

Post by littlestymaar »

Jensson wrote: post #189
airza wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point which i don’t think was articulated well by the GP is that depsite these objections to corporate power nobody (ok,few people) in HN threads ever seems to endorse getting rid of corporations.

Corporations creates enormous amounts of value, as far as we know modern society cannot function without those structures. Unions however are optional, even if they help they still aren't nearly as important as corporations. Edit: For those who disagree, how many modern societies are there without corporations running a majority of the economy? Not a single one. So as far as we know it doesn't work. It can work in th…

> There are however many examples of modern economies with very little union influence, USA is an example, and USA is a better place to live than most countries.

The US is arguably pretty subpar in terms of quality of life compared to other developed nations (little vacation, really expensive school system, poor health system for the masses leading to a lower life expectancy, high criminality rate, etc.). Of course, not all of it is due to unions, but they are all the consequences of policies being “pro business” instead of “pro people”.

Re: Google hired union-busting consultants to convince employees “unions suck”

#276

Post by b8 »

Amazon hired Pinkerton to try and prevent unions.[1] There was an article about some of the people who organized the Google Android dev/DoD project walk out being targeted/fired from Google.[2] Maybe it'll take employees leaving these companies/not going to work there to get them to change. On teamblind people talk about bad it is to work at Amazon and so folks have been declining offers to work there etc.

1. https://www.npr.org/2020/11/30/940196997/amazon-reportedly-h...

2. https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/25/20983053/google-fires-fo...

Re: Google hired union-busting consultants to convince employees “unions suck”

#277

Post by [deleted] »

marricks wrote: post #147

Go figure the top comments on this thread echo how companies talk about unions. “Oh unions can be good but those Americans don’t know their downsides…” Or “Unions are great but it’s awful people can be forced to join them!” I’m just saying Google’s money was well spent.

[deleted]

Re: Google hired union-busting consultants to convince employees “unions suck”

#278

Post by burkaman »

Jensson wrote: post #189
airza wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point which i don’t think was articulated well by the GP is that depsite these objections to corporate power nobody (ok,few people) in HN threads ever seems to endorse getting rid of corporations.

Corporations creates enormous amounts of value, as far as we know modern society cannot function without those structures. Unions however are optional, even if they help they still aren't nearly as important as corporations. Edit: For those who disagree, how many modern societies are there without corporations running a majority of the economy? Not a single one. So as far as we know it doesn't work. It can work in th…

> There are however many examples of modern economies with very little union influence, USA is an example

No there aren't. USA is not an example, every significant aspect of modern employment in the US has been shaped by unions.

Re: Google hired union-busting consultants to convince employees “unions suck”

#279

Post by sgift »

VirusNewbie wrote: post #267

Unions are helpful when you have a homogeneous workforce all doing similar work with similar outputs. We have studies showing how different software engineering is, where some workers vastly outperform others, some workers are interchangeable, some are specialists, and some underperform. This is exactly the wrong type of work that benefits from collective bargaining and gatekeeping. Unions help subpar workers. They d…

> We have studies showing how different software engineering is, where some workers vastly outperform others, some workers are interchangeable, some are specialists, and some underperform.

Do we? Please, show these studies. Obviously, we can only accept peer-reviewed replicated studies. Not some study which was never replicated (there are a few) or even worse some blog post by someone stating they personally know 10x engineers or whatever.

Re: Google hired union-busting consultants to convince employees “unions suck”

#280

Post by defen »

0xbadc0de5 wrote: post #17

A related topic would be collective bargaining - which is often (but not always) associated with a unionized workplace. If you're a sub-standard employee, you win big through collective bargaining because pay bands will move toward the mean. If however, you are a high-performer, you will likely be under-compensated in a collective bargaining environment because your excess effort will be used to compensate those who…

First of all, collective bargaining doesn't just have to be about monetary compensation. It could be about working conditions - e.g. regulations about being on "pager duty", ridiculous overtime during "death marches" (think game industry), employee training, etc. Remember that the vast majority of software developers actually do not work at extremely high-paying FAANG jobs.

Furthermore, on the topic of compensation, Hollywood has unions and yet top actors still manage to make 10s of millions of dollars per movie.

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