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

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351–360 of 493 posts

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

#351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

"No results found for LGBTQQ2SPIA+"

I'm sorry, I got it wrong again, it's LGBTQQIP2SAA

https://oie.duke.edu/knowledge-base/glossary/lgbtqqip2saa

As you well know, the ordering and meaning of these last letters changes. It can't be refuted that the acronym continues to accumulate identities.

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

#352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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,…

I didn't argue otherwise. USA is however not subpar compared to any country hostile to corporations, which is the important part. A country being hostile to unions isn't nearly as bad as a country being hostile to corporations.

> USA is however not subpar compared to any country hostile to corporations

There are too little countries hostile to corporations remaining today to compare, but I'd still argue that today's US has subpar QoL compared to France in the 80s which was arguably on the anti-corporation side (with price control and a state-owned monopoly for most economic activities – or, when it wasn't a monopoly, the biggest actor was state-owned)

Anyway, I'm not arguing that we should get rid of corporations, but we should dramatically reduce their power and influence on the economy, which is now at a level far above what's desirable.

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

#353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What, pray tell, are those corporations made of?

Corporations are a structure of workers. Both the structure and the workers are essential. Workers without structure doesn't produce much value leading to a poor society. Politically created structure leads to bad outcomes so also leads to a poor society. Capitalist created structure creates a lot of value and leads to rich societies. There might be alternatives, but so far capitalism is the only known way to create…

It is also ownership of said structure. If you have a thousand workers. One person can own the output of those workers. Those workers can produce 10 billion dollars in revenue and the owner gets owns all the profit and the workers pocket 1 billion in aggregate.

It's fair trade in the beginning because of high risk during the founding of the company but the tradeoff becomes less fair as the risk lowers and the company becomes more mature.

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

#354
What's wrong with letting employees to hear both sides of the argument, from professionals? Both unions and "consultants" are resourceful organizations. Perhaps they can keep the good and take out the bad practices in their unionization, if they ever choose to.

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

#355

Having worked for both union and non-union employers - it's a mixed bag. Unions have advantages and disadvantages. They are great for worker representation - but that's a double-edged sword. Ideally, unions protects worker's interests. In practice, they often lead to abuse, stagnation and corruption. I've personally witnessed union employees who contributed nothing for years, get perpetually shifted from team to team…

These can all be true things. But could you imagine if we spoke about corporations in this manner? "I've worked for corporations and they are a mixed bag. In practice, they often abuse their employees. I've personally witnessed bosses who contributed nothing for years and just played politics." For some reason we hold unions to an incredibly high standard of "no problems, ever" but this is never used to discourage al…

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

#356
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone could get a better comp and work conditions but noo, that one lazy guy won't be fired, we can't have that!

If the company's in a competitive market, it's unlikely that there's a huge pot of gold somewhere to hand to employees in operations. The whole value-add for unions lately has been pitched as better employee representation in decision making. I'm all for that - if that stops management from colluding with some hedge fund to engineer an awful reverse-buyback-privitazation scheme to load the company with unservicable d…

> If the company's in a competitive market

This typically translates to "the company's successfully lobbied for trade agreements that allow us to force our domestic labor to compete against impoverished foreign workers in a developing nation with nonexistent environmental and safety standards," which is a race to the bottom for everyone but aristocrats.

I think the problem in the US is that the country is deeply right-wing when it comes to labor policy. The union/management relationship in the US is designed to be adversarial. In Germany, it's legally mandated for unions to be represented at the board level, and that kind of cooperative relationship's results speak for themselves. Here, that idea would be considered tantamount to bolshevism.

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

#357

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…

Standard joke: "all our employees are above average". In the context of collective bargaining, it is not only possible but common: any halfway decent IT firm has highly qualified workers paid and ranked well above a "normal" worker sharing the same national contract.

Everybody earns much more than minimum wage, and someone (hopefully the high performers, but don't count on it) even more than that. Pushing low compensations against minimum wage limits is simply not plausible, and paying high performers less than market value is a recipe for talent drain.

Collective bargaining is important for working hours, safety, vacation, healthcare, and other important worker rights.

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

#358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Corporations are a structure of workers. Both the structure and the workers are essential. Workers without structure doesn't produce much value leading to a poor society. Politically created structure leads to bad outcomes so also leads to a poor society. Capitalist created structure creates a lot of value and leads to rich societies. There might be alternatives, but so far capitalism is the only known way to create…

I don't understand the argument in this response: unions exist within capitalist systems, and are an integral part of our capitalist system. Our concept of a "union" does not apply to non-capitalist systems. Extolling the virtues of capitalism is, at the absolute best, completely orthogonal to the legitimacy and value of unionization. Likewise, unions aren't "politically created structure": they're not created in a t…

> Likewise, unions aren't "politically created structure": they're not created in a top-down manner by the state.

Then why are you so upset that people don't want to create the "politically created structure" version of unions? Why not just organize as workers and call yourself a union? Can even create a workers party, like they have in basically every other single other developed country, and then that workers party can stand up for your rights. But that workers party isn't a union. Basically every single developed country except USA has labor parties. Democrats aren't a labor party, they are a party of mostly lawyers.

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

#359

Having worked for both union and non-union employers - it's a mixed bag. Unions have advantages and disadvantages. They are great for worker representation - but that's a double-edged sword. Ideally, unions protects worker's interests. In practice, they often lead to abuse, stagnation and corruption. I've personally witnessed union employees who contributed nothing for years, get perpetually shifted from team to team…

This may be true for some crappier unions but also think about this: If a small percentage of the union members are exploiting the system and some employees of the union are benefiting more than they should who is actually losing money over this? Is it the others in the union? Or is it the employer?

I would rather have a system where a small percentage of the workers can be shitheads and lose their giant mega corporation employer money than a system where the company can just exploit ALL of its workers in any way it wants to.

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

#360
The US once had a rich history of unions for 100's of years since the 17th century, and plenty of wars over them where the US government literally attacked union workers in wars like Battle of Blair Mountain.

The US seems to have almost wiped out this history and few people know who died for these movements and few people realize we have had bloody battles, I never really learned it in school but it's pretty darn American to have unions and die for your rights.

Sure there is corruption but literally every system does, that doesn't make people stop using it. If we had better union power we would not see the poor treatment of Amazon workers, or game testers, or retail works. Heck, one day we may make a requirement to have a vacation day, imagine how crazy that would be if vacation time was written into a work law! Almost imagine that Russia, South Africa and many other countries have literally better labor laws then America not to mention the EU. I was quite shocked how bad our labor laws were when I looked into it further because I assumed a lot, makes it hard to be human in the US. At will employee with literally no time off is perfectly legal here, but I hope one day paid vacations (even just a few days) are requirement for all full time employees at least.

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