Google Had Secret Project to ‘Convince’ Employees ‘That Unions Suck’ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29876068 - Jan 2022 (385 comments)
Google hired union-busting consultants to convince employees “unions suck”
381–390 of 493 posts
Re: Google hired union-busting consultants to convince employees “unions suck”
#382Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am very pro-union, but I feel like a part of situation you are describing is because we needs businesses. We don’t necessarily need unions. Without unions, businesses would still be here. Without businesses, where would the unions be? Edit: I would like to reiterate that I am pro-union. I am just saying that unions are optional, but businesses (or the government as some have pointed out) are more necessary from the…
>We don’t necessarily need unions. I guess we dont necessarily need child labor laws or the weekend... Remember when the cacophony of calls to "End the Olympics Now" when the IOC was found to be grossly corrupt? No, me neither. The investor owned media called for reform. As it will for literally any other institution. Tennis is necessary.
A lot of people don't know just how corrupt the IOC is, I suspect if this was common knowledge there would be a hugely increased number of people calling for boycotts of the Olympics.
Re: Google hired union-busting consultants to convince employees “unions suck”
#383Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> Then why are you so upset that people don't want to create the "politically created structure" version of unions?
I'm not. I'm not a communist, and I don't think I asserted that I wanted a state-enforced union anywhere. Stronger protections for collective organization and bargaining would suffice in my book.
Edit: And, for what it's worth, you can't just create a union in the US. You need to be recognized by the NLRB for any collective action to be considered legitimate and protected under the law.
Re: Google hired union-busting consultants to convince employees “unions suck”
#384Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I say join the leadership and run the union the way you think it should be run This is like saying if you don't like the gangs in your area you should join them and try to reform them to do social work instead. Why isn't it valid to say you don't like unions and so don't want anything to do with them?
> Why isn't it valid to say you don't like unions and so don't want anything to do with them? Because you can't possibly have personally experienced every union, and the media isn't good at covering unions generally, so whatever bias you're (or anyone else making this statement is) presenting here feels unearned. This is similar to the bias of racism or homophobia, right? Like, "I saw a Black person steal something,…
Subtly juxtaposing not wanting to be a union to being racist or homophobic there - very low blow choosing the most incendiary things possible to suggest it's similar to.
And nobody has to earn the right to decline to be pulled into a political organisation they don't want anything to do with. If someone doesn't want to join your club the right response is to think about how to attract them, not to ask them to justify why they don't want to join. Otherwise do you join every single political party? They all claim to represent your interests!
I'm not realistically able to live my life without working with a corporation. I am demonstrably able to live my life without a union. So the bar for the union entering my life, adding that extra complexity, taking some of my money and borrowing the little power I have, is of course far higher.
It's right to be extremely skeptical of anyone who claims to want to represent your interests. Because usually they really want to use your power to represent their own interests.
Re: Google hired union-busting consultants to convince employees “unions suck”
#385"Union hired consultants to convince employees that union rock" - would that even be news?
Yeah; I saw that headline and saw it as non-news. Of course that the the specialty of the consultants.
Re: Google hired union-busting consultants to convince employees “unions suck”
#386Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, I work in a US union that I'm very happy with. I have personally seen action on the ground preventing unfair discipline by management, passing people up for raises over personal vendettas, baseline quality of life stuff. I suspect that most people in a union in the US are quite happy with it.
Right, lots of people are also happy with US healthcare, it is tied to their job (just like unions) and they didn't have any problems with it so to them it seems to work fine. For now. In most other countries unions aren't tied to your job, just like healthcare.
I'm not sure what you mean by unions being tied to your job. I certainly don't know the intricacies of every union out there, but the ones I'm aware of take care of their members when laid off. The union members in my family receive their healthcare and their pensions from the union, not the employer.
Re: Google hired union-busting consultants to convince employees “unions suck”
#387This whole debacle is sort of humorous. I fully support the rights of workers to unionize. The problem is in "Non Right to Work States" the unionized can clobber people that choose not to unionize and coerce them into participation. This is incredibly unethical, immoral, and unconstitutional and violates a person's right to self-determination and other human rights.
I'm no legal expert, but I'm pretty sure being forced to pay union dues is not a violation of any human rights.
Forcing a person to pay something against their will is definitively a human rights violation. That's forced labor.
Re: Google hired union-busting consultants to convince employees “unions suck”
#388Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We definitely talk about corporations in this way. All the time, in fact! But it is always about individual bad actors, not "corporations". When MacDonald's franchises get press showing they're stealing employees' wages, people blame MacDonald's, or the individual franchises. When some union leader embezzles money, people talk about "those unions".
Partly this is a consequence of the relatively small number of unions compared to corporations (which is by design). For example, if you work in the auto industry, there are a lot of different corporations you could work for but only one major union. It also means that you generally have more choice in your employer than your union representation.
>For example, if you work in the auto industry, there are a lot of different corporations you could work for
There really aren't. Perhaps if there were, union representation wouldnt be so desperately needed.
Re: Google hired union-busting consultants to convince employees “unions suck”
#389Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
That is a lie, labor movements shaped those long before there were a legal concept of unions. Unions != labor movements. Unions are often a result of labor movements, but they are not the same thing. For example, the 8-hour work week was demanded by labor movements who weren't organized as modern unions are organized. Edit: Labor movements often called themselves unions though, but that was just a group of people get…
I would say that an organized group of workers that calls itself a union and advocates on behalf of those workers for labor rights is a union, and I think most people and dictionaries would agree with me. If that's not what you meant by the word "union", I think the burden is on you to provide an alternate definition for this discussion.
For example: "an organization of workers formed to protect the rights and interests of its members" - https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/union
Re: Google hired union-busting consultants to convince employees “unions suck”
#390Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those were thanks to labor movements, not unions. They are not the same thing, labor movements happens thanks to Democracy. Democracy is crucial, I agree, it lets groups organize, protest and fix problems with how society works. But what we call unions today are not that. I'm all for labor engaging in politics, but they can do that without paying union dues for working at a company. The problem USA's workers face tod…
To claim that labor movements are somehow divorced from unions is ahistorical. > what we call unions today are not that. Unions don't involve organizing, protesting, or fixing problems? How do you think unions ever get a contract? Your comment makes frustratingly little sense to me.
Socialist movements which pushed for workers rights in Europe are more based on Marx than unions. Most modern worker parties has their roots there, but of course some of the more extreme socialist policies has been dropped in favor of capitalism.