Unions don't suck, Google sucks.
Police unions have made it very difficult to fire bad cops.
Google hired union-busting consultants to convince employees “unions suck”
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Re: Google hired union-busting consultants to convince employees “unions suck”
#42Learn from South Korea: all top tech companies are unionized. #1 search engine (Naver), #1 messenger (Kakao), #1 game company (Nexon), etc.
Not sure what the lesson is?
South Korea is a very different country. Their laws and constitution were written by New Deal Democrats at a time when there was almost no existing industry and no opposition from the likes of Robert Taft and Henry Ford. The situation is very different in 21st century America.
Unions can be a productive part of an industrial system, but just throwing up a union is not really going to solve things that simply.
Re: Google hired union-busting consultants to convince employees “unions suck”
#43Having 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…
American Unions: fat cats (presidents), dues, fancy dinners with the execs, mafia ties, corruption, pay offs, forced politics, exclusion of work based on joining, lowering of salary, years of law suites, subcontractors (non union) to actually do the work, brain drains, unmotivated work forces, forced protesting, layoffs, forced clicks, voting, forced discrimination. "We can't use her she is non-union". "Sure he touched her, but he is union, we need to consult the union first!" Yuck. My wife dealt with the Macys mafia (union) - what a gross group of fat cats in fancy cars. She couldn't even pay her bills - but needed to pay that union due (post tax of course). All her dues were made in person - they only accepted cash. She was laid off along with a few hundred others - after the union and execs had a fancy dinner - no severance obviously. The union pigs are still doing well getting those dues! Enjoy google!
PS! If you work at google, don't pay the dues: ever. Give the money to domestic violence shelters instead. Put that receipt into your union due. Fuck unions.
Re: Google hired union-busting consultants to convince employees “unions suck”
#44Having 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 feels... Unlikely to be a thing of unions. Seems just as likely, if you saw promotions that were unwarranted, that there was incentive for management to get more promotions. Indeed, it is often to grade managers on how many promotions they have overseen. Not shocking that measuring that would cause them to happen unwarranted sometime. Which is just too say that a healthy organization is hard. There are no panace…
>This feels... Unlikely to be a thing of unions.
Why? I likewise have mixed feelings about unions, but I have repeatedly noticed this pattern in countries with strong (typically: constitutionally-protected) unions.
Re: Google hired union-busting consultants to convince employees “unions suck”
#45Unions do suck, so that shouldn't be too hard of a job.
Found the consultant
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Re: Google hired union-busting consultants to convince employees “unions suck”
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do we learn from that?
That unions work in tech companies. Naver/Kakao/Nexon almost simultaneously unionized in 2018, and now some time has passed it is possible to evaluate. It worked great so far.
By what metrics has this worked great? Genuinely curious as I hadn’t heard this before.
Re: Google hired union-busting consultants to convince employees “unions suck”
#47Having 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…
With regard to the lazy worker, honestly, who cares? You still get paid. The company isn't going under. No doubt like most situations of abuse, this is a minority case because in general people like being productive.
Re: Google hired union-busting consultants to convince employees “unions suck”
#48Having 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 feels... Unlikely to be a thing of unions. Seems just as likely, if you saw promotions that were unwarranted, that there was incentive for management to get more promotions. Indeed, it is often to grade managers on how many promotions they have overseen. Not shocking that measuring that would cause them to happen unwarranted sometime. Which is just too say that a healthy organization is hard. There are no panace…
If you don't fire bad employees and just shift them around, it's more likely they will find a manager that promotes them, is it not?
Unions sound to me like just another layer of bureaucracy, with its own mind and interests. Any extra bureaucracy increases corruption and inefficiencies.
Re: Google hired union-busting consultants to convince employees “unions suck”
#49Re: Google hired union-busting consultants to convince employees “unions suck”
#50A 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…
This line of thought might be something that makes employees think that “union sucks”. At a place like Google I assume that everybody thinks they are high-performers and in most cases they are since they got into google. So the majority will always think that they will be “under compensated” and never attempt to unionize. What I want to know is, is it really just another way to convince employees against unions ?