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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”

#451

Post by cycomanic »

Jensson wrote: post #398
d4mi3n wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Every single developed nation" is a very broad generalization that I'd be skeptical of being true. I'd also dispute that all countries are pro-corperation and instead state that most countries are pro-economy. Corporations are just a vehicle for organizing work and profit around a venture. There are many other ways to organize work that have nothing to do with corporations or unions. Consider partnerships, sole prop…

> Consider partnerships, sole proprietorships, cottage industries, co-ops, and more specific arrangements within those vehicles like profit sharing, limited partnerships, and employee ownership (not to be confused with stocks/options, though they are similar in concept). None of those have proven to work at scale though. So as far as we know corporations is how you have to do it. You can believe that there are other…

It's worth pointing out that in many countries small companies under governance models as the ones listed make up a large portion (or even the majority) of the overall GDP. For example in Germany the "Mittelstand" employ 63.7% of all employ and contribute 54,4% of the total economic activity (sorry not sure how that is defined exactly) [1]. So saying they don't work at scale is not quite correct I'd argue, things are definitely more complicated.

[0] https://www.mittelstandsbund.de/themen/internationalisierung...

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

#452

Post by padastra »

lovich wrote: post #443
padastra wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we're roughly in agreement. Businesses are composed of the capital providers, the organizers (who decide how to deploy the capital), and the workers. Capital providers colluding to set a loan rate is illegal. We shouldn't allow them to collude legally; they are a small number of experienced actors operating with information asymmetry already. Organizers (i.e. senior management) colluding is--I don't know the…

The capital tied up in any given business is colluding by definition because it moves in lock step. You don’t have multiple managers in a single org making conflicting business deals or bids with workers(for the most part, I’ve heard of a few companies organized this way). Hell even having multiple investors in a single company is collusion of capital owners when the company makes any sort of business deal. Unions ar…

Strongly disagree.

Whether you give me capital at a 1% interest rate of a 50% interest rate; whether you buy 1% of my company for $1,000 or 1% of my company for $100,000,000; are independently determined by each provider of capital. Collusion would be all banks working together to only provide me a loan for 30% interest even if it's obvious I can pay it back.

The use of capital is irrelevant to the question of collusion for providing capital. That's like saying all the workers on a factory line are inherently already colluding because they work towards producing the same car.

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

#453

Post by aylmao »

Aunche wrote: post #303
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.

So what exactly did Google spend their money on? What exactly did these "union-busting" consultants do? Like the other article posted yesterday, this one is remarkably lacking of details. If the pro-union side is pulling out their pitchforks despite a lack of substantive allegations, then why wouldn't the anti-union side do the same?

> So what exactly did Google spend their money on? What exactly did these "union-busting" consultants do?

I think the sentiment here is that hiring "union-busting" consultants clearly implies strong anti-union sentiment by management and an equally strong desire to quell rising union sentiment within the company.

Companies, especially big tech companies, like to seem friendly to employees and make them feel like they're in charge, and the company is "run by them". They like to keep a facade of being "benevolent" dictators ultimately motivated by being the best they can for users.

In reality, they're corporations, and they'll do what's best for their bottom-line, wether that aligns with their employees' and users' interests interests or not.

In this case, that involved retaliating against employees involved with the Google Walkout, which on top of challenging this benevolent image, is illegal. Of course, Google won't admit it was retaliation. They want to seem unbothered by the fact there's union sentiment within its ranks, and will tolerate the Alphabet Workers Union's existence. Hiring a union-busting consultancy clearly conveys this is not the case.

There's a lot of reason to criticize union-busting in general too; it usually employs misinformation and scare tactics; this has happened at Amazon, for example [1]. Regardless of wether this has been the case at Google, it's clear they're not as indifferent to the organization of their workers as they claim they are.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gk8dUXRpoy8&feature=emb_titl...

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

#454

Post by agentdrtran »

5560675260 wrote: post #413
agentdrtran wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unions aren't just for compensation - it's about having a say in your work.

But you, the worker, will not have more say in your work than you do now, probably less. Union will have. It's great if your views will align with union's views, but that's far from guaranteed.

You don't get exactly what you want no, but you have a vote — which is a lot more than you have now.

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

#455

Post by paisawalla »

wyre wrote: post #437
paisawalla wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I said, this response is not for you, but for someone who grapples with these issues seriously. >Looks like one small step to racism to me. This word is meaningless when uttered by true believers like you. In my life I've been called all sorts of racially-based slurs, or worse. I've earned the right to refuse the orthodoxy of arrogant white liberals, and follow my own conscience on this topic.

On what basis have you “earned the right to refuse the orthodoxy of arrogant white liberals?” Genuinely intrigued. Cause to me that sounds like ur trying to say you’ve earned the right to be a bigot. Bigotry isn’t a right to earn but a choice to make.

> arrogant

And how do you think you come off to me?

"You can't have an opinion about race matters that is different from the official, scientifically correct view as descended from, and endorsed by, all the big brain people and institutions with whom I already agree. We already know the permanent and unchanging answer for all of history, so why would you think your own experience would entitle you to an opinion on such an important question?"

I truly could not have caricatured your position worse than you've expressed it. Are you genuinely unfamiliar with the fact that this flavor of academic anti-racism is not incontrovertible, but deeply disputed by people across the spectrum?

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

#456

Post by mendigou »

Jensson wrote: post #411
mendigou wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not from the US so I'm probably misunderstanding this whole conversation. What's the difference between "a group of people getting together to protest and demand rights" and a union apart from the union being a legal entity? What you wrote in your edit is what a Union means in Europe, it's just formalized as an entity.

Would you say that a labor party is a union? I wouldn't. A labor party is a labor movement though. If you call labor parties unions and say we should be thankful to them, then I agree, but that is totally different from workplace unions.

I guess my question is: how are those two different?

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

#457

Post by lamontcg »

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…

The purpose of Unions is a check on corporate and government power.

Just like the US has three branches of government there are really four fundamental organizations in society: government, corporations, religion and unions.

They work best by keeping each other in check. Right now unions have been decimated and corporations have bought out the government and religion.

Unions aren't optional, we're just slowly and corrosively finding out why, despite their flaws, they need to exist (and they don't work if people aren't involved in them).

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

#458

Post by notahacker »

joshuamorton wrote: post #433
notahacker wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies have guidelines. Wage bargaining arrangements negotiated between companies and unions have binding guarantees. One is obviously easier for a company to ignore if it's in their interests to incentivise a staff member than another. Also, company wage setting guidelines are more likely to prioritise "retain and reward the staff we think are best" in the first place. (Obviously unions prioritising things like r…

> unions can take credit for but accept no blame for any of the changes they negotiate whilst formalising them. Good thing no one said that then! > One is obviously easier for a company to ignore if it's in their interests to incentivise a staff member than another. But in this situation, the offer you're getting is going to be no better than what the other company offers, so if your current company can't match, you…

> But in this situation, the offer you're getting is going to be no better than what the other company offers, so if your current company can't match, you don't lose anything

What a strange comment?! Perceived high achievers and high potential talents receive well above company average salaries or salary rises all the time in competitive industries like software, without waiting to see whether that person starts interviewing at other companies and what that offer is! They can't receive well above company average pay offers if the company's collective bargaining arrangement doesn't allow them to offer anything other than the standard union-agreed pay rate even the below average workers get. So they earn less.

If a company is willing to pay a person more than they're willing to pay their average and below average staff, but a union rule forces them to pay everyone with that job description the same, that person is obviously earning less money, not more money. I'm genuinely amazed a concept so simple can generate so many objections

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

#459

Post by lamontcg »

tnel77 wrote: post #129
UncleMeat wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

But we do.

I'd argue that if you hop into other threads about how everyone is worried about financial/societal collapse in the US that it is the end result of decimating unions in the 80s.

You just don't notice right away that you need unions when you lose them, corrosively much later you notice that society has gone off the rails.

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

#460

Post by VirusNewbie »

discardedrefuse wrote: post #420
VirusNewbie wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Teachers unions actively fight against performance metrics and instead focus on seniority as the main way to get pay increases. People who have worked and doing the same job for 30 years are payed more than twice as much as newcomers to the field. The existence of a teacher's union is actively harmful to new teachers.

> Teachers unions actively fight against performance metrics and instead focus on seniority as the main way to get pay increases. Unions may have fought against it, but many have not succeeded. Those teachers now get paid on performance metrics. Those metrics punish teachers at schools in low income neighborhoods; leaving those schools devoid of good teachers. Those metrics punish teachers working with at-risk kids.…

    >To suggest this is punishing new teachers is ridiculous. If you don't like the salary schedule, you shouldn't have taken the job
Err, you have this backwards. If I don't like my company's stock vesting schedule, I can choose to go get a new job down the street with a completely different comp structure.

If a young teacher in LA County is frustrated that their school is rewarding low performers with double their salary simply because of time, your suggestion is they "shouldn't have taken the job"? Despite the fact that the Union has negotiated with the entire school district, and they have no choice but to leave the county at the very least if they want something different?

You see how the Union is actively harming the younger teachers by taking away their choices, right?

    >But without a union, "Here's what I'll pay you.
That's why US tech salaries are so low these days right?
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