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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”

#471

Post by erik_seaberg »

dls2016 wrote: post #467
erik_seaberg wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, for party A to penalize party B for doing business with party C is an attack on free market competition which should be banned.

Penalize? So it’s ok for a group of people to enter a contract to form a corporation (“penalizing” non-signatories by preventing them from benefiting from the profits of the corporation)… but it’s not ok for a group of people to enter a contract to collectively bargain with a corporation (“penalizing” non-signatories by preventing them from benefiting from the contract). This is absurd. You’re saying a corporation ca…

“I won’t work for less than $x” is fine.

“You can’t hire anyone else willing to work for less than $x” is extortionate. Competition is necessary for a market.

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

#472

Post by joshuamorton »

notahacker wrote: post #458
joshuamorton wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 inte…

> but a union rule forces them to pay everyone with that job description the same

Why would we advocate for this though? You keep making the claim that unions would advocate for more and more restrictive policies.

First it was guidelines, now it's strictly regimented salaries with no room for performance based pay at all.

You're generating objections because you keep changing your argument. Yes, paying everyone exactly the same is probably not a good idea. But no one is advocating for this, so who cares?

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

#473

Post by discardedrefuse »

VirusNewbie wrote: post #460
discardedrefuse wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 sala…

> If a young teacher in LA County is frustrated that their school is rewarding low performers with double their salary simply because of time

This is not a valid argument. The so-called "low performers" (good luck fairly defining that!) are not getting rewarded. They did their job and got paid exactly as expected. That's not a reward.

If a young teacher with no kids decides to work an extra 4 hours a week to do some bullshit laptop inventory project for administration...that's on them. She should get compensated as hourly, but schools just don't have budgets for these kinds of endless tasks. When it comes time for evaluations though, this young teacher will be evaluated as "high performer" and the older teacher who has 3 kids waiting at home and has to leave on time everyday will be evaluated as a "low performer".

> 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?

I'm sorry, but no one goes into teaching without knowing what the meager pay structure is like. In my 23 years of working for a top 5 largest school district I've never heard a teacher complain about another teacher's base salary. Teachers go into teaching for the long haul.

> That's why US tech salaries are so low these days right?

This has nothing to do with salary height. It has to do with employees' ability to bargain for fair wages AND fair working conditions. Right now there are exploited workers in the tech industry (looking at you, game dev) that are in dire need of exactly the kind of help labor unions can offer.

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

#474

Post by IncRnd »

throwawaylinux wrote: post #468
IncRnd wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A corporation in the US is a legal fiction that creates a pseudo-person distinct from the owners, providing privileges to operate and legal protections for the owners. A corporation does not require many employees, which you seem to imply are required. The owners are the main component of a corporation not the employees.

By the way corporate personhood is not a legal fiction as in the term of art, it's a legal principle. More like a fact of law than a fiction. I know in context you don't intend that but just a pejorative based around the fact corporations are a legal structure. Although I'm always puzzled by what the actual problem with this is. And I'll go on a tangent from the topic. The legal system is fictional in basically the s…

I appreciate your comment, but I'm not sure what your point is. Corporate personhood is literally a legal fiction due to the granting of personhood in order to fall under the umbrella of existing law. This personhood is accepted as true, even though it is objectively untrue; this is a textbook example of a legal fiction.

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

#475

Post by __float »

tablespoon wrote: post #441
__float wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/12/17/22841166/google-californ... > According to a diversity report Google released earlier this year, Black women make up around 1.8 percent of its workforce and departed the company at a higher than normal rate. In the report, the company said it had “room for improvement” when it came to keeping underrepresented talent. How much evidence are you going to demand before considering that…

> How much evidence are you going to demand before considering that perhaps they actually aren't treated fairly, by any reasonable definition of the word? You're largely refusing to engage with the actual topic at hand and instead squabbling over "shibboleths". Do you have an preferred way to discuss this, because I do think there's a legitimate concern here. What are you talking about? The "actual topic at hand" is…

I'm aware the topic at hand is unionization. You turned it into something about shibboleths and polarization - while BIPOC is regularly used in mass media - and implied I'm using scare quotes because I don't know what it means.

I don't think you're having this discussion with anything near a neutral viewpoint, and I don't really want to engage further. You've said in the past you're not a Trumper, but you definitely appear to lean quite far right.

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

#476

Post by lovich »

padastra wrote: post #452
lovich wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 collus…

The amount invested in the company is provided by each separate investor, but those investors do not then negotiate separate deals with each worker. The investors “collude” together to creat the business and have greater negotiating power than they would on their own.

A union is merely the labor version of joining together to increase leverage and is not any special level of collusion greater than the investors is what I am getting at

And yes saying the workers are colluding because they are working on the same car is what’s happening if you are going to call banding together to negotiate rates is colluding. There is non union labor and other unions

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

#477

Post by raxxorrax »

lamontcg wrote: post #459
tnel77 wrote: post #129

Earlier 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 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.

I think that has much more to do with legislation in the US (not from there). Unions make sense for professions with a large amount of workers with very similar conditions. This is what brings members together and especially low wage workers have not much room to bargain. Tech paints a completely different picture.

Support and call center staff? Certainly can use a union. Developers? Far too diverse conditions.

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

#478

Post by raxxorrax »

aylmao wrote: post #448
ambrozk wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This conversation makes me crazy. I was at Google when its employee union, a.k.a. "AWU", was trying to get off the ground. I formed my opinion of it completely independent of company propaganda. AWU is a political advocacy organization, not a traditional union. AWU's mission statement is explicitly and emphatically not to further my or other full-time employee's interests. Rather, it is organized primarily as a vehic…

> Almost none of AWU's projects have focused on Googlers' work conditions or pay. I'd assume this is why they've been allowed to exist. In fact, unfortunately, this sounds like it could be working well for Google. If this organization is calling itself a "union" without doing actual union work or representing employees, it can help create an apathetic environment towards unions at the company. It also sounds like thi…

They are the perfect union busters, not a sensible union. At least that is what it looks like from outside.

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

#479

Post by throwawaylinux »

IncRnd wrote: post #474
throwawaylinux wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By the way corporate personhood is not a legal fiction as in the term of art, it's a legal principle. More like a fact of law than a fiction. I know in context you don't intend that but just a pejorative based around the fact corporations are a legal structure. Although I'm always puzzled by what the actual problem with this is. And I'll go on a tangent from the topic. The legal system is fictional in basically the s…

I appreciate your comment, but I'm not sure what your point is. Corporate personhood is literally a legal fiction due to the granting of personhood in order to fall under the umbrella of existing law. This personhood is accepted as true, even though it is objectively untrue; this is a textbook example of a legal fiction.

Maybe I have the wrong understanding. I thought the legal concept of a "person" can be said to be a legal fiction https://www.jstor.org/stable/1342652, but a corporation is not. It's a real thing that is created and exists according to corporate law. That might happen to use legal fictions as part of its definition, but the corporation is not a legal fiction.

But even if I was right there, I would agree I was trying to be overly pedantic and ended up distracting from the point I was trying to make.

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

#480

Post by notahacker »

joshuamorton wrote: post #472
notahacker wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 inte…

> but a union rule forces them to pay everyone with that job description the same Why would we advocate for this though? You keep making the claim that unions would advocate for more and more restrictive policies. First it was guidelines, now it's strictly regimented salaries with no room for performance based pay at all. You're generating objections because you keep changing your argument. Yes, paying everyone exact…

I mean, literally the entire point of collective bargaining arrangements is that instead of negotiating salaries individually, the firm agrees to pay everyone a wage schedule agreed with the union. Hence the whole subthread starting with another poster talking about collectively negotiated pay bands for all staff having less scope for large pay rises than a firm's discretionary policy, as the union also has to look after the interests of lower performing workers who want to be paid the same or nearly the same as their colleagues. A collective bargaining agreement is by definition a more restrictive wage policy than an individually negotiated one.

It is not me "changing my argument" that you have spent several posts sniping at my arguments without apparently having the slightest idea what collective bargaining is.

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