So when a company tries to squeeze as much labor out of as little compensation as it can, it’s a shrewd business move… but when employees try to get the most compensation for the least labor, they’re lazy? Do you see the double standard here?
It's not a shrewd business move! Companies should pay well and treat their employees well, both because it's good for business and because it's the right thing to do. The adversarial model of employment where passionate employees fight against penny-pinching bosses is neither natural nor inevitable, and I think everyone who can avoid it should do so.
What if paying their employees who work in their warehouses as little as possible and tracking them to maximize productivity is actually what maximizes their profits?
What if they don't have a shortage of labor but do employ a large number of people in a town?
Should the company continue to provide awful working conditions?
What should motivate the company to treat their employees better, if not the employees getting together collectively to say "we're not going to take this anymore"?
Are the employees dependent on their plight becoming a national scandal that shames their employer? Or should they be able to cause the change they need themselves?
Respectfully, I just don't understand what your stream of angry questions is about. As I said, what should happen is that companies just provide good pay and working conditions in the first place. If workers are being mistreated, I have no objection to them collectively organizing against it.
And respectfully, despite the fact that Google is an objectively good place to work for many people (good pay, good opportunities for growth and advancement, etc), there is an abundance of evidence in recent years that for minorities, and for teams under specific leaders, Google has not been a good place to work.
Unions aren't just about wages and workloads, it's entirely possible that employees of tech companies (and shareholders of tech companies) that are unionized could be protected from the impact of shitty leaders through the power of collective bargaining and action that demands that abusive leaders and managers be held accountable.
Different commenter here: I have no objection to workers organizing.
I do think that unions are both the kind of mechanism that eliminates the worst workplace abuses ... but contributes to a workplace being policy driven and stifling.
There's already reasons why larger employers institute lots of policy and remove individual team, worker, and manager autonomy. But a counterparty demanding a lot of these to be committed to in contract forming its own parallel bureaucracy can multiply these effects.
I think one might reasonably say that a company like Google is already stifling with its bureaucracy. The problem is that the existing bureaucracy protects the company and managers and not the workers
Yah. I just have bad memories of not being able to move my monitor from one end of a desk to another without a worker in a union filing a grievance. Just because you have lots of bureaucracy doesn't mean you can't have a bunch more.
To be clear, that's about moving equipment, right?
(I've had that issue as well, where the people who managed the equipment were in a union)
Note: I think that's a misapplication of their grievances - it's one thing if your employer makes you move your office equipment to avoid hiring movers, a single person updating their desk or location should be an explicit exception
But I agree with you!! Unions can cause bad policy, and this is a reasonable example.
I think unions should be just about wages and workloads. It's not obvious to me that collective bargaining is a good way to handle more complex questions about how things ought to be, because rhetoric of solidarity and workers rights can be very easily subverted to serve the personal and ideological goals of union leaders.
When I negotiate a starting salary, I don't just stick to "salary and workload."
I keep everything on the table. If there are any benefits that they can provide me that are outside the scope of salary and workload, it's possible I'll be able to get something more valuable to me while being more favorable for my potential employer
Eg I might negotiate team size if I'm coming in to lead a team, I might negotiate benefits if I'm going to a sufficiently small company, I might negotiate how frequently I'm expected to travel for the company
Being able to negotiate quality of life is important because many employers offer _what looks like_ a generous package but then shove their employees into dangerous working conditions.
Remember that unions are always less powerful than your employer, and you can influence the union more easily than you can influence your employer (caveats on seniority in which case a union isn't for you), for better and worse
Why is it acceptable for the leaders of companies to subvert the company to serve the personal and ideological goals of the company leaders, but it's bad for the employees to do the same when they are often the ones who are called on to do the work for those goals, and are less likely to have the freedom to simply change jobs (especially during an economy melting pandemic).
I recognize that in general, the leaders of a company are the folks who are either selected by, or are the investors or founders, but at the end of the day, the impact that those investors or founders can have is strongly limited by the talent they can attract.
The entire tech industry is a shit show from a human rights perspective because of the ongoing imbalance between the folks who are making decisions, and the folks who are executing those decisions (see: the coinbase affair, the recent Uber ad spend revelations building off disclosures by other adtech researchers, the whole mess with Susan Fowler, the way Timnit Gebru was fired, and any number of issues that seem to come up on a weekly basis)
Unions can be problematic, but it is blatantly clear that tech investors and founders are basically the robber barons of our generation. In the pursuit of power and profit they have advanced us towards the type of cyberpunk dystopias most of the folks posting on this forum grew up reading, and most of the people posting here are the cogs that enable some of the atrocious privacy and human rights violations that are happening on the regular.
I am a strong believer in the role that unions play because I grew up in a community where unions literally saved lives because managers at a smelter wanted to maximize profits and workers didn't want to die from a massive cauldron of liquid copper or zinc exploding on them, or wanted effective safety gear when prying plates of zinc deposit from cathodes. It may not be quite the same degree of physical risk, but the folks who screen objectionable content on social media platforms certainly deserve protections. Gig economy workers deserve protections. Startup employees deserve protection. If government regulation isn't doing the job, then unions are the natural organizations to step in, as they have during some of the most prosperous times in history.
Virtually all of the concerns that folks have about shitty unions (and shitty leadership) can be solved through transparency, but it is incumbent on the leaders selected by constituents of those groups (union members and investors/founders/executives) to choose transparency.
My point is that your claim that "it's good for business" to treat employees so well they don't benefit from advocating for themselves is clearly false in one of the largest tech companies.
If you don't understand that, your view of corporations is rosy-eyed
I don't disagree. But it's kind of a moot point, because the adversarial model of employment is what many people have. Google in particular recently settled a lawsuit about an agreement they had with other tech giants to depress their employees' salaries: https://time.com/76655/google-apple-settle-wage-fixing-lawsu...
> The adversarial model of employment where passionate employees fight against penny-pinching bosses is neither natural nor inevitable
Very few people would continue working their jobs if they didn't need to to survive. The legal, cultural, and competitive structure of corporations demands paying employees as little as possible for as much work as possible. Barring serious cultural and political change, I don't see how this could result in anything but adversarial employment for almost everyone.
Treating employees well is bad for business outside certain bubbles, and "the right thing to do" doesn't factor in to these decisions.
Should they still endeavor to avoid this adversarial relationship if the alternative is to not be treated well, or to see the company they work for do immoral things.
If the alternative is to sit down and shut up, I think it's time to be adversarial.
EDIT: just saw your reply to another commenter and it seems you are pro-union if needed. It didn't come across that way to me when I read your initial comment.
It’s like politicians saying that $600 is significant. How would they know? Google unionizing is like politicians asking for free parking. They seem to just want to unionize as a way to force their beliefs on others.
That’s a very black-and-white way of looking at it, you do know that? How is unionizing and asking for reasonable demands “forcing your beliefs on others”
The company is not some helpless animal that just rolls over when a union appears. Especially if you regulate it well, like in Europe.
So when the mlb & mlbpa negotiated stricter covid protocols (which both allowed them to complete the season and improved player safety), you're saying that provided the players no benefits?
Unions are involved in more than pay negotiations. Sure I can work hard and earn a promotion and pay raise. Working hard cannot, for example, get me out of signing a non-compete agreement. Unionized employees could collectively bargain to ban non-compete agreements.
They also can, under certain circumstances, collectively demand that the company stops hiring anyone outside the union, and make other unsubstantiated demands such as mandatory membership fees, that benefit the union itself and not high-skilled individual employees who know how to beneficially sell their skills to the employer without third-parties involved. Also, contractors with individual LLCs usually don't sign non-compete agreements, so you don't need a union to be able to benefit from an expertise that is currently in high demand.
Yes that can occur. Lots of things can and do occur.
If we think unions are bad because they do bad things under certain circumstances then that should also apply to corporations, no? Worker exploitation, ignoring externalities and such?
So, we could get rid of corporations and unions? Or ... have both, since like any human institution, both are fallible.
> Yes that can occur. Lots of things can and do occur.
so, what's your solution to the problem of fallible unions?
> Or ... have both, since like any human institution, both are fallible.
You are yet to prove that unions solve anything in the setting that you outlined.
How about just having corporations and a small government that doesn't prevent new players entering the market by restrictive laws and quotas, in place of those that fall prey to corruption, fraud, and short-sighted destructive practices? There's more than two options to consider.
My point is simple. These are all human institutions. They're not "problems" with "solutions".
And, to answer your second question, I believe the scenario you idealize creates externalities like environmental pollutions which kills citizens, and creates conditions where companies exploit workers (consider what the food industry, meatpacking plants, etc, would look like without OHSA).
Precisely because you've added a redundant argument of fallible corporations to the thread that makes a case about corrupt unions that negatively impact law-abiding high-skilled professionals. This was the concern I initially raised.
> My point is simple. These are all human institutions. They're not "problems" with "solutions".
I think they are, unless these institutions have no purpose and do not set any goals.
> And, to answer your second question, I believe the scenario you idealize creates externalities like environmental pollutions which kills citizens
For that we've already got a court system that is capable, after a proper due process, of fining and criminally charging everyone who is proven to be guilty. I'm not advocating for dispersing them, I'm advocating for separating state affairs from economics, in the same manner and for the same reason why religion and church was separated from the state in the western world a few centuries ago.
> consider what the food industry, meatpacking plants, etc, would look like without OHSA
what responsibility do OSHA, FDA, SEC, etc inspectors and supervisors carry for regulatory failure? I know what happens to the producers and owners of those plants who fail to provide safe environment and products, or who commited fraud and got caught, I've never heard of government inspectors and commitee members going to jail for any of those cases that led to citizens' harm. At most, and in very rare cases with a lot of public pressure they get permanently banned from holding similar positions in the future.
> I know what happens to the producers and owners of those plants who fail to provide safe environment and products, or who commited fraud and got caught,
Um it is the government that catches them and punishes them?
I had a difficult time understanding your comment - could you try expressing it another way?
Yeah and network effects add value, coordination adds value, individual contributors can only do so much, a well oiled group of engineers has outsized production, and by bargaining collectively, leverage their productivity for better compensation.
Most are convinced they are “special” or otherwise immune from anything that would warrant union representation.
At least until they maybe sustain an injury that makes them less productive, or even simply grow old enough to face age discrimination.
It’s always the privileged and somewhat myopic that discount the value of collective action. We act together to lift each other up. To extract the best conditions for our work and the most support from our employer because the ‘free market’ has given us coordinated wage suppression among tech giants and a mountain of sexual and racial discrimination in the workplace.
Together we are stronger. America used to get this more in the early 1900s. Then the ruling class got better at controlling the narrative and crushing class consciousness.
To the kids reading this who think they don’t need a union - nearly every positive workplace condition you have is a result of collective action in the past.
So mistaken. My union has done so much for me and my fellow workers. Any time I have a meeting with management my union sits at my side. If I was wrongfully fired my union would fight it and even hire a lawyer. Why would I not want those protections? How is that not needed in a modern world? And finally what do you do for work that hour industry needs no union I am very curious?
