10 ms·

A new kind of labor movement in Silicon Valley?

57 points by RobertSmith 8y ago

tboyd47 8y ago
You really don't need to bring in politics to justify a programmer's union, but if that's the trigger that causes workers to organize, so be it. Just off the top of my head, I can think of a number of entirely non-political ways a union could benefit tech workers: 1) Personalized ergonomic workspaces 2) Legal counsel on basic tech-related issues (patent law, non-compete clauses, sexual harassment, discrimination, etc.) 3) Training and career development 4) Representation to recruiters 5) Group health insurance, tax advice, equipment rentals for freelancers
- ralusek 8y ago
  What exactly do you mean by unions without politics? Unions are inherently political. The things you've listed here are literally just employment perks, they can exist independently of unions as reasons that someone might want to work at a given company. They also all have a cost to the employer and employee, either of which might prefer to have those resources allocated elsewhere. Companies naturally offer differing employment perks to try to entice people to work for them. Google famously has bowling alleys, dance classes, laundry, massages, food, etc, which all form a part of the package of what might make somebody want to take a job as a developer at Google. Facebook followed suit with many similar perks. As an SF/SV contractor for the last 5 years, it has been my experience that all different companies offer completely different costs and benefits to working for them, and I'm perfectly happy to let the companies compete among themselves for talent. If I have to join some software engineering union whose demands are going to be some bastardization of collective goals, which inevitably will deteriorate into a wasteful bureaucratic entity (as unions tend to do), I lose my ability to freely choose what exactly I'm looking for in a workplace. For example, I don't care about personalized ergonomic workspaces, I don't care about legal counsel, I don't care about training, I don't care about representation to recruiters, I have my own health insurance, I get my own tax advice, and I don't need equipment rentals. Every thing that you've outlined as an objective for a union to accomplish are things that I would rather have the employer spend on salary. Your objectives do not align with mine, I don't want to pay you to accomplish them, and I don't want you to have my employer spend money accomplishing them. I have completely ignored companies with things like swimming pools, ping pong, seminars, etc, and have instead chosen places based off of how much they pay, or how interesting the project is to work on. Everyone's objectives are different, and so long as there is not a massive imbalance of power against the workforce wherein we lose the ability to choose freely, which in the case of a SV developer is absolutely not the case, then I see many more problems than solutions from an attempt to collectivize them.
  - tboyd47 8y ago
    I guess I meant more of a labor collective than what's normally considered a "union." I'm not interested in paying for pensions or protecting jobs of old farts who feel threatened by young people. But I am interested in collectivizing with workers to get access to the sort of "perks" that most people rely on their company for, because that's going to increase my ability to freely choose who I do and don't work for. You mentioned you have your own health insurance and that's great. As an independent consultant, I do too, but I don't get the same kind of rates and coverage as I would as part of a company. It's just not offered to people like me. The "free market" response to that would be, "Well, then get a FTE job then, there's plenty out there." But what if I'd rather not depend on my employer for that? We can collectivize; we choose to let our employers do it for us. I don't understand the stark anti-union sentiment. You must realize that sometimes, your interests will diverge from your employers, and that the optimal result for both sides may not always be for you to give up or risk your employment being terminated over it, but it might actually be for the company to change their policies. That outcome is much harder to imagine without some sort of collective bargaining.
    - masonic 8y ago
      You must realize that sometimes, your interests will diverge from your employers But Unions span multiple employers and have the last word over any grievance you might have. You lose standing as an individual to negotiate with or complain to management. And when union leadership and management collaborate against the best interests of employees, you're really screwed. I've been there.
      - tboyd47 8y ago
        Interesting story, do you mind giving more detail?
  - Apocryphon 8y ago
    > so long as there is not a massive imbalance of power against the workforce wherein we lose the ability to choose freely, which in the case of a SV developer is absolutely not the case You're right, there isn't a massive imbalance of power- relative to other industries. Yet we get these endless stories of developer misery- toxic workplaces where people are cuffed by golden handcuffs to prevent speaking up or walking, harassment that goes uninvestigated, abuse of contractors, the endless crunch cycle of the video game industry, management that refuses to listen to engineering concerns and decisions, and the dev complaint of the month- open offices, whiteboarding interviews, rejection of remote work, outsourcing, bad equity deals, or whatever else the industry bosses holds sacrosanct. Software engineers are paid more than well- though don't forget that it's partly because that other careers have not seen salaries rise as they should, not that engineers in general are doing much better [0], but there is still a lot more to improve in this industry. Some sort of workers' association can be the solution for these problems, and at least provide some oversight. Why assume that it'd be inevitably doomed to fail as American labor unions in the past. (I assume you're not familiar with the benefits of the German system [1]). Shouldn't an industry whose foundation is on optimization, improvement, and experimentation at least try to build a better union? Why follow tedious axioms like "unions don't work?" [0] https://www.quora.com/Why-do-software-engineers-make-so-much-With-so-many-students-pursuing-careers-in-software-engineering-today-do-you-see-salaries-going-down-significantly-in-the-future-If-so-by-how-much/answer/Michael-O-Church https://www.quora.com/Why-do-software-engineers-make-so-much... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13986889 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13986889
- pascalxus 8y ago
  I think you DO need to bring some kind of politics into it to justify a programmer's union. Just think what would have happened if those google engineers simply created a union without some "higher moral cause". They would have been fired and replaced instantly. But, Google certainly can't do that if they're gathering together to fight some uniequivocal evil (at least how society sees it) such as "Automated Military drones". Google and facebook can't take any chances on appearing to have unethical behavior - they have far too much at stake.
quotemstr 8y ago
This "movement" is not nearly as broad-based as the combination of loud online activism and press coverage suggests. The current social-media-fueled frenzied environment has a way of amplifying extreme views, and the concrete policy propodals from the "ethics" camp are extreme indeed. It is not "unethical", for example, among the huge majority of the population, to cooperate with law enforcement in matters of immigration --- but to listen to advocates, cloud hosting for these organizations is beyond the pale. Every proposal I've seen has a similar character. To these people, "ethics" isn't about the timeline virtues of honesty and integrity. Instead, it's deplatforming your ideological opponents, because in activist world, the only explanation for disagreement is intellectual or moral defect. This whole effort is a thinly-disguised political power play, and large socially-important infrastructure companies should not play politics. These companies serve too important a role in society to allow themselves to be weilded as political tools by a loud and angry few.
- guelo 8y ago
  Labor has power whether capital likes it or not. Deal with it.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - stuntkite 8y ago
    I think he's under the impression that a paycheck makes you into a slave. Weird. He might have a political agenda of his own there. I've got as much power to quit as they do to fire me and creative talent isn't cookie cutter like finding someone to fill your shift on an assembly line. Regardless, in ANY job, no one is required to do something that they find unethical. Unfortunately, the power you have is to quit/get fired. Fortunately in tech, losing one (or more) people on a bleeding edge weapons contract can sink the whole thing as there aren't that many folks qualified to do that sort of work. A paycheck doesn't remove my brain or make my boss a god.
  - dang 8y ago
    Can you please not post ideological flamebait to HN? These topics teeter on the brink of tedious flamewar no matter what; that's no reason to push it over. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
hyprCoin 8y ago
The real movement towards transparent group goals is happening in crypto. Many tech companies have become honeypots and they, like other honeypots, have been raided by dishonest individual actors.
akshayB 8y ago
In case of using AI for drones and warfare I am glad that people decided to standup against it. Although there is a big moral question here the technology is there even some of the tools are open sourced. Google employees decided to raise their hand and say it is wrong but there is no checks if a dictator decided to make use of AI in a bad way. Technology is constantly evolving and there is no oversight when misuse happens. CEO's will sign contracts like these as long as there is a big dollar sign attached to it.
- eanzenberg 8y ago
  I'm glad people are building AI for drone warfare. I would much rather not put uniformed people at risk where the risk could be avoided. I would much rather have discriminate weapons as opposed to ones with more collateral damage.
  - quotemstr 8y ago
    Right. The world is more complicated than "weapons bad love good". Do people really think that fewer people would die if we could somehow roll weapons technology back to 1914? God help us if we did that unilaterally. We live in an age of unprecedented peace and prosperity, and it's not artificial limitations on technological development that got us here. I see the adoption of simplistic and absolute moral stances by people smart enough to know better as a form of entitled selfishness. It's as if people feel entitled to performative first-order moral posturing while foisting on other people the job of avoiding the foreseeable negative consequences of adopting simplistic feel-good policies in a complex world.
    - losteric 8y ago
      > Do people really think that fewer people would die if we could somehow roll weapons technology back to 1914? Nope, that's a red herring.
  - kec 8y ago
    The long term outcome of this is not what you want. The less risk there is to going to war, the less incentive there is to avoid war in the first place. More automation will inevitably lead to more frequent, bloodier (especially in terms of collateral damage) wars.
mc32 8y ago
I don’t know of any country which is able to which does not enforce immigration policy, including Mexico, Canada, as well as Colombia, Brazil, Costa Rica, etc... Never mind Japan, Koreas, China, etc.
- monocasa 8y ago
  Do those countries make toddlers represent themselves in immigration hearings? https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/children-immigration-court-deportation-attorney/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/children-immigration-court...
  - jerf 8y ago
    I seriously, seriously, seriously doubt that if you examined all those countries with the same level of examination you've applied to the US (even if that is not all that much) that you'd find they're all just hunky dory. In fact I all but guarantee you'd find over half the policies aggressively racist, let alone all the other things you might think to fault immigration policies for. Note this is not an "everybody else does it so it's OK" argument, this is my not being particularly sympathetic to a lamppost argument. If the area under the lamppost is dirty, you don't have much logical basis to assume that everywhere else is clean, and then critique the area under the lamppost for its unique dirtiness.
    - vkou 8y ago
      If the area under my lamp-post is dirty, that's what I should care about. I don't care that there's some dirty lamp-post on the other side of the world. I don't live there. I don't have any power, or influence over that lamp-post. It's one thing when some government agency in Turkmenistan is behaving unethically. It's another thing to actively abet unethical behaviour next door.
      - AnimalMuppet 8y ago
        You are right that, if it's my lamp-post, it's fine for me to say that it's not as clean as it should be, and we need to fix it. But that's different from what jerf said. He said it's not valid to assume that under my lamp-post is uniquely dirty. And he is also correct.
scarface74 8y ago
I am of two minds about immigration enforcement. One on hand, I don’t have a problem with enforcing immigration laws. On the other hand, I hate the demonization of “other” and immigration enforcement has turned into being more openly racially motivated than it ever has been before and this isn’t a Democrat vs Republican thing. None of the other Republican administrations have been like this one. I hope the Romney/Bush wing of the party can take back over. I can deal with “big business” Republicans even if I don’t agree with them on a lot of issues. I would love to have two sensible parties fighting over ideas or even more cynically which special interest they favor.
- AnthonyMouse 8y ago
  > On the other hand, I hate the demonization of “other” and immigration enforcement has turned into being more openly racially motivated than it ever has been before and this isn’t a Democrat vs Republican thing. None of the other Republican administrations have been like this one. "Racially motivated" is a misnomer. Trump uses "Muslim" and "Mexican" not in the way that Confederate politicians used "Negros" (or worse), but in the way that older Republicans used "Russian" or "Communist". It's obviously not used in a sympathetic way but it's not about racism any more than Nixon was racist against Russians. Trump isn't threatening to expel the ethnic Mexican with US citizenship operating an auto repair shop in Alabama, but he's also not offering citizenship to low-income people from neighboring socialist-leaning countries who would probably vote for Democrats. Democrats hate this with a burning fire because it's the exact opposite of what they want. But it's not actually about race, it's all politics and the culture war.
  - scarface74 8y ago
    Trump isn't threatening to expel the ethnic Mexican with US citizenship operating an auto repair shop in Alabama, Actually he is threatening to expel US citizens who are Mexican who he doesn’t believe have valid birth certificates. Not because he believes they are forged, but because the babies were delivered by midwives at the border.... https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/us-is-denying-passports-to-americans-along-the-border-throwing-their-citizenship-into-question/2018/08/29/1d630e84-a0da-11e8-a3dd-2a1991f075d5_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/us-is-deny... ICE also detained an American citizen that was speaking Spanish. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2018/05/20/a-border-patrol-agent-detained-two-u-s-citizens-at-a-gas-station-after-hearing-them-speak-spanish/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2018/05/2... Not to mention that whole Obama’s is not a US citizen but he is a “secret Muslim” trying to spread Sharia law. but he's also not offering citizenship to low-income people from neighboring socialist-leaning countries who would probably vote for Democrats. If it were about socialism and not race, why is he so enamored by people from Norway?
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
s09dfhks 8y ago
To play devil's advocate, couldn't these employees be terminated for refusing to do the job they were hired to do?
- s73v3r_ 8y ago
  That's one of the things that the union/guild would be there to protect against.
  - masonic 8y ago
    That's not within their purview. The CBA binds management and labor alike.
throwawaysea 8y ago
I have to think the authors of articles selling the same point are participants in an activist cabal, because they keep pushing this narrative as if it is the dominant perspective and has momentum. But it's not the dominant perspective and doesn't have momentum. And except for the outrage machine of Twitter/Vox[Recode]/Atlantic/Gizmodo/etc. trying to stand up a positive feedback loop around this issue, we would probably have moved on. The number of participants in these efforts are so small and unrepresentative, to a point where it is not material and these companies should not change their direction. Based on what I've heard, Microsoft and Amazon have triple-digit participants at best. Google is where this vocal minority is most present, and they're just in the low four-digit range (~3K per this article, out of ~100K employees). There are FAR more employees who either do not share these same views or are OK with the company pursuing its own agenda independent of their personal political views. For example with workers not willing to build image recognition algorithms that assist/augment the capabilities of joystick-drone-operators, I bet there are a much larger number that are totally willing to work on it, and they are signaling that by not participating in the protest even when it is socially/professionally safe to do so. As for the others - they're just not screaming about it due to the intolerance exhibited by far-left progressives at these companies, especially with all the purposeful/malicious leaking. And as a left progressive, I think that sort of behavior must be stopped and not tolerated.
htor 8y ago
what does "blue-collar" and "white-collar" mean?
- biztos 8y ago
  "blue-collar" generally means people who do physical, non-office work; and the jobs that they do. "white-collar" generally means office workers and management, and their jobs. AFAIK it originates in the color shirts normally worn, i.e. if you're out working on engines you can't afford white shirt collars as they'll get stained. The difference is a lot less clear in tech, where we're all "white-collar" in old-school terms but there is still a very wide scale of job-pleasantness and pay and everything else. I think when these terms originated, an entire productive industry of only white-collar folks was unimaginable. ("Productive" as opposed to, say, banking.)

57 points by RobertSmith 8y ago

You really don't need to bring in politics to justify a programmer's union, but if that's the trigger that causes workers to organize, so be it. Just off the top of my head, I can think of a number of entirely non-political ways a union could benefit tech workers: 1) Personalized ergonomic workspaces 2) Legal counsel on basic tech-related issues (patent law, non-compete clauses, sexual harassment, discrimination, etc.) 3) Training and career development 4) Representation to recruiters 5) Group health insurance, tax advice, equipment rentals for freelancers

ralusek 8y ago
What exactly do you mean by unions without politics? Unions are inherently political. The things you've listed here are literally just employment perks, they can exist independently of unions as reasons that someone might want to work at a given company. They also all have a cost to the employer and employee, either of which might prefer to have those resources allocated elsewhere. Companies naturally offer differing employment perks to try to entice people to work for them. Google famously has bowling alleys, dance classes, laundry, massages, food, etc, which all form a part of the package of what might make somebody want to take a job as a developer at Google. Facebook followed suit with many similar perks. As an SF/SV contractor for the last 5 years, it has been my experience that all different companies offer completely different costs and benefits to working for them, and I'm perfectly happy to let the companies compete among themselves for talent. If I have to join some software engineering union whose demands are going to be some bastardization of collective goals, which inevitably will deteriorate into a wasteful bureaucratic entity (as unions tend to do), I lose my ability to freely choose what exactly I'm looking for in a workplace. For example, I don't care about personalized ergonomic workspaces, I don't care about legal counsel, I don't care about training, I don't care about representation to recruiters, I have my own health insurance, I get my own tax advice, and I don't need equipment rentals. Every thing that you've outlined as an objective for a union to accomplish are things that I would rather have the employer spend on salary. Your objectives do not align with mine, I don't want to pay you to accomplish them, and I don't want you to have my employer spend money accomplishing them. I have completely ignored companies with things like swimming pools, ping pong, seminars, etc, and have instead chosen places based off of how much they pay, or how interesting the project is to work on. Everyone's objectives are different, and so long as there is not a massive imbalance of power against the workforce wherein we lose the ability to choose freely, which in the case of a SV developer is absolutely not the case, then I see many more problems than solutions from an attempt to collectivize them.
- tboyd47 8y ago
  I guess I meant more of a labor collective than what's normally considered a "union." I'm not interested in paying for pensions or protecting jobs of old farts who feel threatened by young people. But I am interested in collectivizing with workers to get access to the sort of "perks" that most people rely on their company for, because that's going to increase my ability to freely choose who I do and don't work for. You mentioned you have your own health insurance and that's great. As an independent consultant, I do too, but I don't get the same kind of rates and coverage as I would as part of a company. It's just not offered to people like me. The "free market" response to that would be, "Well, then get a FTE job then, there's plenty out there." But what if I'd rather not depend on my employer for that? We can collectivize; we choose to let our employers do it for us. I don't understand the stark anti-union sentiment. You must realize that sometimes, your interests will diverge from your employers, and that the optimal result for both sides may not always be for you to give up or risk your employment being terminated over it, but it might actually be for the company to change their policies. That outcome is much harder to imagine without some sort of collective bargaining.
  - masonic 8y ago
    You must realize that sometimes, your interests will diverge from your employers But Unions span multiple employers and have the last word over any grievance you might have. You lose standing as an individual to negotiate with or complain to management. And when union leadership and management collaborate against the best interests of employees, you're really screwed. I've been there.
    - tboyd47 8y ago
      Interesting story, do you mind giving more detail?
- Apocryphon 8y ago
  > so long as there is not a massive imbalance of power against the workforce wherein we lose the ability to choose freely, which in the case of a SV developer is absolutely not the case You're right, there isn't a massive imbalance of power- relative to other industries. Yet we get these endless stories of developer misery- toxic workplaces where people are cuffed by golden handcuffs to prevent speaking up or walking, harassment that goes uninvestigated, abuse of contractors, the endless crunch cycle of the video game industry, management that refuses to listen to engineering concerns and decisions, and the dev complaint of the month- open offices, whiteboarding interviews, rejection of remote work, outsourcing, bad equity deals, or whatever else the industry bosses holds sacrosanct. Software engineers are paid more than well- though don't forget that it's partly because that other careers have not seen salaries rise as they should, not that engineers in general are doing much better [0], but there is still a lot more to improve in this industry. Some sort of workers' association can be the solution for these problems, and at least provide some oversight. Why assume that it'd be inevitably doomed to fail as American labor unions in the past. (I assume you're not familiar with the benefits of the German system [1]). Shouldn't an industry whose foundation is on optimization, improvement, and experimentation at least try to build a better union? Why follow tedious axioms like "unions don't work?" [0] https://www.quora.com/Why-do-software-engineers-make-so-much-With-so-many-students-pursuing-careers-in-software-engineering-today-do-you-see-salaries-going-down-significantly-in-the-future-If-so-by-how-much/answer/Michael-O-Church https://www.quora.com/Why-do-software-engineers-make-so-much... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13986889 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13986889
pascalxus 8y ago
I think you DO need to bring some kind of politics into it to justify a programmer's union. Just think what would have happened if those google engineers simply created a union without some "higher moral cause". They would have been fired and replaced instantly. But, Google certainly can't do that if they're gathering together to fight some uniequivocal evil (at least how society sees it) such as "Automated Military drones". Google and facebook can't take any chances on appearing to have unethical behavior - they have far too much at stake.

quotemstr 8y ago

This "movement" is not nearly as broad-based as the combination of loud online activism and press coverage suggests. The current social-media-fueled frenzied environment has a way of amplifying extreme views, and the concrete policy propodals from the "ethics" camp are extreme indeed. It is not "unethical", for example, among the huge majority of the population, to cooperate with law enforcement in matters of immigration --- but to listen to advocates, cloud hosting for these organizations is beyond the pale. Every proposal I've seen has a similar character. To these people, "ethics" isn't about the timeline virtues of honesty and integrity. Instead, it's deplatforming your ideological opponents, because in activist world, the only explanation for disagreement is intellectual or moral defect. This whole effort is a thinly-disguised political power play, and large socially-important infrastructure companies should not play politics. These companies serve too important a role in society to allow themselves to be weilded as political tools by a loud and angry few.

guelo 8y ago
Labor has power whether capital likes it or not. Deal with it.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- stuntkite 8y ago
  I think he's under the impression that a paycheck makes you into a slave. Weird. He might have a political agenda of his own there. I've got as much power to quit as they do to fire me and creative talent isn't cookie cutter like finding someone to fill your shift on an assembly line. Regardless, in ANY job, no one is required to do something that they find unethical. Unfortunately, the power you have is to quit/get fired. Fortunately in tech, losing one (or more) people on a bleeding edge weapons contract can sink the whole thing as there aren't that many folks qualified to do that sort of work. A paycheck doesn't remove my brain or make my boss a god.
- dang 8y ago
  Can you please not post ideological flamebait to HN? These topics teeter on the brink of tedious flamewar no matter what; that's no reason to push it over. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

hyprCoin 8y ago

The real movement towards transparent group goals is happening in crypto. Many tech companies have become honeypots and they, like other honeypots, have been raided by dishonest individual actors.

akshayB 8y ago

In case of using AI for drones and warfare I am glad that people decided to standup against it. Although there is a big moral question here the technology is there even some of the tools are open sourced. Google employees decided to raise their hand and say it is wrong but there is no checks if a dictator decided to make use of AI in a bad way. Technology is constantly evolving and there is no oversight when misuse happens. CEO's will sign contracts like these as long as there is a big dollar sign attached to it.

eanzenberg 8y ago
I'm glad people are building AI for drone warfare. I would much rather not put uniformed people at risk where the risk could be avoided. I would much rather have discriminate weapons as opposed to ones with more collateral damage.
- quotemstr 8y ago
  Right. The world is more complicated than "weapons bad love good". Do people really think that fewer people would die if we could somehow roll weapons technology back to 1914? God help us if we did that unilaterally. We live in an age of unprecedented peace and prosperity, and it's not artificial limitations on technological development that got us here. I see the adoption of simplistic and absolute moral stances by people smart enough to know better as a form of entitled selfishness. It's as if people feel entitled to performative first-order moral posturing while foisting on other people the job of avoiding the foreseeable negative consequences of adopting simplistic feel-good policies in a complex world.
  - losteric 8y ago
    > Do people really think that fewer people would die if we could somehow roll weapons technology back to 1914? Nope, that's a red herring.
- kec 8y ago
  The long term outcome of this is not what you want. The less risk there is to going to war, the less incentive there is to avoid war in the first place. More automation will inevitably lead to more frequent, bloodier (especially in terms of collateral damage) wars.

mc32 8y ago

I don’t know of any country which is able to which does not enforce immigration policy, including Mexico, Canada, as well as Colombia, Brazil, Costa Rica, etc... Never mind Japan, Koreas, China, etc.

monocasa 8y ago
Do those countries make toddlers represent themselves in immigration hearings? https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/children-immigration-court-deportation-attorney/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/children-immigration-court...
- jerf 8y ago
  I seriously, seriously, seriously doubt that if you examined all those countries with the same level of examination you've applied to the US (even if that is not all that much) that you'd find they're all just hunky dory. In fact I all but guarantee you'd find over half the policies aggressively racist, let alone all the other things you might think to fault immigration policies for. Note this is not an "everybody else does it so it's OK" argument, this is my not being particularly sympathetic to a lamppost argument. If the area under the lamppost is dirty, you don't have much logical basis to assume that everywhere else is clean, and then critique the area under the lamppost for its unique dirtiness.
  - vkou 8y ago
    If the area under my lamp-post is dirty, that's what I should care about. I don't care that there's some dirty lamp-post on the other side of the world. I don't live there. I don't have any power, or influence over that lamp-post. It's one thing when some government agency in Turkmenistan is behaving unethically. It's another thing to actively abet unethical behaviour next door.
    - AnimalMuppet 8y ago
      You are right that, if it's my lamp-post, it's fine for me to say that it's not as clean as it should be, and we need to fix it. But that's different from what jerf said. He said it's not valid to assume that under my lamp-post is uniquely dirty. And he is also correct.

scarface74 8y ago

I am of two minds about immigration enforcement. One on hand, I don’t have a problem with enforcing immigration laws. On the other hand, I hate the demonization of “other” and immigration enforcement has turned into being more openly racially motivated than it ever has been before and this isn’t a Democrat vs Republican thing. None of the other Republican administrations have been like this one. I hope the Romney/Bush wing of the party can take back over. I can deal with “big business” Republicans even if I don’t agree with them on a lot of issues. I would love to have two sensible parties fighting over ideas or even more cynically which special interest they favor.

AnthonyMouse 8y ago
> On the other hand, I hate the demonization of “other” and immigration enforcement has turned into being more openly racially motivated than it ever has been before and this isn’t a Democrat vs Republican thing. None of the other Republican administrations have been like this one. "Racially motivated" is a misnomer. Trump uses "Muslim" and "Mexican" not in the way that Confederate politicians used "Negros" (or worse), but in the way that older Republicans used "Russian" or "Communist". It's obviously not used in a sympathetic way but it's not about racism any more than Nixon was racist against Russians. Trump isn't threatening to expel the ethnic Mexican with US citizenship operating an auto repair shop in Alabama, but he's also not offering citizenship to low-income people from neighboring socialist-leaning countries who would probably vote for Democrats. Democrats hate this with a burning fire because it's the exact opposite of what they want. But it's not actually about race, it's all politics and the culture war.
- scarface74 8y ago
  Trump isn't threatening to expel the ethnic Mexican with US citizenship operating an auto repair shop in Alabama, Actually he is threatening to expel US citizens who are Mexican who he doesn’t believe have valid birth certificates. Not because he believes they are forged, but because the babies were delivered by midwives at the border.... https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/us-is-denying-passports-to-americans-along-the-border-throwing-their-citizenship-into-question/2018/08/29/1d630e84-a0da-11e8-a3dd-2a1991f075d5_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/us-is-deny... ICE also detained an American citizen that was speaking Spanish. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2018/05/20/a-border-patrol-agent-detained-two-u-s-citizens-at-a-gas-station-after-hearing-them-speak-spanish/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2018/05/2... Not to mention that whole Obama’s is not a US citizen but he is a “secret Muslim” trying to spread Sharia law. but he's also not offering citizenship to low-income people from neighboring socialist-leaning countries who would probably vote for Democrats. If it were about socialism and not race, why is he so enamored by people from Norway?

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

s09dfhks 8y ago

To play devil's advocate, couldn't these employees be terminated for refusing to do the job they were hired to do?

s73v3r_ 8y ago
That's one of the things that the union/guild would be there to protect against.
- masonic 8y ago
  That's not within their purview. The CBA binds management and labor alike.

throwawaysea 8y ago

I have to think the authors of articles selling the same point are participants in an activist cabal, because they keep pushing this narrative as if it is the dominant perspective and has momentum. But it's not the dominant perspective and doesn't have momentum. And except for the outrage machine of Twitter/Vox[Recode]/Atlantic/Gizmodo/etc. trying to stand up a positive feedback loop around this issue, we would probably have moved on. The number of participants in these efforts are so small and unrepresentative, to a point where it is not material and these companies should not change their direction. Based on what I've heard, Microsoft and Amazon have triple-digit participants at best. Google is where this vocal minority is most present, and they're just in the low four-digit range (~3K per this article, out of ~100K employees). There are FAR more employees who either do not share these same views or are OK with the company pursuing its own agenda independent of their personal political views. For example with workers not willing to build image recognition algorithms that assist/augment the capabilities of joystick-drone-operators, I bet there are a much larger number that are totally willing to work on it, and they are signaling that by not participating in the protest even when it is socially/professionally safe to do so. As for the others - they're just not screaming about it due to the intolerance exhibited by far-left progressives at these companies, especially with all the purposeful/malicious leaking. And as a left progressive, I think that sort of behavior must be stopped and not tolerated.

htor 8y ago

what does "blue-collar" and "white-collar" mean?

biztos 8y ago
"blue-collar" generally means people who do physical, non-office work; and the jobs that they do. "white-collar" generally means office workers and management, and their jobs. AFAIK it originates in the color shirts normally worn, i.e. if you're out working on engines you can't afford white shirt collars as they'll get stained. The difference is a lot less clear in tech, where we're all "white-collar" in old-school terms but there is still a very wide scale of job-pleasantness and pay and everything else. I think when these terms originated, an entire productive industry of only white-collar folks was unimaginable. ("Productive" as opposed to, say, banking.)